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Digg.com Sold To Betaworks For $500,000
New submitter MyFirstNameIsPaul writes "The once popular social news website Digg.com, which received $45 million in funding, is being sold to to Betaworks for $500,000. From the article: 'Betaworks is acquiring the Digg brand, website, and technology, but not its employees. Digg will be folded into News.me, Betaworks' social news aggregator. This is not the outcome people expected for Digg. In 2008, Google was reportedly set to buy it for $200 million.'"
Update: 07/13 12:26 GMT by S : Looks like real number is about $16 million.
This is still 500,000 times what Newsweek sold for. So I guess it means failure in digital is still worth more than a failed dead tree product.
All social media sites can expect to share this fate soon enough with the exceptions of facebook, twitter and a couple more than will survive for a bit. The whole model depends on scaling up to 'too big to fail' before the initial money runs out. And of course 'too big to fail' also fails eventually, see myspace and any number of other dead and forgotten sites that had their fifteen minutes.
The only way to make money in this game is to piss off the users as you slap them in the face with the reality that they aren't customers.... they are the product. Yet the sole reason a social media site exists is because users want to be there, the defining feature is there is little created/curated content on a social media site, it is all user created. And since users aren't really tied to a site they are free to be fickle and jump to the next shiny thing they can share links to cat videos on. Which all means it is fairly easy to get a crapload of users, just give em free services; making a living giving away stuff to zillions of users is still a hard and mostly unsolved problem. Google is making money giving stuff away, anyone else?
Democrat delenda est
Most social comment-driven sites that employ a user-activated reward and punishment system eventually degenerate into boring, politically correct bully pulpits where the choir preaches only to the choir while everybody with a brain bails out. The writing is on the wall. Can you Digg it, Slashdot?
I used to visit Digg several times a day. Then they did a site redesign that was horrible. I stopped going there, and after a few days, realized I didn't miss it.
Note to slashdot: I've been coming here at least once a day since 1998. Note you have had redesigns but nothing too horrible, and I'm still here. Don't pull a Digg.
I liked the digg interface and usability, pre v4. redit has one of the worst designs on the web today, maybe only outdone by 4chan. The content is usually great but navigation is a disaster, thats something I like about digg and slashdot, while there ar elots of great things in idle, both digg and /. have a logical flow and easy to use nav. I suspect you are right though, alot of the digg regulars have migrated to reddit
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The griefers won. There's a lesson there for slashdot.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think there's a BIG take-home to be had from the demise of Digg. Listen to your users.
They REALLY screwed up with Digg 4, and completely dismissed the feedback from their users out of hand.
Had they actually used their brains and done proper testing beforehand, instead of rushing half-baked shit into production, they might've done far better by now.
Did I mention that it's a really good idea to listen to your users, and not walk around with your head up your arse.
"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" -- Proverbs 16:18.
I've mentioned several times the past years that Digg, which turned in a total crapfest back then, probably would be sold to Yahoo! soonish so they could properly kill it. I was wrong with the customer, but probably not wrong about the death of Digg. The past months it has been flooded by spammers and reporting them is pointless (nothing is done). Good luck, Betaworks, with cleaning up the mess.
Perl Programmer for hire
New reddit user here.
Your quote is spot on:
The Dig/Bury model favours quick, cheap laughs at the expense of thoughtful debate.
I find that if something on reddit takes me longer than ten seconds to digest I just click away. This is not my normal mode of operation btw, but the nature of the site leads me to this behavior.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
He's one of the people responsible for killing digg, but scamming the system that "dug up" the stories. Between that, Kevin Rose's ego, the V4 design, the trolling, political bias of stories "dug up", it drove a lot of people away. When I saw they were sold for only 500k, you have to know those that stood to make a huge amount of money when they were suppose to be worth 200 million have to be just slapping their heads doing the Homer Simpson DOOHHAHH sound.
Take your rose-colored glasses off re Digg. It is factually true that Digg had much bigger discussions, but they were awful. You can find any number of PhDs commenting regularly about niche topics on Slashdot, but that never happened on Digg. It was always college kids allcapsing their uninformed opinions.