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Digg.com Sold To Betaworks For $500,000

Posted by samzenpus on from the so-long dept.

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.

9 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco by hovelander · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If I remember correctly, wasn't Digg supposed to be the new Slashdot without the hardcore Geek Cred? Didn't Kevin Rose speak directly to CmdrTaco about the failings of Slashdot? Kevin doesn't seem that bad a guy, actually, but he had two major failings that I can see:

    - Not selling at the top of the market, which is usually hard to gauge anyway, (and didn't he leave some time ago?)

    and the most important failing:

    - Dumping Sarah Lane so that she could later travel the world on Honeymoon and get a brain eating parasite.

    Better Days to them both.

    1. Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco by mysidia · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Perhaps Diggs' new owners will use "cvs update -r DIGG_UPDATE_3" or whatever and undo the heinous redesign ?

    2. Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco by rgbrenner · · Score: 4, Interesting

      digg is still bigger than slashdot.. about 5x bigger

      http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org
      http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digg.com

    3. Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But unfortunately Slashdot has one of the better and smarter public discussion boards. (Which doesn't really bode well for the others including digg)
      Dig focuses mostly on the links. Slashdot focuses on the discussion. Digg gets more hits but Slashdot people stay on it longer.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. Forget Digg... by billybob_jcv · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What does that mean for the valuation of /.?

  3. Ephemeral values of interwebs properties by ackthpt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is why I won't buy stock in fazebook.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  4. Reddit is already dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Reddit is already dead from a usability standpoint. The largest subreddits are unrefutably crap, and the overall site is overrun by the hordes of idiots who infect the few decent, smaller subreddits. Unfortunately, the site has degenerated into a massive karmawhoring party and it is no longer easy to find quality links in the sea of regurgitated memes, 37-panel ragecomics about dropping a piece of toast, and Facebook screenshots. I never really cared for Digg, but did frequent Reddit from 2008 to 2010 before I could no longer tolerate the painfully obvious downward trend in quality. A part of me hopes Conde Nast will just kill it.

    Now, I just trawl Slashdot and wait for a good catch. (The Slashdot moderation system is imperfect, but superior to the ones used by Digg and Reddit.) The NetworkWorld-esqe spam posts are annoying, but the accompanying angry comments that eviscerate the stupid headlines are amusing. Overall, the signal-to-noise ratio is higher here -- I particularly enjoyed the recent lighthearted threads about C: 1, 2.

  5. Re:Don't care by datavirtue · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I used it for the first time two days ago and thought, "this is worse than reddit," of which I'm a new user as well. I checked them out because /. is dying. Also breezed through 4chan for once, what a shit hole. Since then I've been looking for a decent community that aggregates real news. No luck. Thinking of building my own. Nonetheless, we are certainly at an impasse.

    --
    I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
  6. results of bad censorship by Deputy+Doodah · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Digg had a bad habit of deleting the accounts of people who disagreed (politely even) with leftist politics in general and the homosexual lifestyle in particular by labeling all such disagreement "hate speech". They censored themselves out of relevance.
    I deleted my own account with them several years ago due to my disgust with this behavior.