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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
This would have been first post, but it was a missed opportunity.
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.
What does that mean for the valuation of /.?
Its not pointless when it points out the principal reason Digg is done.
Virtually Nobody saw any good reason to use that site, virtually nobody goes there for a recommendation on what they should read about. It failed precisely because the vast majority shared Reboot246's opinion.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Slashdot is very old when measured in Digg lives.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This is why I won't buy stock in fazebook.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
and I'm sure I speak for more than just myself when I say that. The first year or two of Digg's existence were actually alright, when interesting articles were actually posted on the front page. It degraded rather quickly, however, into a reeeeeally shitty aggregator. When I finally stopped going, it was almost completely top-ten lists and links to "funny" pictures.
Digg was good for social media. People would submit stories, and then the cool ones would come to the top. Apparently a minor problem arose with power users who could spam their friends with messages,"Digg this cuz ur my friend", and a lot of them would. These power users eventually started getting corporate sponsor to astroturf, and their friends were oblivious so they still got Diggs. The actual user base didn't have much of a problem with this as you could read user names and just ignore them. I think the proper solution was to allow people to permanently ignore user posts, then power user spam would have been fixed.
Where Digg went wrong was,"We gotta beat these power users to their own game!" So they made it so users could no longer submit stories. And then your entire feed was all corporate sponsored advertising. This is equivalent of turning prime time television into one giant informercial. I know nothing of value is lost there, but in social media, this is a group of people moderating news and it was pretty valuable until they killed it thinking we're all bunch of sheep who will just sit there and read advertisements all day.
I'm glad Digg.com is dead. I just hope Reddit.com doesn't pull something stupid too.
God spoke to me
Will we see Digg's new owners taking up arms against Reddits, and all the other hundreds of sites that 'copied' their idea of user-rated submissions based on a thumbs up / thumbs down or "Like" / "Hate" system?
Perhaps Facebook could be a target. Digg's "Digg" button did predate Facebook's "Like" button, and FB's "Like" functionality can be construed as a shameless copy of Digg's Digg function; granted FB didn't copy the counter, and Digg didn't provide a list of users that liked the article, or publish lists of articles liked by a user.
I seem to recall that Rose made Digg because he felt there was too much elitism on Slashdot.
I guess elitism works!
Vivo El Taco!!!
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
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.
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.
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.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/
Okay, I got this link from Fark. Shoot me.
They suffered from a really shit moderation system too, which encouraged groupthink to a far greater extent than Slashdot. Slashdot, imho, is a scalable, robust moderation system done right.
Digg was a sad joke in comparison, where simply having the "wrong" (e.g. liberal) opinion would have you Buried into a smoking crater.
Another problem was sad, basement-dwelling "power Diggers" posting lowest-common-denominator crap all the time. The Dig/Bury model favours quick, cheap laughs at the expense of thoughtful debate.
Although it has to be said that I got into some REALLY fun and entertaining fights with some utterly loopy American and Chinese rightwing extremists. Digg, given it's tendency to lower the IQ of everything it touches, attracted those kinds of people like flies to shit. But after the while, the aggro and stupidity got to me, and I quit my Digg habit.
Can't say I'm sad to see it getting cut up for scrap.
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
Kevin Rose did everything he could to drive away long-time, loyal users, first by killing off any social networking aspect and then by revamping the entire site so that it didn't resemble the original or have any of the functionality that made it popular. It was idiocy gone wild. Personally, I think Betaworks just got ripped off big time. Digg's been going down the drain for two years now, and nothing's going to revive it at his point. Why do you think Rose took a job with Google?
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
I was a digg user from a little bit after that time as well. It makes it very clear just how little most of the people commenting on this story know about it. Digg's been a vastly changing culture and platform over the years. It went from "meh" to ok to good and then a slow slide to kinda shitty before Rose totally stabbed the remaining users in the back. Looking at digg now is like going to detroit now and thinking you can judge its past by the current rubble and ruin.
Everything will be taken away from you.
The phrase, "bully pulpit" does not mean what you're using it to mean. In that phrase, (credit to Teddy Roosevelt?), "bully" is a synonym for, "awesome" or "grand."
When you speak from a regular pulpit, everyone in the room listens, typically of the order of 200 people, because a larger room would be too large for the "amplification" technique of "sticking a hollow box over the speaker's head." The presidency is a bully pulpit because when you speak as President, potentially 300 million are listening.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
But this has not happened to Slashdot.
The reason why is the moderation system, which some people dislike but I think works about as well as any moderation system can.
The proof is in really hotly debated topics - you can see arguments from BOTH sides of a hot issue being moderated to +5, even if a lot of down-moderation is also applied. That's the key that tells you the system is working to keep people on all sides of an issue engaged, and makes the reading much more interesting as you have more of a real debate and much less a "pulpit" as you said.
That is why Slashdot endures even as other things like Digg float away...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
I used to visit Digg several times a day. Then they did a site redesign that was horrible.
It's important to point out that Digg v4 was quite a bit more than a "redesign". The closest thing I can compare it to is a ground-up rewrite of a major piece of software, where the new version not only looks different, but is missing some fundamental or well-liked features that were present in the previous versions.
Digg v4: How To Successfully Kill A Community
It's hard to understate just how badly Digg screwed itself over with v4. The backlash was like nothing I had ever seen in, or read about, any similar circumstance. I had Digg Support close my account toward the end of the user revolt. (I refused to migrate to Reddit, though, because that site's design was (and still is) just terrible. It might have good content, but even the Mona Lisa can't spruce up a rusted-out utility shed.)
Earlier this week I got the urge to visit Digg for the first time in a long time... and it is such a sad, pathetic thing to behold. Where the most popular stories on the front page used to break 1000 "diggs", they now have two- maybe three-hundred diggs. Where submissions usually had a minimum of several dozen comments, now only the most popular stories seem to break a dozen. Most have only one or two...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
You could try Hacker News. Its unofficial tagline is "this isn't Reddit".
Dilbert RSS feed
I say 'Good riddance'. I was a digg user for a few years, but the constant french-bashing, europe-bashing (even on unrelated topics) drove me away. Nothing as informative as /., or say, Engadget on tech news, and political discussions were more like a Quake IV arena than articulated, educated exchanges of opinions.
Can you recommend any good sites for a right wing homophobe to visit these days?
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
I think whoever designed reddit saw 4chan and said
I can do worse
Not only that, but the comments were consistently of TERRIBLE quality, even on tech and gaming stories (and even worse when they branched out). I couldn't believe it back in the day when people were actually calling Digg a "Slashdot killer." But people are saying the same shit about Reedit today, and that's just as laughable.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?