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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 /.?
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
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
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.
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
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?
Once you disable certain obnoxious subreddits in your profile, the site actually becomes wonderful. Just turn off /r/atheism, /r/adviceanimals, and maybe /r/politics, and add the many TV/movie related and other cultural subreddits and you have a nice party.
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?!
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.