Digg & The Importance of User Intelligence
Digg, founded in 2004, by internet entrepreneur Kevin Rose, used to be one of the world’s most visited websites, competing with the likes of Reddit for who would be the new aggregator that ruled the internet.
But then all of a sudden, they faded into obscurity and Reddit prevailed. Reddit, ranked 25th most visited website on internet, now receives an average of 542 million visits a month and is home to just under a million different and diverse communities of people. That could have easily been Digg, but then on one day in 2010 they launched version 4, that morning Digg users around the world woke up and went to the site, only to find it completely redesigned, or just completely offline.
They redesigned everything and launched a bug-riddled mess that made Digg for the most part unusable for several weeks. They had stripped out core parts of the service including: Burying, Favoriting, Friend Submissions, Subcategories, Videos and History Search. Pretty much everything that people went to the site to do just got removed, without warning and with zero consideration for user happiness.
Digg relied on it’s users, it was a user-driven news aggregator, where users could upvote (digg) and downvote (bury) content and share and communicate with others. But they didn’t listen to their users, they completely ignored the fact that users were outraged that the service they’d loved for years and visited daily had just been completely hollowed out and turned from a community-driven news aggregator into an online newspaper of sorts.
This caused dedicated Digg users to uproot and move to Reddit in droves. August 30, 2010 was dubbed ‘Quit Digg Day’ and Reddit’s userbase grew substantially, because Reddit listened and Reddit cared, they might not respond immediately to every single quarm that people have with the service and their team, but they do listen and they genuinely care about what they can do to empower their users.
I can’t imagine what internal politics caused this within the Digg team in order for them to make dreadful mistake after dreadful mistake, but a big one they could have easily avoided is not listening to their users. They should have gathered feedback from a closed group and allow the backlash to come from a small group of people before you completely destroy the website and the large community attached to it.
Digg still exists, it was brought by Betaworks for $500,000 and some of it’s IP was sold to LinkedIn and The Washington Post for a total of $16 million.
Founder Kevin Rose attempted to launch several other products after Digg and worked at Google Venture’s between 2012 and 2014, he is now a board member at the Tony Hawk Foundation.
Today’s Digg is a well designed website, it’s useful, it’s informative, but it’s not Digg, it’s The Huffington Post with Digg’s branding slapped on it.
I do like their RSS reader though.
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