Lessons Learned from Digg: A Story of Love and Hate

sokkz.com — I was there when it started. I was there when Digg first started chugging along. I remember it being slow, ugly, and crappy. I remember wondering why anyone would ever use something like it. And who cares if 79 other people think a story is worth my time? I browse my own news sites, thank you very much. I dont need to know what the other geeks care about boy was I ever wrong. I kept my eyes on Digg (and its many, many competitors) over the next several years as I graduated from college, worked, then went back to school. It wasnt until I began studying online communities, however, that I really understood anything. Recent Problems If you spend any time on social news sites, youve already noticed the mass migration of users from Digg to Reddit. How did this happen? Where did it all begin? And is this really a bad thing for Digg (or a good thing for Reddit)? Im trying to answer these questions myself, and like all good community mixups, it just turns up more questions. But there are answers to be found, and Id like to share my ideas as I keep searching. Most people think the roots of this change-up lie in Digg v4. It was meant to be an upgrade from Digg v3 a permanent change with better load times, better features, and a better UI. But shortly after the site went up, something went very, very wrong. Not only did users dislike the general look and feel of the site, but they also felt betrayed as personal information (formerly attached to their accounts) disappeared without warning. Additionally, the site was constantly crashing due to a new, bug-laden database. Shortly thereafter, users began closing their accounts and moving out. If the reports are to be believed, it appears most of them went to Reddit. But hold on. Is this truly the beginning of the end as so many former-Diggers claim? Will the mass exodus actually destroy Digg? Im not so sure. Most of the Diggers think this is something new, but this type of community migration has occurred on the Internet time after time after time. Community migrations happen almost constantly due to the ebb and flow of the net. Diggs loss of user base is just a very high-profile occurrence. Im here to argue that Diggs not done just yet and on top of that, this whole thing started long before Digg v4. In the Beginning In the beginning (2004), there was Digg. It was crappy, slow, and ugly. As an experiment run by 3 friends (one of which is current CEO Kevin Rose), it focused on technology news and not much else. Digg slowly picked up steam by word of mouth (and email), and eventually there was something like a stable user base. Due to the sites content and founders, most of these users were tech geeks, developers, and information technology people. (Sort of a social news equivalent of slashdot if you remember slashdot.) Digg v2 Over time, Digg grew. To keep up with the changing community (and compete with other sites), Digg launched version 2 with a new friends feature (July 2005). Suddenly the anonymous posting and approval features took a new turn those 128 other Diggers all had names and icons. Furthermore, this pushed toward new features such as suggestions and recommendations from friends. The awareness of others began to creep into Digg, and the whole site began shaping itself into a community. Diggnation Parallel to the Digg v2 launch, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht hosted a new podcast called Diggnation. It served as a best of the week show for Diggs top stories, and it attracted a much larger audience than Kevin Rose had ever imagined. The name Diggnation really proved itself to be accurate as live recordings pulled bigger and bigger crowds. Users proudly wore Digg T-shirts and sent pictures to the show. Girls asked the hosts on dates and (*gasp*) wanted their bodies autographed. Kevin Rose appeared on the cover of BusinessWeek in an embarrassing photograph that became part of Digg culture (and legend). The listener base became so large that Diggnations parent company (Revision3) began offering a wider array of shows and operating independently of Digg. Diggnation proved one thing: ignoring Kevin and Alexs couch-seat comedy, Diggs user base had become unprecedentedly large. Digg v3 Early in 2006, Digg began receiving buyout offers. Kevin Rose (and company) pushed forward with the site and launched Digg v3 (June 2006). Aiming to bring a wider audience to Digg, the site boasted new categories, expanding beyond the tech crowd with World & Business, Entertainment, and Videos. Furthermore, features like top stories became more explicit throughout the life of Digg v3. Things that were formerly hidden became transparent, and the developers experimented with a number of different features to varying degrees of success. The New Crowd In some ways, Digg v3 was a smashing success. It attracted an entirely new crowd of users wholly uninterested in technology news. The community was utterly central to Digg, and the site reflected this attitude. Digg was all about friends, following, and personalized news. But were the New Crowd really faithful to Digg? In other ways, Digg v3 was a resounding failure. Older users slowly trickled out this was not the site they knew and loved any more. Gone were the in-depth articles on technology and development. Gone were the analyses of programming. Gone were the debates over Ruby on Rails vs. PHP. Replacing them were things like how to cook in 10 easy steps. Digg began to look less like a technology site and more like a web version of Maxim magazine. Sure, you could filter out the stuff you didnt like, but why bother? Even the programming channels had turned away from in-depth articles and toward basic tutorials. Digg had, in a sense, sacrificed depth for breadth of content. As the content of Digg became broader, so did the audience. Sadly, as the depth of Digg became shallower, so did the audience. Digg users felt entitled to their resources. They felt they owned their accounts, owned their list of dugg articles, owned their interface. When the encryption key for HD-DVD was cracked, Digg forced a gag order on all related stories. In response, the community threw a fit. They demanded not to be censored, and they threatened rebellion. In desperation, Kevin Rose (and the entire Digg company) relented. Kevin personally published a story on the official Digg blog with the encryption key in it, announcing he would no longer censor stories on Digg. after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, youve made it clear. Youd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we wont delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying. A brave move to be sure, but what was the motivation? Was this for fear of rebellion or a desire to be true to the community? Nobody really knows, but whatever the case, Kevin set a dangerous precedent by bowing to community pressure. After initially proclaiming Kevin Rose a hero, Digg users became increasingly demanding. Additionally, Digg became less about reading interesting content and more about popular comments. It was extremely commonplace to see comment threads where most of the audience hadnt even read the linked article. Memes evolved from the New Crowd and were used and re-used into the ground. (In fact, if you check the archives of Diggnation, you can find a list of most commonly used Digg memes.) The Digg Effect When Digg first started, blog-owners would often report cases where their entire site had crashed due to a sudden influx of traffic. Named The Digg Effect, this traffic rapidly drew the attention of outsiders. For entrepreneurs, this traffic could be an easy source of income. The power of Digg traffic slowly dawned on several different audiences, all of whom tried to leverage it for their own uses. At first, business-people tried to copy Digg; in the face of failure, they tried to buy out top Diggers and re-direct traffic toward their sites. Unscrupulous Diggers tried to create Digg exchanges where they bought and sold Diggs on one anothers stories, all to get articles to the front page. Community members competed for attention in comment threads. The once-dreaded Digg Effect had become a marketing tactic known web-wide. The Release of Digg v4 All the while, the developers at Digg were hard at work on a new version. To combat exploitation from both outsiders and users, Digg made it so that content-owners received credit for their stories (rather than random users who submitted the stories first). The goal was give credit where due and reduce duplicate submissions of the same story. To make the site more community-oriented, Digg made several features friend-oriented by default. Gone were the days where you saw the opinions and pulse of the entire community suddenly your world was limited to specific friends and taste-makers. While developing Digg v4, the idea was obviously to make Digg more community-oriented. The users, however, received it much differently. On August 25, 2010, Digg officially released Digg v4. Early reports indicated crashes, data-loss, and a general sense of confusion. In the words of the now-famous meme, Digg accidentally their website, and it was bad. In response, Kevin Rose posted a message on his blog to ameliorate the Digg community. The community was not amused. When the site came back online, Diggers began complaining en-masse about the problems, the layout, and the loss of their data. The nation of Digg demanded a full revert to Digg v3. Whether on purpose or by freak accident, many of these stories mysteriously disappeared from the front page. This was the last straw Digg went into a full-scale revolt. Users began posting all submissions to Reddit (Diggs #1 rival), then submitting the Reddit pages to Digg. By mob power, the Digg front page was dominated by Reddit articles. Vocal Digg users began publicly abandoning the website in droves. Legitimate stories were covered with comment threads full of this account is now closed. Few (if any) Digg users were brave enough todefend the website.The community had officially turned against Digg. Where We Are Now Despite the problems, Digg is still alive, and it has undergone many changes to placate the mob that abandoned it. Thenextweb estimates that Digg has lost 26% of its U.S. market and even more in the UK. This is substantial to be sure, but its a far cry from the mass destruction the mob intended. While Digg is currently in a tough spot, the site still retains about 3/4 of its original user base. Perhaps the 1/4 that left were just the loudest? Only Digg really knows anything about who left and stuck around. Given Diggs response (virtual silence), I wouldnt be surprised if the users who left the website were undesirable or problematic to begin with. Think about it. This is a website that risked its own financial stability to satisfy the community. On a number of occasions Kevin Rose has risked the collapse of Diggs financial backing for the apparent good of the community. Remember that HD-DVD scandal I mentioned? It couldve easily gone the other way. Remember the Kevin Rose fanboys that supported his every move? Gone. The BusinessWeek photograph had gone from a fun inside joke to a banner of hatred. How did we get here? How did the community go from love to hate so very quickly? One thing is certain: those who abandoned Digg were not the original, loyal user base that existed in Digg v1. Those who loved Digg for its technology focus had trickled off the site years ago. They were slowly replaced by a new generation (a New Crowd) of less-loyal, more selfish individuals. These were people who loved MySpace because it let them have their own webpage. Then they abandoned MySpace for Facebook, which became their new stomping ground. When they heard about Digg from their geeky friends, they decided to try it. Then they decided to make it their own. These people were the community of Digg. Is it really surprising they pitched a fit when Digg did something they hated? I dont think so. Like any good story, theres a lot more under the surface. We can safely assume that the community for which Digg bled, sweated, and sacrificed itself had become immature and selfish over time. Maybe Digg will collapse. Maybe Digg is just happy they left only time will tell. Those who have moved on to Reddit have already begun making some unwelcome waves. For now, the vocal users of Reddit seem happy to have them, but perhaps well see the same thing happen there as well? I would offer the following words of caution to Reddit: Be very careful which community you encourage to stick around (and which one you alienate). You dont want to sacrifice yourself for a community that abandons you. Sep 26, 2010 View in Crawl 4