Rose’s Biggest Mistakes: Hiring, Feature Development

According to Rose, “there is a temptation that you want to throw as many developers as possible at a problem.” As Digg was built on top of PHP, the company would hire too many developers that specialized in this language. Then, however, Rose noted, “you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers.” At that point, said Rose, you end up having to hire a lot of developers that can do other things and don’t know what to do with the old developers.

Talking about the Digg community, Rose also noted that keeping the often unruly group of users on the site in control was often a problem. During the last presidential election in the U.S., for example, Rose would get death threats when too many pro-Obama stories hit the Digg frontpage.

Digg today still gets about 20 million uniques according to Rose, but at the height of the service’s popularity, it was getting about 38 million uniques.

After repeated rumors that its numbers were falling dramatically, Digg had to actually post its Google Analytics numbers on its blog yesterday. These numbers show that the site still gets about 17 million unique visitors a month. While Digg has to be defensive about these numbers, though, its competitors at Reddit – which used to be much smaller before Digg’s missteps last year – now celebrate 28 million uniques in October. Digg argues that because close to 50% of its visitors come to the site directly, monitoring firms like Compete can’t accurately measure its traffic.

Digg’s Problems Go Deeper than its Traffic Numbers

Getting 17 million unique visitors is a respectable number, even though Reddit now dwarf Digg easily. The company’s problems go much deeper than just pure traffic, though. It has lost its most active users, who used to keep the site stocked with interesting stories. Earlier this year, Digg actually had to hire some editors to search the site for interesting stories and highlight them manually so they wouldn’t get lost.

Its users also aren’t as active as they used to be. Where top stories used to need close to 100 votes to even appear on the site’s front page, some stories can now get on the frontpage and move all the way down without ever reaching 100 votes. Stories with more than 1,000 votes were pretty normal on Digg just two years ago.

As a comparison: On Reddit, stories now regularly get 3,000 or more votes and hundred or even thousands of comments.

What’s most disturbing on Digg is that the community that was once so active now barely exists. Stories can move all the way down the front page with just 2 or 3 comments.

So while Digg may be posting some positive numbers today, chances are, it won’t be able to do so for a very long time anymore. It may linger around for a while, but eventually, it won’t be able to make it unless Reddit really messes up and drives its users to go to Digg again.

The big difference between Oink and Foursquare or Yelp is that Oink doesn’t focus on places so much as on the things inside them. Instead of rating a local restaurant, for example, you would rate the pizza you had there. While it uses your location to make it easier for you to tag your discoveries, it doesn’t bother you with pointless check-ins.

The app features the usual fixings you would expect from this kind of service: an activity stream, the ability to discover popular things around you, access to your profile and, of course, the ability to add your own ratings, photos and comments. While the app is extremely well designed, though, the real game-changer here isn’t so much the app itself, but the idea that users care more about finding interesting things or the best coffee around than the best restaurant or store

Rate Anything

In many ways, adding this granularity to these kinds of apps is really the next evolutionary step. After all, that cool coffee shop where all the hipsters hang out with their Macbook Airs may make a mean espresso, but may not actually make that great iced coffee you really want right now. While it clearly looks forward, though, Oink is also a throwback to the old days of Web 2.0, as its tagging system lets users tag virtually anything with any tag without imposing any clear structure.

Oink also goes beyond location by allowing you to rate and tag virtually anything. There is plenty of talk about books and games on the system right now, for example.

As users rate more items related to tags they are using, they will gain “cred.” This ramification element may attract some of the more competitive folks out there, but there are no Foursquare-like discounts to be had yet (which in return means you don’t have to worry about retaining your mayorship either, of course).

Verdict

Overall, then, Oink puts enough of a twist on this genre to be interesting – something that can’t be said about most of the new entrants in this oversaturated market for ratings+photo sharing apps. As any new service, it suffers from the fact that there isn’t much of a community on it yet – especially if you don’t live in San Francisco – but I’ve got a feeling that it will quickly attract a very dedicated following.

Image via Wikipedia

As Arrington rightly points out, Digg’s glory days were around 2007/2008, when Google was quite interested in buying the site, though that deal eventually fell through. Since then, Digg has struggled to keep up with the times and is now under pressure from social media services like Twitter and Facebook, as well as from Digg-like sites, including Conde Nast’s Reddit. The launch of Digg v4, which alienated the site’s most loyal users in an effort to turn Digg into a more mainstream-oriented service, was a turning point for the site, which never recovered from this.

For Digg, Rose’s departure (assuming this rumor is true) likely won’t result in any immediate changes. While Rose took over as Digg’s CEO after the departure of Jay Adelson (who, according to various people I have talked to at SXSW, has rarely looked as happy and relaxed than these days), Matt Williams took  Rose’s role late last year and now runs the day-to-day operations at Digg. One has to wonder, though, if others at Digg won’t follow Rose’s example and will start looking for new jobs (maybe even at Rose’s new venture).

Note: I have asked Revision3/Digg for a comment about this rumor and will update this story once/if I hear back from them.

The improved algorithm for the “My News” sections will make this feature more interesting for users who only follow a few other users and those who follow a very large number of other Diggers. According to Digg’s Will Larson “if there is not much recent activity in your My News, Trending blends in the most active content (diggs, comments and clicks over a period of time) from Top News to make sure you have something interesting to read. If there is lots of recent activity in your My News, it will bring the most active stories to the top, making it easier to see the stories your friends are most interested in.”

Still a Lot of Ground to Make Up

The earliest comments show that Digg’s users are quite happy to get the ability to see who dugg a story back, but the general lack of comments (and diggs) on the announcement post – which in the days before the V4 launch would have hundreds of comments by now – shows that Digg still has a lot of ground to make up if it wants the site to return to its glory days again.  

• dw221 Plain and simple….this sucks! Bring back the old Digg.
• nicklo06 FUCK YOU NEW DIGG GIVE ME DIGG CLASSIC!
• tophomeloans What’s the point in digging if you don’t get credit for it. Screw this…..
• originalmadmatt this is crap.. digg has gone to the dogs..
• outlawsundown New Digg is like New Coke horrible and unwanted. Bring back Classic Digg!
• fuzybuny What the fuck is up with the color scheme?
  What the fuck is up with the layout?
  Where the fuck is the upcoming section?
  How the fuck do I see peoples comments?
  Fuck this fucking fuck shit and fuck Diggs shitty ass Web Designer they should have hired a fucking Usability specialist now this website is pure fuckery.

Almost by default, users don’t like redesigns – and the more invested users are in a site, the less they like change. It’ll be interesting to see what the effect of this redesign will have over the next week or so. Early reactions are almost unanimously negative (and Diggers tend to be quite vocal in their disapproval)

Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing