I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.
New stuff like reddit, insta, twitter, simply took over filling the urge to hit f5 for latest content.
Edit - makes me wonder if they used the site themselves.
Especially with a high profile implosion like this, it’s really interesting to contrast our experience in the userbase to an internal perspective.
>Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly.
I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.
Reddit at the time felt lighthearted and fun. I think I read somewhere that a lot of the comments were being written in-house, which makes sense in retrospect. For example, someone would leave a comment like "Is this the real life?", and then the entire lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody would appear line-by-line as comments without missing a beat. It seems improbable that a bunch of strangers could have done that perfectly.
While there are some parallels between Digg v4 and what's going on with Reddit today, I think predictions of its death are greatly exaggerated. However, I would be happy to see something else take its place.
In a few years nobody will remember that this is what precipitated the fall of Reddit. It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.
Even the smaller subs catch the contagion year over year.
I’ve been a Redditor since before the narwhal baconed at midnight. I miss the Reddit that was good.
I’m excited to see what replaces it.
I have never been accused of being a racist transphobe whatever, if that’s your number one issue with the site maybe some inward reflection is in order? Just don’t get involved in political flamewars, they serve absolutely no purpose for anyone involved.
I know that had you stepped up to help out one of your favorite subs, you'd have a different lense. You comment is v clearly just ignorant.
I left in 2018 or there-around. Probably stayed too long, in retrospect. 10+ year account, moderated multiple subreddits and a pillar of the community type figure in a few others.
On some level it felt like each election cycle dug deeper trenches until the entire website looked like the battle of Verdun. This wasn't exclusively an American phenomenon either. The same thing happened on several national subreddits.
I also got the sense that the reddit members cultivated a sort of creeping depression that was really allowed to fester on some subreddits essentially all about exchanging thoughts of hopelessness and doom. This was before Covid. I can't imagine it got better those years. Granted, Reddit was wallowing in "forever alone"-memes even 15 years ago, but it feels like the darkness of that abyss got darker as the years passed.
I've looked back a few times but I've immediately turned heel as I saw what a toxic dumpster fire it's turned into. Like it isn't as obvious if you've been in it, but jesus f christ on pogo stick is it ever clear to see when you've been away for a couple of years.
“It’s already turned into an echo-chamber of nonsense, ruled by all-powerful mods to whom every user is a racist transphobe nazi homophobe enemy.”
Moderators (excepting automod) are human, and like all of us they sometimes make mistakes, some may have biases or having a bad day. I have not seen what you are describing.
Nobody on Reddit has called me any of those things.
The great Digg migration was something of a perfect storm. Digg shot themselves in the foot, yes, but Reddit was already up-and-coming and viewed as the most viable alternative.
There isn't really a viable alternative to Reddit yet.
I’ve literally never had this problem. And I’ve commented on a multitude of subreddits for years.
Curious to see some concrete examples where your comments were framed in this manner.
It really reached an insane degree on the official subs at least. There are some karma farmers that certainly are human that post and post the ever same topics, but the quality of many submissions really dropped significantly. And I compare that to the former reddit quality, which was optimized for mass instead of quality. Today it looks like some form of propaganda spam. Perhaps a result of news outlets copying more than before.
Reddit should have build on its strengths. It was better for discussion than Twitter or Tiktok. Not too deep, but at least you could find new ideas. Now they used the platform to consolidated opinions and killed the advantages that formerly differentiated the platform.
- commenters who are the problem according to the other half
- moderators who are the problem according to the other half.
I admit I'm much more of a lurker than a contributor, but I do post things from time to time. Comments fairly frequently in technical forums, and posts much less frequently, but when they are, they are either: 1) to show a project I did, or 2) to ask a technical question.
Basically all of these use cases are more and more an exercise in frustration. I've been using the site for at least a decade, but I can't remember having so much trouble using it until quite recently. The last several posts, let's say during 2023, I've made get either manually or auto-removed. Every single subreddit no matter how small has its own, different, set of "rules" and if you don't memorize them you get your post removed. These rules are often very antisocial, in my opinion.
For example, in one forum that I read very often, I never post anything because I only like to post my own work, as I consider such work to be "original content" -- I'm not one to spend my time scouring the internet for other people's work to share, instead I like to share when I've got something to share, right? Seems natural enough to me anyway. Well, I posted a project that I spent 2 months developing, yes as part of the startup I work for but it was a for-fun April-fools type project, intended to amuse. Banned. Immediately. For "self promotion". (There were literally no ads in it or anything, just a website with a fun interaction, and the startups logo in the corner.) Thanks guys. Guess I'll take my ball and go home. Apparently they prefer reposted nonsense to original contributions? Bizarre, backwards..
Another example, someone was asking where they could go for some discussions on a certain topic, so naturally I responded to point to some other subreddits. Immediate auto-remove due to "posting links to other subreddits". Really? So, like, they have rules against hyperlinking? That thing that is at the foundation of the web?
Similarly I posted a question to a Python forum, actually quite an advanced question about an interesting phenomenon I noticed related to async generators -- auto-removed. Told to repost it in LearnPython. Great. Did so, got a bunch of beginner replies, as I expected, instead of the in-depth discussion I was hoping for.
Now, I understand that these rules and bots exist for a reason .. mainly one reason actually, which is to fight spam. But enough is enough. At what point does spam fighting become intrusive to normal, community sharing of ideas? To be honest, this has gotten me so down regarding reddit that I'm considering just not using the site any more, as it's gotten quite boring because I can barely contribute without jumping through hoops. Trying to post or share something is just depressing because either it breaks some rule, or people jump all over it with negative comments. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the effort anymore.
Does anyone else have this experience, or is it just me?
Weird, I've been put off of reddit because of the prevalence of transphobes, homophobes, and racists who inundate so many threads. I wish there were better mods to remove those folks from the site.
I have always been pretty left wing (have been a member of and organised for a range of left wing political parties) but Reddit was what very much moderated by belief in 99% of left wing politicians and would be politicians. If the kinds who rise to the top of subreddits ever saw power in our societies we would see the terror and widespread violence. There's a performative aesthetic idea of what being left wing is based on positions on issues, knowledge, rather than an actual mindset and series of real beliefs about what is the right thing to do.
It comes down to what I had always seen as the territory of the right but now realise that people of any political persuasion can do it:
1. Blame the system for your own problems
2. Other your enemies and make their problems personal failings
3. Claim that justice would be their destruction rather than their rehabilitation
And for social media companies these lonely, angry, miserable people drive huge amounts of engagement.
Reddit has huge governance issues as a community that stems from the fact that the corporate leadership cannot serve two masters. In retrospect when they did the big slow down on the "hot" algorithm was the moment it could not be saved.
It's less about the wokeness and more about the ability for a handful of mods to hijack popular topics and create an unecessarily unpleasant/unproductive experience for their communities.
I'll leave ineffective admins, lack of original content, spam, karma, bots, misinformation, automod, and monetization as separate points of discussion :P
Anyway, for me, "Narwhal baconed at midnight" was when I realized the site was overrun was kids. Slow decline while obsessively looking for alternatives since then.
Reddit was never good.
Digg's v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page.[citation needed] Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's.[19] High staff turnover included the departure of head of business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's release.[20]
How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.
A junior developer creates a function with default of [] instead of (), but otherwise no mutations:
def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
return query_users(ids)
fa55099 - 45 minutes ago - Alice - Avoid creating unnecessary new list
def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
- if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
+ if not ids: ids.append(current_user_id)
return query_users(ids)
f4e704c - 30 minutes ago - Bob - Fix caller who was sending invalid ids
+ def get_user(ids=[]):
- def get_user(unchecked_ids=[]):
- ids = get_valid_ids(unchecked_ids)
if not ids: ids = [current_user_id]
return query_users(ids)
def get_user(ids=[]):
if not ids: ids.append(current_user_id)
return query_users(ids)
Is it good code? No. Good version control hygiene? Also no. Should you crucify the developer who made this mistake? Of course not, especially once you add the boilerplate chaff that was omitted here. That's why it's called a footgun, it's easy to misuse.
Given this was 2010 I wouldn't be surprised if they had a less mature development process that doesn't use things people take for granted today, like linters, and pre-merge code reviews.
If you assume perfection of humans, maybe 95/100 times it works out and 4/100 it's a small oops, but 1/100 times you get something embarrassing like this
Around that time I was in the middle of the Java ecosystem though, which had tons of tooling for validation, linting, verification, books full of best practices, etc.
Still a far cry from what is normal these days, but we did do things like unit tests, end-to-end tests and code reviews back then. But, that was enterprise, the SF web companies I think weren't as enterprisey as the bank I worked for at the time.
It's ironic though; the old fashioned companies I've worked for adopted a lot of the more fast-and-loose-feeling practices from SF, think extreme programming, agile, taking a chance on rewriting the whole back-end to a new language, things like that.
Humans are good at designing processes and procedures that compensate for their lack of perfection. In this case that capability was not used apparently.
Anyone can make a mistake and that's fine, but a company would be expected to have processes and enough eyes to make sure that a bunch of other people need to make the same mistake before it makes its way into prod at which point the likelihood of mistake becomes really low...
These days I'd set up a linter that enforces these things do not happen, but it's easy to be smart after the fact. You say "once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot", which I feel is true. You just need that bitter experience first, and for me it came in the form of a production issue.
What I don't get here is why they didn't simply use 'None' instead. If a parameter is optional then 'None' makes way more sense than an empty list.
The scoping of list comprehensions in Python 2 was far less justifiable, IMO.
I've been bitten by this exact thing. It's not strictly obvious IMO. Though it didn't make it through testing.
This post also mentions an update to google search which hit them hard, and a bunch of internal issues, senior staff leaving. They had a limited runway and the company was going to run out of money unless they did something.
The something they decided to do was "launch digg v4". It wasn't ready from a technical perspective. Worse, it really looks like they skipped the market research step used their once chance to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall to see what worked.
Revenue. Well, that's what they hoped.
At the expense of user experience.
Enshittification, but without the lock-in, which ended predictably
Tangentially related, just yesterday a rideshare company got into hot water for posting support on reddit where they used the persons real name instead of their username.
Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo?
The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling
Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.
The selfishness of it is obvious if you think through what would happen if someone posted one of these dig iframed urls to another digg-like site, which was then itself posted to a third digg-like site. 3 stacked headers, yay!
Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your users actually like about your product vs your competitors. You’re too close to the product.
A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is the perfect time for a jump to a competitor.
You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much more tolerable rate.
IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in early 2015.
That's terrifying!
Digg was 3 webservers with 8 database slaves in 2006.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to increase performance.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
Digg, Zero, etc.
It's just sad he's using his fame for NFT crap now.
Given how many users they have I suppose they know a thing or two about scale.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshma...
What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity.
The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total.
People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence.
Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO.
The real story is probably way more interesting than anyone really would guess. I'll summarise it as so:
What made Digg work really was one guy who was a machine. He would vet all the stories, infiltrate all the SEO networks, and basically keep subverting them to keep the Digg front-page usable. Digg had an algorithm, but it was basically just a simple algorithm that helped this one dude 10x his productivity and keep the quality up.
Google came to buy Digg, but figured out that really it's just a dude who works 22 hours a day that keeps the quality up, and all that talk of an algorithm was smoke and mirrors to trick the SEO guys into thinking it was something they could game (they could not, which is why front page was so high quality for so many years). Google walked.
Then the founders realised if they ever wanted to get any serious money out of this thing, they had to fix that. So they developed "real algorithms" that independently attempted to do what this one dude was doing, to surface good/interesting content.
They thought they'd succeeded, or market pressures forced their hand, whatever. So they rolled it along with a catastrophic UI/UX and back-end tech rewrite all rolled up into one.
It was a total shit-show. I was involved in the "old" MySQL stack, and watched them totally fuck it up with beta software that wasn't ready for production (Cassandra, at the time, was not what it is today).
The algorithm to figure out what's cool and what isn't wasn't as good as the dude who worked 22 hours a day, and without his very heavy input, it just basically rehashed all the shit that was popular somewhere else a few days earlier.
So you ended up with a site that was ugly, fuxed, no-one in the existing wanted, and with a bland boring bunch of stories on the front-page, which was not at all compelling for anyone new showing up to check stuff out.
Instead of taking this massive slap to the face constructively, the founders doubled-down. And now here we are.
To be clear, much of the tech behind Digg was very interesting, the work Owen and many other engineers did was very interesting. The algorithm was all smoke and mirrors, though. And Kevin and his little circle of buddies were all crap engineers that tanked the business with their hubris and inexperience.
Who I am referring to was named Amar (his name is common enough I don't think I'm outing him). He was the SEO whisperer and "algorithm." He was literally like a spy. He would infiltrate the awful groups trying to game the front page and trick them into giving him enough info that he could identify their campaigns early, and kill them. All the while pretending to be an SEO loser like them.
There were a few other amazing people behind the scenes. I'm actually leaving out myself and my group because who wants some dude to blow his own horn? But many of us did amazing things.
There were also literally dozens of guys super high-up that were useless. Not because they were dumb, but they were too full of hubris and thought they had expertise where they didn't. Like Kevin Rose should have realised being a nice guy was his strength, and stay out of engineering, because he started dabbling in it, promoting the wrong people and ideas for the wrong reasons, and the next thing you know... BOOM. Implosion.
I even catch myself calling some of the people who were in K.Rose's event horizon "idiots" or "stupid" but when I really think about it honestly, they were reasonably bright but just given poor incentives. Hey, this NoSQL thing is awesome! Let's replace the entire (functional) MySQL portion with Cassandra. Yeah! After seven beers and two joints, this sounds like an amazing idea. Let's do it!
No.
If you find yourself, or your company founder, doing things like this, sell your equity position for whatever it's worth at that moment. Do not HODL. SELL and SHORT.
I am in shock- amazing story. Thanks for sharing. This thread is blowing my mind.
Was that one dude owen? Lol.
When I was 13, I managed to watch TechTV for one straight day while on vacation. Then, TechTV promptly shut down. But learning about Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, changed me. I wanted to move to San Francisco and get into tech. TWiT and Diggnation were totally foundational to me.
I remember still the excitement that on Digg you could upvote a story without reloading a page. AJAX! That was really what Web 2.0 was about, technologically.
I sometimes feel strange that almost no one talks about these days. Maybe it’s not long enough ago? I mean… it’s been almost 20 years.
still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested.
the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-and-bust with their layoff cycles.
techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class. no other professions allow such reckless failures.
My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes.
I would be curious of other people’s timeline.
From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical.
Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.
Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly.
Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple.
Too bad for Digg. Was a good site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060412174457/http://www.oreill...
Digg even moved some processing from MySQL into PHP in 2009 to increase performance.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/23/digg-4000-performa...
Kind of difficult as you will always see those kids trying all kinds of magic with a language instead of razor sharp focus on the problem itself to be solved.
Anyways, I guess everyone passes through those phases of growth. Also unreasonable to remain like a dinosaur refusing to learn what else new is coming up.
These are not the adjectives I associate with Java...
Simplicity, you can code Java apps to be as simple as possible, unless you use a framework like spring, but that's true for any language. I used vert.X and it's expressJS of Java, very lean, basic but more batteries available if needed but still manages to be simple. Java doesn't have complicated concepts to understand nor does it have 100 ways to do the same thing.
Scalability, dockerize and scale to your heart's content or tweak the JVM params and max out your hardware.
What am I missing, not trying to be snarky, maybe you wrote more Java than me, may be for years, so genuinely curious to understand. For additional context, I coded in NodeJs, Python, Go, Swift and Java. and each have its own merits. So I'm not biased against Java.
Twitter would disagree[0].
> We now have the capacity to serve 10x the number of requests per machine. This means we can support the same number of requests with fewer servers, reducing our front-end service costs.
---
All phones since the last 30 years (including the famous Nokias) shipped with Java and apps that simply worked. Android is constructed on top of Java. What I build today with pure Java will run in 100 years from today without needing changes. Quite a different scenario for whatever other language that breaks stuff every couple of versions.
Using other languages is of course possible. In the same manner as building a wheel with stone is possible instead of using rubber.
There was no place for users on Digg v4. And without users, it's hard to get revenue.
Was it unreliable at first? I didn't even notice. I just saw what they were aiming for, and noped out.
If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS, their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc.
On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016 when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage day and night.
Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few things defaulted in the new reddit.
1) Allow viewing of removed comments. 2) Give mods the ability to remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe) 3) A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the top comment + top rebuttal or something.
