"As one commenter quipped, if Twitter had fired engineers because of rocky launches and questionable code in the first few months of getting popular, there would be no one working at the company. (Ha!)"
I'm of mixed feelings about that bit (there was questionable code, but the launches were pretty smooth given the lack of hardware), but it's pretty obvious the person doesn't know the history of the site. But mostly that's because the PR team worked really hard to make sure people didn't.
The first 2 years were amazing. Digg is now six years old, Kevin has taken 7 digit figures "off the table," there's no question that this launch was unacceptable from so many perspectives. They just fired the wrong person.
I'm not sure I agree. Clearly Digg was having some kind of monetization issue. This whole episode might be pretty calculated really. They had to know those changes where going to cause general outrage. They had to think that the benefit would outweigh that.
In the end they might add tremendous value.
What they didn't count on was the site taking a huge step back in terms of reliability.
I'm not sure which part of my comment you disagree with. But the monetization issue is (in my opinion) due to Kevin and Jay taking money off the table, and spending much of their time drawing digg salaries while building other businesses (revision3, pownce, wefollow, fflick). If they'd devoted 100% of their time to digg there wouldn't be a monetization issue.
No doubt about it I don't know the details of the technical impls of Twitter in the early days -- I only became aware of it when it's usage started exploding and the "fail whale" became such a common occurrence.
No knock to the Twitter team, if that was just hardware scaling issues from the get-go, not much they can do about that. The reference to the comment was more for the cute anecdote more than anything.
I'm of mixed feelings about that bit (there was questionable code, but the launches were pretty smooth given the lack of hardware), but it's pretty obvious the person doesn't know the history of the site. But mostly that's because the PR team worked really hard to make sure people didn't.
The first 2 years were amazing. Digg is now six years old, Kevin has taken 7 digit figures "off the table," there's no question that this launch was unacceptable from so many perspectives. They just fired the wrong person.