Am I the only one hoping for a "RIP Techcrunch" any time soon ?
She just completely throw Digg's work into the trash like useless fastfood plastic bag.
This is what happens when you don't know how to create anything productive in your life, and you spend your days talking sh about other's people work. I don't care if Digg is losing visitors, it was a new concept back then, and it was successful, show some respect for the people who are/were still working for it.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'd be lucky to have been even close to as successful as someone like Kevin Rose. People make mistakes -- you never know how successful something will be until you put it in action. I remember years ago when I was watching Diggnation and reading Digg all the time. I've never had near that level of influence over that many people. For that, I have massive respect for Digg and its creator(s).
EDIT: Hell, Digg was probably what shifted my focus from just tech news to actually starting programming and learning to start my own company -- it was almost an inspiration. There's a lot more to its legacy that's unsung, unappreciated, and undervalued.
I don't know how anyone takes Sarah Lacy seriously. The bombast, the myth-making and self congratulation, but most especially the complete disregard for any annoying facts that get in her way.
" And Digg? Well we got Digg exactly right. We said it could sell for between $150 million and $200 million, and over the next few months and years there were several negotiations and at least one solid offer in that exact range. But Digg — unlike peers like Flickr and Delicious– said no, and its best days seemed ahead of it."
Presumably she is talking about the google talks, because that would be the only "solid offer" in that exact range. And guess what, it was google who walked away according to Techcrunch.
With that cover, Sarah Lacy learned that you can sell magazines if you treat founders like rock stars or athletes. (This was not original, viz Fanning on the cover of Time 6 years earlier.)
Tech trade journalism has become about having a pat narrative that fits the current mood, not insightful commentary or facts. It's on a spectrum somewhere between sportswriting and trolling. The business is not to inform, but to mythologize.
That's why they are always either cheerleading or hating. That is why they call anyone who disagrees, or questions their integrity or competence, "haters". That's the mindset. It's how they've trained themselves to view the world.
Come on. The man is endless fun. We used to have a copy of "Dvorak Predicts" at the office. Just about every page it was opened had something that gave us a good laugh.
Thouh the numbers could have been exaggerated, its a fact that digg could have been much more profitable had kevin thought of selling when there was a market for it. Its one of many examples of how founders enamoured with their ideas tend to push the startup past the prime. Groupon just did that a few months ago. I can see myself reading a similar headline about them a few years from now.
The entrepreneurs were the exact opposite of the kids today seduced by the promises of Y Combinator, easy cash of super angels and lure of TechCrunch headlines.
Is she talking about the same Digg that had the founder on the BusinessWeek cover?
Edit: Fascinating, this very writer of the blog post put him on the "controversial" cover. And then she wants to talk about a time when kids weren't seduced by "easy cash." Defies logic, really.
I thought this was going to be an analysis of Digg's current problems, but seven out of ten paragraphs are about Sarah Lacy's BusinessWeek career, her book, her current whereabouts, etc.
Much of what she does have to say about Digg and the history of Web startups is questionable (for example, "The entrepreneurs were the exact opposite of the kids today seduced by the promises of Y Combinator, easy cash of super angels and lure of TechCrunch headlines. They were doing something that still stank of broken dreams and evaporated billions. And they were doing it for one simple reason: they couldn’t stop themselves.")
Sometimes TechCrunch does well (particularly when it gets a real scoop) but "R.I.P. Digg" is poor, in my opinion.
It's a shame we live in a society the likes to kick people when they are down. These are the same people who were cheer leading when digg was on a roll.
I remember when I created an account on the site. A friend kicked a link my way from Fox News of all places ... that mentioned the site alongside Slashdot. In my job at the time, crowdsourced sites focused on technology were very useful. I left the site about a year after they decided to open up to general news. My fear was that it would become what many of the emerging Web 2.0 news aggregation sites became: a political activist haven. Within several months (not overnight as I had feared), it had ceased being a useful resource. The breaking point was when there was no way to configure my profile to filter out crap-political-commentary. I wrote them to have my account removed (something that couldn't be done with a few clicks at the time).
I had taken it out of my daily "sites to check on" in 2007, but after reading some commentary about how "all of the Web 2.0 sites had become BIASED! (OMG!)" in early 2009, I visited the front page (now without an account with filters setup). The top stories of the day were dominated by nearly everything that a former female candidate for vice president had made.
I love Hacker News because despite its growing popularity, it has maintained civility and avoided (most of the time) entries focused entirely on politics.
Maybe it's also time to separate what is an interesting resource or tool from what is an interesting business.
150-200 million is a lot for a company that seems to have earned very little if anything. It's one thing for a Groupon to walk away from a deal, but Digg should have cashed out.
I'm hardly ever on Digg anymore, but I am Hacker News a lot. I'm not sure if Hacker News was ever constructed to be a business - seems like it was just designed to be an interesting place for people in the community to get together and share information - and that's just fine. Not every great idea is necessarily a great business.
I used Digg for a while, and it became apparent over time that the quality both of the news and also the comments was tanking. Once I discovered HN I stopped using Digg altogether.
I don't know if it was spam or all the format changes, each time a format change occurred users complained - a lot, yet changes were implemented anyway.
The highlight of Digg's history I'd say was the HD-DVD encryption key everyone put in posts refusing to back down I think that brought the users together.
Then one day the user-base seemed to suddenly shift rapidly to the right almost overnight from a more centrist point of view, that cause a lot of friction and comment wars.
Telling the people who use your website, some of who practically lived on the website, what they should like and not like design-wise instead of listening to them was disastrous and may have been the cause of Digg.com being abandoned by most of its user-base.
I was there for about the same time period. In addition to the shift in the community, around that same time the front page began to be dominated by mediocrity (daily mail anyone?). If you checked the history on any of the front page submitters it was obvious they were all in massive vote-collusion rings.
Articles in these rings would instantly hit the front page with 200+ votes. The front page became irrelevent, and on Digg -- as opposed to its competitor Reddit -- there was not much else.
I stopped visiting months before the v4 fiasco, but even then it was already long apparent that the essence of what made Digg special in the beginning was long gone.
Even places such as Slashdot are hard to get submissions accepted but I'd say that's due more to the sheer volume of submissions, not as much in past years but I'm sure Slashdot has a large user-base they've got at least a good eight years experience over Digg and Reddit. I mean even Anonymous users can submit at Slashdot.
I'd say it's more than having your funny cat picture or that article everyone has seen 20 times posted because it's new to you it's the fact you can submit your post and let the community decide what to do instead of having everything outright rejected instantly - it makes for hard feelings and no sense of community.
Believe it or not I think Digg is actually getting better community-wise, it seems the rats have left the sinking ship. edit: I certainly don't mean Kevin!
I can't help but think that starting a new website with the RSS that they removed wouldn't be such a bad idea. Keep running digg, but take all the ideas and stuff the current digg community hates and build a new site (with different theme/terminology obviously).
I agree that she probably tried to sensationalize it. However, it is still an insightful read about lessons that can be learnt from Digg, if you can hold your attention long enough and look past the tabloid journalism elements.
That's funny to me because I feel that TechCrunch was the BIGGEST twitter cheerleader for many years. I even started a twitter account just because they felt that it was so important to the web and this was before the everyday man and celebrities created their accounts.
IS there room for digg-like-sites that cater to specific verticals? For a while, it was trendy to do digg clones and now they have all disappeared- is voting based news site like digg still a good idea for news and information.
Hacker News itself is rather Digg-like and quite focussed.
Reddit is also quite interesting in how it lets you subscribe to reddits that interest you (and unsubscribe from those that don’t), as well as allowing anyone to make a new reddit. It prevents (or delays) the need for site migration, like what happened with the Digg to Reddit exodus, by giving you reddit migration. Don’t like /r/pogramming? Go to /r/coding! Etc.
She just completely throw Digg's work into the trash like useless fastfood plastic bag.
This is what happens when you don't know how to create anything productive in your life, and you spend your days talking sh about other's people work. I don't care if Digg is losing visitors, it was a new concept back then, and it was successful, show some respect for the people who are/were still working for it.
I'm seriously hating TC everyday a little more.