Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's a Friday, which means it's time for
Speaker 1: a classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published
Speaker 1: way back on May fifth, twenty seventeen. It is called
Speaker 1: the Dig Story. Digg known as the homepage of the Internet,
Speaker 1: at least once upon a time. It still exists. It's
Speaker 1: not like it's gone, but it certainly has changed a
Speaker 1: great deal since its founding. So let's listen to this
Speaker 1: classic episode about Dig. Today we're going to explore the
Speaker 1: story of dig dot com, what it was, how it
Speaker 1: came about, and exactly why. Some people say it serves
Speaker 1: as a lesson in community mismanagement. It's very interesting. First,
Speaker 1: let me give you a quick overview of what dig
Speaker 1: was all about, and to some extent, is still about,
Speaker 1: though the current incarnation of dig is very different from
Speaker 1: what was thought of as Dig back in the day.
Speaker 1: So do you know Reddit? Okay, that's kind of what
Speaker 1: Dig was. Dig was essentially a lot like what Reddit
Speaker 1: is now, and a lot of people who used Dig
Speaker 1: abandoned it for Reddit, and we'll talk about why in
Speaker 1: this episode. But more specifically, Dig was a site where
Speaker 1: users could share links to web pages, and it was
Speaker 1: part social network, part news aggregator, and it set itself
Speaker 1: apart from other services with similar functions, Like there was
Speaker 1: dell ish Shuss. You might remember that you old timers
Speaker 1: of the Internet. That was sort of a bookmarking app
Speaker 1: where you could link to a page that you intend
Speaker 1: to go back to over and over and you could
Speaker 1: easily share those bookmarks with other people. But the whole
Speaker 1: purpose was this was a reference you intended to return
Speaker 1: to repeatedly. That's not really what Dig was interested in.
Speaker 1: They were more about sharing links to timely pieces of
Speaker 1: content like news articles, for example, and then users on
Speaker 1: Dig's site could vote. They could boost a topic further
Speaker 1: up the main page, or they could end up knocking
Speaker 1: it down the main page. Boosting was called digging. You
Speaker 1: would dig an article or a link and say that's awesome.
Speaker 1: I want that promoted because I think it's really interesting.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to vote it down, you buried it.
Speaker 1: So there was digging and burying, which is odd because
Speaker 1: if we're talking about the physical act. That's very similar,
Speaker 1: but in this case, digging means I dig it. Bury
Speaker 1: means let's bury that story. It's not interesting, it doesn't
Speaker 1: belong here. It was also meant to allow users to
Speaker 1: determine which stories were the most relevant and interesting, and
Speaker 1: they were to have control. Really, the idea was that
Speaker 1: the users of the site determined what went on the
Speaker 1: site and how that content was arranged based upon their actions.
Speaker 1: So it gave a lot of control to its user base,
Speaker 1: and that had a real appeal to it, right, And
Speaker 1: we'll dive more into Dig in just a little bit. Also,
Speaker 1: just in the interest of full disclosure, I should point
Speaker 1: out that while I don't personally know the founders of dig,
Speaker 1: we have never really officially met. I think I met
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose once, but I know a lot of folks
Speaker 1: who are friends with them, so we have a lot
Speaker 1: of friends in common. And over the years, some of
Speaker 1: the stuff that was going on over at dig kind
Speaker 1: of made its way to my ears through the grapevine,
Speaker 1: you know, just basic gossip type stuff. Now, fortunately, because
Speaker 1: I'm me, I've forgotten almost all of that. I have
Speaker 1: no I remember hearing a lot about Dig back in
Speaker 1: the day, but I didn't retain any of that information.
Speaker 1: I never really used DIG that much myself, so it
Speaker 1: never took hold in my brain. However, I thought it
Speaker 1: was important for me to disclose the fact that at
Speaker 1: least I know some of the same people that the
Speaker 1: founders knew, that we ran in the same circles, just
Speaker 1: to disclose that. But I don't think any biases have
Speaker 1: crept through in my reporting of this because my memory
Speaker 1: is so bad. It's not that I am so ethical,
Speaker 1: it's that my brain just didn't hold onto the information.
Speaker 1: I'd like to think I would be ethical if my
Speaker 1: brain did hold onto it. But we'll never know, now,
Speaker 1: will we. Anyway. The founders of Dig included Jay Addelson,
Speaker 1: Ron Gorrigetsky owen Burn, and Kevin Rose. They started development
Speaker 1: on the site back in October two thousand and four,
Speaker 1: and they launched dig on December fourth or fifth, two
Speaker 1: thousand and four. So let's talk a bit about each
Speaker 1: of those guys and what they brought to DIG. First,
Speaker 1: we're gonna mention Jay Adelson. He came from Detroit and
Speaker 1: he grew up in as cecil of Welcome to Nightville
Speaker 1: would say, he grew up in Michigan. He got a
Speaker 1: degree in film and broadcasting with a concentration in computer
Speaker 1: science from Boston University in nineteen ninety two. After he graduated,
Speaker 1: he worked for companies like the ISP, the Internet service
Speaker 1: provider Netcom. He helped design the Palo Alto Internet Exchange,
Speaker 1: and he later founded a company called Equinix, which was
Speaker 1: another Internet data center and infrastructure company. So his yorick
Speaker 1: was primarily on the inner workings of the systems that
Speaker 1: the Internet itself depends upon, you know, not websites or
Speaker 1: but rather the actual infrastructure that allows computers to communicate
Speaker 1: with each other. He worked a lot on those those
Speaker 1: sort of systems, and it was actually in his job
Speaker 1: at Equinox, where the company he had co founded, where
Speaker 1: he would first meet Kevin Rose, you know, one of
Speaker 1: the other co founders of DIG, probably the most famous
Speaker 1: of the founders of DIG. Kevin Rose at the time
Speaker 1: was doing a segment for a show called The Screen Savers,
Speaker 1: and I'll mention that show again when I get to
Speaker 1: Kevin Addison would then become the business manager for Dig
Speaker 1: once it became an official thing. He used his experience
Speaker 1: to hire the initial management team for the company and
Speaker 1: it was Adilson who led the charge in raising venture
Speaker 1: capital shortly after dig launched. He would also become the
Speaker 1: company's CEO in two thousand and five, and he would
Speaker 1: co found Revision three along with Kevin Rose, also in
Speaker 1: two thousand and five. Ron Gordetski is a software engineer.
Speaker 1: He studied at the University of California, San Diego, and
Speaker 1: his role on the team was to be the system's
Speaker 1: engineering manager. Gorgetsky would also co found Revision three later on,
Speaker 1: so he was one of those members. Revision three initially
Speaker 1: was kind of a podcasting and video arm of dig
Speaker 1: It sort of existed as its own thing, and it
Speaker 1: sort of existed as an extension of dig itself. Gorydetski
Speaker 1: also co founded a company later on on called Flick.
Speaker 1: Had two f's in the beginning is fflick, so flick.
Speaker 1: It was a film news and reviews site that based
Speaker 1: its information off of Twitter posts. Google eventually would acquire
Speaker 1: Flick in twenty eleven, and Gordetski went on to work
Speaker 1: for YouTube until twenty sixteen. Owen Burn, the third co founder,
Speaker 1: built the PHP code for the original dig site, and
Speaker 1: you might be saying, well, what is PHP. PHP is
Speaker 1: an irritating acronym because it's a recursive acronym, which means
Speaker 1: that it has its own acronym in its full name.
Speaker 1: The full name is PHP Hypertext Processor, which isn't a
Speaker 1: very satisfying answer if I ask you what is PHP.
Speaker 1: It's a general purpose scripting language and its open source
Speaker 1: and it can be embedded into HTML. So essentially, what
Speaker 1: Burne's job was was building out the framework for the
Speaker 1: original dig site and to add in the functionality of
Speaker 1: the basic purposes for DIG. So he was responsible for
Speaker 1: making sure that he could actually develop the the basic
Speaker 1: functions that DIG had when it launched. In return, he
Speaker 1: was rewarded with equity in the company itself, so he
Speaker 1: had some ownership of DIG when it first launched, and
Speaker 1: his title was senior software engineer and co founder. He
Speaker 1: would stay on with DIG until two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1: Then we get to Kevin Rose, who is two freaking
Speaker 1: years younger than I am. Multi millionaire Kevin Rose two
Speaker 1: years younger than I am. I gotta be fair. The
Speaker 1: dude's brilliant. He's a very intelligent guy, so I can't
Speaker 1: really fault him. It's just a case of sour grapes
Speaker 1: with me. He has founded numerous startups, including not only Dig,
Speaker 1: but also Revision three, a company called Pounce, and another
Speaker 1: one called milk Now. He got his start on the
Speaker 1: tech TV series The Screen Savers. He originally came on
Speaker 1: to tech TV as an it kind of guy, but
Speaker 1: eventually he started to work behind the scenes as a
Speaker 1: production assistant for The Screen Savers, and gradually he transitioned
Speaker 1: to appearing on camera and eventually became a co host
Speaker 1: of the Screen Savers itself. When Leo Laporte left the show,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose kind of stepped into Leo Laporte's role on
Speaker 1: the Screen Savers. Later on, Comcast would acquire tech TV
Speaker 1: and merge it with another channel called G four, and
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose initially would transition over with the G four team,
Speaker 1: but by two thousand and five he negotiated his release
Speaker 1: from his contract with G four, and of course, by
Speaker 1: that time Dig had already become a thing. It had
Speaker 1: launched in late two thousand and four. It was Rose
Speaker 1: and Allison who first came up with the idea for
Speaker 1: a social news aggregation service, and Kevin Rose decided he
Speaker 1: would pay for this initial development out of his own pocket.
Speaker 1: He took six thousand dollars of his own savings to
Speaker 1: fund the building of the dig initial build, so it
Speaker 1: really was his money. I mean, he believed in this
Speaker 1: enough to put his own cash down. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: case of him asking for loans from other people. He
Speaker 1: was twenty seven years old at the time. The co
Speaker 1: founders settled on the name dig because they originally wanted
Speaker 1: Dig with one G. But they had a problem. Disney
Speaker 1: had already registered the urlwww dot dig dot com. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this, but Disney's not
Speaker 1: in the habit of giving up property that it owns typically,
Speaker 1: so they decide instead to go with two g's and
Speaker 1: get around that problem. They launched the site on December fifth,
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, and on December thirteenth, two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, Kevin Rose would mention dig dot com on
Speaker 1: an episode of The screen Savers, so he essentially got
Speaker 1: to use the screen Savers to promote this other project
Speaker 1: he had done. He was co hosting the screen Savers
Speaker 1: at the time, so he took the time to say, Hey,
Speaker 1: we've got this new project called dig dot com. It's
Speaker 1: a user generated news aggregator site. And it's a way
Speaker 1: for us to really concentrate on the coolest stories out
Speaker 1: there on the inner And so the site began to
Speaker 1: gather users pretty slowly but steadily at first, and back
Speaker 1: then the site was really simple. It listed stories by
Speaker 1: brief headlines, which were also links, so you could click
Speaker 1: on the little headline, which was user generated. People would
Speaker 1: type out what they thought the story essentially was. That
Speaker 1: would be your hypertext link to take you to the story.
Speaker 1: They would also include a brief summary of what the
Speaker 1: story was about. And the more users clicked dig as
Speaker 1: in I like this on a story, the higher it
Speaker 1: would appear on the main page. And as some stories
Speaker 1: would climb up obviously other stories had to drop down lower.
Speaker 1: And if a story dropped down low enough, it would
Speaker 1: eventually roll over to the second page of dig. And
Speaker 1: this is very much like search engines. A lot of
Speaker 1: people will only pay attention to that first page. They
Speaker 1: don't want to dig further down into the pages. So
Speaker 1: once you end up on page two, it it's really
Speaker 1: you see a massive drop off on traffic to that link.
Speaker 1: This is true for Reddit, it's true for dig Or,
Speaker 1: it was true for dig and it's true for search
Speaker 1: engines as well. Being on that main page is prime
Speaker 1: real estate. And if you were burying a story enough,
Speaker 1: if enough users buried a story, it would drop off entirely.
Speaker 1: And the only way you could see it from that
Speaker 1: point forward is if you enabled an option in your
Speaker 1: user profile to view things that had been buried off
Speaker 1: the page in search results. So you could search for
Speaker 1: something that had been buried off the page and you
Speaker 1: could find it that way, but only if you enabled
Speaker 1: that option in your profile. It was really all about
Speaker 1: driving engagement and community activity. And you might want to
Speaker 1: know what the first few dig stories were, like, what
Speaker 1: appeared on Dig's site when it launched. What were the
Speaker 1: top ten stories of dig dot com when it went live?
Speaker 1: I got a list for you. Story number one was
Speaker 1: cherryos delayed till Q one of two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: And that raises the question, what the heck was CHERRYOS. Well,
Speaker 1: that was a power PC G four emulator for Windows,
Speaker 1: which is a fancy way of saying it was a
Speaker 1: program meant to simulate an Apple operating system so that
Speaker 1: Windows PC users could actually run Apple programs on Windows XP.
Speaker 1: It was an emulator. It emulated the Apple operating system,
Speaker 1: or rather the Apple processor, not really the operating system anyway.
Speaker 1: Back in late two thousand and four, it was apparently
Speaker 1: big news that the program was experiencing delays. It would
Speaker 1: eventually come out on March eighth, two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: in case you're curious, Not that it's relevant anymore, but
Speaker 1: there you go. Story number two said that Creative declares
Speaker 1: war against the iPod. Actually it said delare's war against
Speaker 1: the iPod. It left in a typo, but we know
Speaker 1: they meant declare, and this ties into that topic I
Speaker 1: covered not too long ago about the history of MP
Speaker 1: three players. You might remember that Creative was one of
Speaker 1: the companies designing MP three players back in the day,
Speaker 1: and then Apple's iPod rose up to challenge Creative and
Speaker 1: other companies. So this was a story that tied into
Speaker 1: that the idea that these two companies were at war
Speaker 1: with each other. Both of those first two links, cherryos
Speaker 1: and Creative, were submitted by anonymous users. But the third
Speaker 1: story wasn't. That story was rumors next iPod to have
Speaker 1: downloadable games, and this was a story that Kevin Rose
Speaker 1: himself submitted to dig back in the early development days
Speaker 1: for the website. When they were still building out the site.
Speaker 1: He submitted this. It managed to become pop seventy three
Speaker 1: days before it was even submitted to the website, according
Speaker 1: to the statistics on the page itself, which is kind
Speaker 1: of funny because you could argue this is a bit
Speaker 1: of foreshadowing for some of Diggs's later problems. But honestly,
Speaker 1: this was probably just to test out the features before
Speaker 1: they launched it. I don't think there was any real
Speaker 1: attempt to game the system this early on. It was
Speaker 1: more about making sure the website did what they wanted
Speaker 1: it to do before they launched the site. Story number
Speaker 1: four was one about a torrent search engine. I've done
Speaker 1: episodes about torrents in the past if you want to
Speaker 1: hear more about that. That was another submission from Kevin Rose,
Speaker 1: and some people argue it was Rose attempting to get
Speaker 1: a leg up by dominating Google Search for torrents search
Speaker 1: because it was a very popular topic back in the
Speaker 1: day still is to some extent. Story five was about
Speaker 1: the Logitech Z fifty three hundred and five point one
Speaker 1: surround speaker system, probably obsolete at this point. Keep in
Speaker 1: mind that Rose was coming from a tech review and
Speaker 1: talk show background. So it's not a huge shock that
Speaker 1: almost all of the stories on dig back in the
Speaker 1: day were technology related. But then comes story number six.
Speaker 1: This was a major story one I think we all agree,
Speaker 1: burst free from the tech centric nature of the other stories.
Speaker 1: This was buy one, get one free jamba juice. Sadly,
Speaker 1: thirteen years later, this offer no longer applies. They laughed
Speaker 1: me out of the store. Story seven was called Ben's Bargains.
Speaker 1: There was no possessive apostrophe after the end for Ben.
Speaker 1: The name Ben b e n, so Ben's bargains. I
Speaker 1: assume they mean bargains that belonged to Ben. I wish
Speaker 1: I could tell you what the story was about, but uh,
Speaker 1: later on it got deleted or merged into another story,
Speaker 1: so it's all lost on me. I suppose Ben had
Speaker 1: a bargain and I missed it, bummer. Story eight was
Speaker 1: a headline called Cascading Style cheat Sheet, so this goes
Speaker 1: back to talking about development creating cascading styles. Story nine
Speaker 1: was blog box applications, and story ten was I don't
Speaker 1: know because it disappeared. It was deleted and not archived
Speaker 1: in time, so I guess story ten is story not
Speaker 1: appearing in this podcast anyway. Those were the ten, well
Speaker 1: nine stories that first appeared on Dig when it premiered.
Speaker 1: Now I've got a lot more to say about Dig,
Speaker 1: how it developed and how it eventually imploded, but before
Speaker 1: I get into that, let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor, all right. So, one of the early
Speaker 1: features that Dig built into its system was comments. Users
Speaker 1: could leave comments about links. They could actually start up
Speaker 1: an entire comment thread, so it turned Dig into kind
Speaker 1: of a forum about news items. It wasn't just a
Speaker 1: place to share or promote or bury news. It was
Speaker 1: also a place to discuss it. And of course users
Speaker 1: could end up burying a news item and make it
Speaker 1: drop off the list entirely if they felt that it
Speaker 1: was merited. Sometimes people would try to spam Dig, especially
Speaker 1: in those early days. I mean really, it was true
Speaker 1: for the entire history of Dig, because you've got people
Speaker 1: who just like to cause mischief. So there were people
Speaker 1: who were trying to spam the page, and luckily the
Speaker 1: berry function allowed the community to respond and to get
Speaker 1: rid of stuff that was just cluttering things up. The
Speaker 1: same was true for anyone who was seen to be
Speaker 1: promoting something that was self serving, So For example, if
Speaker 1: I were to try and share an article that I
Speaker 1: had written on how stuff works to Dig directly, that
Speaker 1: would not look so great, right. It was meant to
Speaker 1: be a place where people discovered stuff and shared it
Speaker 1: with others, as opposed to promoting their own work. That
Speaker 1: was the other purpose for the Barry button was to
Speaker 1: make sure that this was truly a democratized user generated
Speaker 1: experience and not something that was dictated to them. More
Speaker 1: on that as we progress now. The engineers that did
Speaker 1: create an algorithm to determine if a story merited inclusion
Speaker 1: on the main site or, in a later revision of dig,
Speaker 1: on one of its major sub sections. So like Reddit,
Speaker 1: Dig would eventually become divided into departments like gaming, Lifestyle, Entertainment, sports, science, technology, World,
Speaker 1: and Business, and also the offbeat category. And of course
Speaker 1: there was the main site, the main page that you
Speaker 1: would go to if you went to dig dot com.
Speaker 1: That was the primo real estate on dig. That's where
Speaker 1: if you wrote a story, that's the page you wanted
Speaker 1: it to show up on, sort of like the main
Speaker 1: page on Reddit. Very much the same. Dig also created
Speaker 1: a button that other sites could host on their own pages,
Speaker 1: so you could include this bit of code in your
Speaker 1: web page's HTML file, and a little button that would
Speaker 1: would pop up on your page that would allow you
Speaker 1: to have users click on it and submit content directly
Speaker 1: from your page to Dig. That would let people either
Speaker 1: submit a story entirely or to vote up or vote
Speaker 1: up a story. Really, you'd had to go to dig
Speaker 1: if you wanted to bury it. But once upon a
Speaker 1: time you could dig stories on HowStuffWorks dot com. I
Speaker 1: think we even we had a big button that was
Speaker 1: active for quite some time before we did a site revision.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was one of those where if you
Speaker 1: wanted to share what you saw, then you could click
Speaker 1: on the dig button. It's very similar to the way
Speaker 1: a lot of sites use Facebook and Twitter buttons today.
Speaker 1: In fact, you could argue that Dig sort of paved
Speaker 1: the way for those other sites to use that same
Speaker 1: kind of functionality. Further down the road, Kevin Rose would
Speaker 1: also launch a video podcast with Alex Albrecht called Dignation
Speaker 1: that was one of the cornerstones of Revision three. That
Speaker 1: video and podcast arm that I talked about that they
Speaker 1: launched in late two thousand and five. They used Dignation
Speaker 1: to talk about some of the top stories featured on Dig,
Speaker 1: and the first episode published in two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: several months after Dig had already launched. Depending upon what
Speaker 1: source you look at, some people say it Dig started
Speaker 1: or Dignation started in May one, two thousand and five.
Speaker 1: Others say July first, two thousand and five, which seems
Speaker 1: like a pretty big discrepancy. I was not listening to
Speaker 1: Dignation at that time, so I cannot independently verify that
Speaker 1: either way. But anyway, Dig launched in December two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, so a few months later you get Dignation.
Speaker 1: And one of the purposes for Dignation was to talk
Speaker 1: about stories that had made their way on to Dig
Speaker 1: and just to be kind of a discussion forum for it.
Speaker 1: And so in a way it became a promotion for
Speaker 1: the dig dot com website, and the two hosts were
Speaker 1: really personable and funny and informed, and so it started
Speaker 1: getting popular pretty quickly. One of the top stories that
Speaker 1: very first episode was to talk about a major revision
Speaker 1: to Dig, which was it was not even a year
Speaker 1: old yet and Dig version two point zero was coming out.
Speaker 1: And also it didn't hurt that Kevin Rose and Alex
Speaker 1: Albrecht would drink a few beers on camera because it
Speaker 1: made them more personable. They didn't get tore up on camera,
Speaker 1: not typically anyway. Their shows could get a little rowdy
Speaker 1: when they would do live shows at say south By Southwest,
Speaker 1: but generally speaking, it just made them seem like approachable
Speaker 1: human beings who were talking about cool stories. So it
Speaker 1: was a really appealing pair that had a very approachable style,
Speaker 1: and it led to great success for Dignation at least
Speaker 1: for several years. I only ever saw them once at
Speaker 1: south By Southwest, it was just before they concluded the show.
Speaker 1: In October two thousand and five, Dig reached out to
Speaker 1: venture capitalysts to get some funding. Remember, Kevin Rose funded
Speaker 1: the initial launch of Dig with six thousand dollars of
Speaker 1: his own money. The company managed to raise a cool
Speaker 1: two and a half million dollars from various sources, including
Speaker 1: the founder of Mosaic and Netscape, Mark Andresen. The user
Speaker 1: base for Dig started to grow. It grew pretty steadily.
Speaker 1: It hit eight hundred thousand users within eighteen months of launching,
Speaker 1: which is pretty impressive. Eight hundred thousand registered users, it's
Speaker 1: not bad, and the development team was busy adding more
Speaker 1: functionality during that whole time, not only did they create
Speaker 1: that tag system that allowed dig to divide up stories
Speaker 1: into different divisions like whether it was technology or science
Speaker 1: or whatever, but they also started looking into other features
Speaker 1: as well, like a friend system where you could befriend
Speaker 1: other users and follow the kind of stuff that they liked.
Speaker 1: Maybe you might share a common interest with someone, and
Speaker 1: that way it gave you even more opportunities to discover
Speaker 1: cool stories that maybe weren't on the main page when
Speaker 1: you log in, but because your friend liked it, you
Speaker 1: would be able to see more about it. So that
Speaker 1: was a but what really made dig turn more into
Speaker 1: kind of a social network than just a news aggregator.
Speaker 1: Really the name of the game was diversification. They really
Speaker 1: helped Dig a lot because when it first started, it
Speaker 1: was almost exclusively focused on technology. You remember when I
Speaker 1: was listing out those first ten stories, but first nine stories,
Speaker 1: eight of them were about tech. Only one was not
Speaker 1: directly about technology. So it had a limited appeal for
Speaker 1: a very particular audience. Let's call them nerds, because I
Speaker 1: am a nerd, I have a nerd podcast. I'm doing
Speaker 1: it right now. I'm not calling you guys nerds, but
Speaker 1: I'm a nerd, so Dig really had an appeal to
Speaker 1: nerds when it first started, and again no disrespect, I
Speaker 1: consider myself one. But by two thousand and six the
Speaker 1: site had really branched out with these other categories like
Speaker 1: sports and entertainment and lifestyle, and so it had a
Speaker 1: broader appeal. It was no longer just for technology enthusiasts.
Speaker 1: It was for anybody who wanted to learn about the
Speaker 1: coolest stories that were breaking in their particular area of interest.
Speaker 1: Another adjustment helped add some credibility to Dig. They decided
Speaker 1: to add in the capability for users to report stories
Speaker 1: as being inaccurate. So there's a lot of talk today
Speaker 1: about fake news, about sites that generate articles that are
Speaker 1: not really reflective of reality that end up being misleading
Speaker 1: or complete fabrications or lies, or they are trying to
Speaker 1: be satire but they never really succeed in being satire. Well,
Speaker 1: Dig built in this tool so that users could point
Speaker 1: that out and those links could then be pulled from
Speaker 1: the various pages on Dig so that they weren't cluttering
Speaker 1: things up. They also had filters to help catch profanity
Speaker 1: to help cut down on some flame wars that could
Speaker 1: go on in comments. As it turns out, when you
Speaker 1: let people comment, some people take advantage of that and
Speaker 1: abuse the system, So they tried to deal with that
Speaker 1: as best they could. They also wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: that they could filter out profanity in the headlines and
Speaker 1: stories themselves. It was a case of trying to make
Speaker 1: sure that people were using Dig for the weight they
Speaker 1: had intended it to be used, and not for it
Speaker 1: to turn into just the wild West, And it also
Speaker 1: showed that they still cared about how DIG operated. In
Speaker 1: August two thousand and six, BusinessWeek featured Kevin Rose on
Speaker 1: the cover of its magazine, and Revision III, that podcasting
Speaker 1: company that Rose and as co founders, launched in late
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, helped Dig secure another million dollars
Speaker 1: in venture capital funding. At this point, Dig itself was
Speaker 1: estimated to be valued at two hundred fifty million dollars
Speaker 1: according to The New York Post, so less than two
Speaker 1: years after it had launched, and it was worth a
Speaker 1: quarter of a billion dollars two hundred and fifty million dollars.
Speaker 1: That's crazy, but understandable when you realize this was a
Speaker 1: powerful tool for people to share their interests and it
Speaker 1: was driving insane traffic to other websites. Now, in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, Kevin Rose said in a few interviews
Speaker 1: that he was initially a little worried about the types
Speaker 1: of content that could end up on dig because he
Speaker 1: was worried that it might require a lot of policing
Speaker 1: to make sure that the worst stuff on the Internet
Speaker 1: didn't really just bully its way onto the main page.
Speaker 1: But he said the community was consistently pretty good at
Speaker 1: finding relevant, interesting stories and sharing them, and so really
Speaker 1: the community in large part was policing itself fairly effectively. Now,
Speaker 1: one time this didn't play out the way he wanted
Speaker 1: was when someone posted a link to an encryption key
Speaker 1: for HDDVD. Do you guys remember hddvds. That was the
Speaker 1: format that was competing with Blu rays for high definition video.
Speaker 1: And eventually, of course Blu ray won out, but for
Speaker 1: a while it was a pretty tough competition, and the
Speaker 1: encryption key would let you crack the protection around HDDVD,
Speaker 1: which meant that you could then copy the content off
Speaker 1: an HDDVD and potentially distribute it. And so a lot
Speaker 1: of big companies were very upset about this, because you know,
Speaker 1: they don't really like piracy for obvious reasons. It at
Speaker 1: least is somewhat linked to a drop in revenue, although
Speaker 1: you can't argue it's a one for one case, because
Speaker 1: if someone steals something, that's not to say that they
Speaker 1: would have bought it otherwise. Sometimes that's just just not true.
Speaker 1: But sometimes if they steal something and share it, it
Speaker 1: might end up costing you in sales. It's just impossible
Speaker 1: to know to what extent right, because you can't guarantee
Speaker 1: that all the people who download something would have otherwise
Speaker 1: bought it. Still, it was a real problem. Now there's
Speaker 1: nothing directly against the law from copying the content on
Speaker 1: a piece of media that you have purchased for the
Speaker 1: purposes of backup. However, having to circumvent encryption gets a
Speaker 1: little more shady in the eyes of the law. So
Speaker 1: while you could make a backup copy, you weren't supposed
Speaker 1: to break encryption preventing you from making a backup copy.
Speaker 1: And this is one of the many reasons why pirates
Speaker 1: versus creators those battles get really ugly on both sides
Speaker 1: because both sides have they do a lot of dancing
Speaker 1: to justify their actions. I'll say that I don't necessarily
Speaker 1: think that studios or creative companies are free of blame
Speaker 1: in these cases. I also don't think that pirates are saints.
Speaker 1: It's a complicated issue, all right. So Dig's owners kept
Speaker 1: pulling down links to the encryption key that had been posted.
Speaker 1: They were trying to head this off. They didn't want
Speaker 1: to court a major lawsuit with a studio. They wanted
Speaker 1: to avoid that. They didn't want anyone to be able
Speaker 1: to say, hey, you're hosting this illegal encryption key that's
Speaker 1: letting people bypass the security we put on hddvds. So
Speaker 1: they were starting to pull down the links, but the
Speaker 1: users wanted the links, and so they kept on posting them,
Speaker 1: and they found tricky ways of posting them. They would
Speaker 1: name them other things in order to try and get
Speaker 1: around any detection. And so eventually Kevin Rose decided he
Speaker 1: was going to side with the community. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: you'd rather see Dig go down fighting than bow down
Speaker 1: to a bigger company. End quote. And he said, if
Speaker 1: that's what you want, that's what we're gonna do. We
Speaker 1: are no longer going to take down those links, and
Speaker 1: so he stopped. He said, We're gonna let them stay
Speaker 1: up on dig because that's what you users want, and
Speaker 1: that's the purpose of dig is to let the users
Speaker 1: generate the stuff that they think is interesting, or at
Speaker 1: least to share the stuff they think is interesting. And
Speaker 1: so he sided with the community on that one. Now,
Speaker 1: as Dig grew, so did its influence. Not only was
Speaker 1: it driving engagement among its users on its own site,
Speaker 1: it also could help drive traffic to other sites. So
Speaker 1: if someone shared, say one of my articles on dig,
Speaker 1: and it made the main page, we would suddenly see
Speaker 1: a huge rush of traffic coming in from dig. And
Speaker 1: that's valuable. You know. You got to remember that most
Speaker 1: of the Internet was generating its revenue through page views
Speaker 1: because the web pages were supported by advertising. So the
Speaker 1: more eyeballs that were on the page, the more money
Speaker 1: you were making. It became a goal for many sites
Speaker 1: to develop content that folks would naturally share on Dig.
Speaker 1: More and more began to incorporate the dig button on
Speaker 1: their pages to encourage this behavior as early as two
Speaker 1: thousand and six. Again, it launched in December two thousand
Speaker 1: and four, but as early as two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: other companies were already showing interest in potentially acquiring Dig.
Speaker 1: Yahoo reportedly wanted to scoop up the company for forty
Speaker 1: million dollars, not bad for a company that started on
Speaker 1: six grand Rose himself was interested in pursuing a deal
Speaker 1: with a totally different company, news Corp. News Corp had
Speaker 1: just purchased MySpace. I did a whole episode about MySpace
Speaker 1: ages ago. If you want to hear about that story,
Speaker 1: it's news Corp's purchase of MySpace is commonly referred to
Speaker 1: as one of the big big mistakes in mergers and
Speaker 1: acquisitions in the tech world. At the time, news Corp
Speaker 1: Was offering sixty million dollars to purchase Dig, and Rose
Speaker 1: wanted to sell. He wanted to take take them up
Speaker 1: on that offer, but he wasn't allowed to because Dig
Speaker 1: had a board of directors and he had to answer
Speaker 1: to this board of directors, and they would not approve
Speaker 1: of a sale to news Corp. They thought that the
Speaker 1: company was worth more than that. They thought Kevin Rose
Speaker 1: was going to drive this company to even greater heights.
Speaker 1: So even though Kevin Rose had created the company, even
Speaker 1: though he had funded the initial company, he didn't have
Speaker 1: the authorization to sell it to another corporation. So he
Speaker 1: was forced to stick with it. He was really upset
Speaker 1: about this, according to several of his friends, and frustrated
Speaker 1: that he couldn't just sell the company that he had
Speaker 1: created and make millions of dollars and then move on
Speaker 1: to do something else. And at this point, Kevin Rose
Speaker 1: owned about sixty percent of dig dot com. The board
Speaker 1: though they wanted to hold out for a bigger fish,
Speaker 1: they wanted to see a better offer, and eventually, a
Speaker 1: couple years later, a bigger fish happened to swim by,
Speaker 1: and that fish's name was Google. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: Google was rumored to consider Dig for a potential acquisition
Speaker 1: for about two hundred million dollars, and this was more
Speaker 1: than just rumor. Kevin Rose talked about it. The deal
Speaker 1: was well on its way, but it fell apart toward
Speaker 1: the end. There were fundamental disagreements that the two sides
Speaker 1: could not see eye to eye on and ultimately Google
Speaker 1: withdrew its intention to acquire Dig. So that was a
Speaker 1: two hundred million dollar deal lost. Kevin Rose was beyond
Speaker 1: frustrated about that. Instead, Dig ended up going up for
Speaker 1: another round of venture capital investment to keep the company afloat,
Speaker 1: because even though it was valuable it wasn't really generating
Speaker 1: that much revenue, so this time they ended up raising
Speaker 1: twenty eight point seven million dollars from Highland Capital Partners. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: behind the scenes at DIG, Rose was battling against his
Speaker 1: boat board of directors. Rose decided to partner up with
Speaker 1: a designer named Daniel Burka, who was also working for
Speaker 1: DIG at the time, and together they built a file
Speaker 1: sharing application that they called pounce Powncee. That's when the
Speaker 1: board over at DIG said, hey, wait a minute, that
Speaker 1: belongs to us because you work for us and Daniel
Speaker 1: works for us. So you're using DIG assets to build
Speaker 1: a totally different application that should belong to the shareholders
Speaker 1: of DIG. It cannot be its own thing. Meanwhile, morale
Speaker 1: at DIG was on the downslope. People are starting to
Speaker 1: get very discouraged over at DIG. And then the board
Speaker 1: said to Rose, hey, why don't you just knock it
Speaker 1: out with all those other projects you're looking at, pay
Speaker 1: attention to this company that you started. You need to
Speaker 1: make sure you can motivate the people at dig dot com.
Speaker 1: Pour your energy into being innovative in this company. Don't
Speaker 1: just look around for other companies. Now, Kevin Rose didn't
Speaker 1: exactly follow orders. He started working on a Twitter directory
Speaker 1: app called we Follow, which he audationed unveiled it south
Speaker 1: by Southwest. In two thousand and nine, Digg's board went
Speaker 1: to Adelson, who was still CEO at the time, and
Speaker 1: they told Adelson to fire Kevin Rose. So the board
Speaker 1: of directors tells the CEO, you gotta fire this co founder.
Speaker 1: But Rose and Addison had an agreement they could only
Speaker 1: fire each other with the other's consent. In other words,
Speaker 1: they had a veto for any direction that the board
Speaker 1: wanted to take, as long as it was about firing
Speaker 1: one or the other. So instead of firing him, Digg
Speaker 1: decided that, hey, well acquire we Follow. So the Board
Speaker 1: Directors was able to acquire this this venture that Kevin
Speaker 1: Rose had created, and reportedly Kevin Rose earned a few
Speaker 1: million dollars like six million bucks as a result of this.
Speaker 1: But as part of that, in order for him to
Speaker 1: get this money, he had to stick with DIG a
Speaker 1: while longer. Around this time, Kevin Rose started to invest
Speaker 1: in other companies, some of them turned out to be
Speaker 1: huge ones, like Twitter, But as investments were taking his
Speaker 1: attention away from Dig, according to his contemporaries, Kevin Rose
Speaker 1: would sometimes just come in to Dig once a week
Speaker 1: or just disappear for days and days at a time.
Speaker 1: The rest of the time he was working on other projects,
Speaker 1: investing in new companies, and that's really what excited him.
Speaker 1: It turned out that that's what he was interested in,
Speaker 1: the early process, when there's nothing but potential. A company
Speaker 1: hasn't cemented itself, it hasn't turned into its permanent version
Speaker 1: of itself, It could be practically anything. That's when Kevin
Speaker 1: Rose is interested in working with those companies. It gives
Speaker 1: him a lot of energy and creativity. He's not so
Speaker 1: much interested once it establishes itself and managing day to
Speaker 1: day activities is not really his forte. But he did
Speaker 1: help a lot of companies out this way as a
Speaker 1: venture capitalist investor, as an angel investor, if you will.
Speaker 1: But the board of Dig was getting increasingly frustrated with
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose, and meanwhile he was feeling the same way
Speaker 1: about the board of directors. On the site itself, things
Speaker 1: were getting pretty problematic. There were a group of dig
Speaker 1: users who had essentially gained control of what did or
Speaker 1: did not make the main page. In fact, according to
Speaker 1: some sources, the top one hundred users on dig dot
Speaker 1: com were responsible for fifty six percent of the content
Speaker 1: on the front page of Dig. Keep in mind there
Speaker 1: are millions of registered users by this point, and one
Speaker 1: hundred people are in charge of more than half of
Speaker 1: what appears on that main page. Now, they weren't exactly
Speaker 1: gaming the system, but they were definitely using the system
Speaker 1: to their advantage, whether knowingly or not. You see the
Speaker 1: power users the ones who had been using dig the
Speaker 1: most frequently in for the longest. Their votes had a
Speaker 1: heavier weight to them than a new user's vote. So
Speaker 1: if you had been on dig dot com since the
Speaker 1: beginning and you had been using it regularly and you
Speaker 1: voted up on an article, your vote counted way more
Speaker 1: than my vote if I just joined diig dot com
Speaker 1: the other day. And so that's how these top one
Speaker 1: hundred users were essentially dictating what would appear on the
Speaker 1: main page. And again, it wasn't that they were necessarily
Speaker 1: setting out to do that. They were using Dig the
Speaker 1: way they always had. They were up voting stories that
Speaker 1: they thought were interesting, and they were down voting stories
Speaker 1: that they thought were terrible. It just so happened that
Speaker 1: their votes counted more than anybody else's. So sometimes they
Speaker 1: might attempt to boost or drop a story by coordinating
Speaker 1: their efforts, but it was just as possible that they
Speaker 1: were literally using DIG the way it was meant to
Speaker 1: be used. It's just that they had more influence than
Speaker 1: anyone else did. Now Dig's initial solution to this problem
Speaker 1: because the board of directors, the people behind the scenes
Speaker 1: over a DIG, they weren't really keen on the fact
Speaker 1: that a small group of people were having such a
Speaker 1: huge influence on what was actually being shown. It was
Speaker 1: very frustrating for new users. It was making it more
Speaker 1: difficult to attract people to adopt DIG because if you
Speaker 1: come into a system where it feels like it's an
Speaker 1: old boys network and all the old boys are the
Speaker 1: ones who dictate what happens, it feels like nothing you
Speaker 1: do has any consequence. So they wanted to change this up,
Speaker 1: and they decided to try a couple of different methods
Speaker 1: to do it, but it didn't go over so well.
Speaker 1: One of the things they did was installed some controls
Speaker 1: behind the scenes to decrease the group's influence by essentially
Speaker 1: dewaiting their contributions. Part of this meant removing the list
Speaker 1: of top users from the site, which was kind of
Speaker 1: a badge of honor to get your name listed among
Speaker 1: the top users. But then once they got rid of
Speaker 1: top users, these same power users started to feel like
Speaker 1: they were being abandoned or ignored. Many of them felt
Speaker 1: like they were being dismissed. That all the years that
Speaker 1: they had been putting in working with dig, you know,
Speaker 1: using the platform, promoting stories, burying bad stories, that all
Speaker 1: of that was being swept aside, and so they were
Speaker 1: feeling like that they were being punished for this, even
Speaker 1: if they were just using Dig the way they always had.
Speaker 1: And so the company began to alienate some of its
Speaker 1: core user base, and that was a real problem because
Speaker 1: they started to set a new tone. All Right, we're
Speaker 1: getting into the beginning of the end. But before I
Speaker 1: go any further, let's take another quick break to think
Speaker 1: our sponsor. All Right, at this point in its history,
Speaker 1: Dig had forty three million registered users, and Dig had
Speaker 1: started to experiment with generating revenue on its own by
Speaker 1: inserting dig ads into its pages. So between various headlines
Speaker 1: of stories, you would get promoted advertisement. It would just
Speaker 1: appear right there. There's sort of like the promoted search
Speaker 1: results that you would find in Google, and like those,
Speaker 1: the ads were clearly marked as ads. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: they were tricking you into thinking you were reading a story.
Speaker 1: They were marked as ads. And not only that, you
Speaker 1: could actually vote on those ads. You could dig or
Speaker 1: bury ads and gave users a lot of power when
Speaker 1: it came to advertising, something that I think was particularly
Speaker 1: interesting to allow your user base the opportunity to vote
Speaker 1: down ads. It seems like that would be potentially dangerous
Speaker 1: from a revenue standpoint, but it would also send a
Speaker 1: real message about whether or not advertising was working or
Speaker 1: very much not working. Around this time, dig also launched
Speaker 1: app for the blossoming smartphone platforms of iOS and Android.
Speaker 1: Now keep in mind, the iPhone came out in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven. Android came out in late two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, early two thousand and eight. This is two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine we're talking about, so all of those
Speaker 1: platforms were still very young, especially when you consider the
Speaker 1: fact that when iOS first launched, you could not develop
Speaker 1: an application for Apple. It was just the Apple apps
Speaker 1: on the original iPhone for a while before they launched
Speaker 1: the ability for other people to program apps for it.
Speaker 1: Things were not going smoothly. Behind the scenes, o Red Dig,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson were having some disagreements about
Speaker 1: the direction of the company, and those disagreements continued to
Speaker 1: escalate throughout two thousand and nine and into twenty ten,
Speaker 1: until Adelson was asked to step down as CEO. More
Speaker 1: or less he was fired. Kevin Rose chose not to
Speaker 1: use his veto option. So remember, Adelson and Rose had
Speaker 1: disagreement where it would require their I guess, I guess
Speaker 1: their agreement with the board of directors before either could
Speaker 1: be fired, and Rose decided not to veno the board's
Speaker 1: decision to fire Adelson. So Ailson resigned. Essentially he was
Speaker 1: able to officially, according to the communication he gave, he
Speaker 1: stepped down from the position, but behind the scenes people
Speaker 1: say that he was essentially fired as CEO. But he
Speaker 1: said he wanted to go and work on more startup ideas,
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what he did. I'll talk more about
Speaker 1: that toward the end, Kevin Rose ended up taking over
Speaker 1: control of the company he founded. He became the new
Speaker 1: CEO of DIG on April fifth, twenty ten. In May
Speaker 1: twenty ten, the company laid off about ten percent of
Speaker 1: its work staff, now, Kevin Rose was still listening to
Speaker 1: the community. One of the things that he listened to
Speaker 1: was their reaction to a tool called the Digbar. The
Speaker 1: company had launched the dig bar earlier, and this was
Speaker 1: a toolbar that would appear above websites, so it would
Speaker 1: install itself so in your browser essentially, so you would
Speaker 1: see this toolbar whenever you would go to other websites.
Speaker 1: And it was meant to let people interact with dig
Speaker 1: without leaving the website they were on. So you could
Speaker 1: go read some other website and use this toolbar to
Speaker 1: leave comments about this particular article on dig, but without
Speaker 1: leaving the website to go to dig first. However, a
Speaker 1: lot of people fell It was really intrusive and irritating
Speaker 1: and distracting. So one of his first actions as CEO,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose decided to ditch the Digbar. He was responding
Speaker 1: to the community reaction and hopes were running high on
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose, both from the Dig community and the board
Speaker 1: of directors. Everyone was hoping that Kevin Rose was getting
Speaker 1: re energized, reinvested in the company that he had created.
Speaker 1: The board had been really critical of Rose's focus on
Speaker 1: other projects, those other things that he was trying to
Speaker 1: launch while still technically working for dig but they were
Speaker 1: hoping that this meant he was back on board to
Speaker 1: lead the company in a new direction with innovation. So
Speaker 1: the big hope here was that Kevin Rose was now
Speaker 1: grown out of a phase according to the Board of directors,
Speaker 1: that he would no longer just focus on stuff as
Speaker 1: it was brand new and when it interests him, but
Speaker 1: that he would be capable of leading the company in
Speaker 1: the day to day operations of dig dot com. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the company began to alpha test the next version of
Speaker 1: dig dot com. This would be version four point zero.
Speaker 1: This is the infamous one. This is the one that
Speaker 1: people totally flipped out over for good reason. I don't
Speaker 1: think that it was unmerited. So before Kevin Rose became CEO,
Speaker 1: dig dot com showed off some of it concepts for
Speaker 1: version four point zero at south By Southwest in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people were really excited by what
Speaker 1: they saw. They thought that the innovations were merited, they
Speaker 1: were good. They felt that it was going to add
Speaker 1: value to the dig dot com experience. But once Kevin
Speaker 1: Rose took over as CEO, he essentially threw all of
Speaker 1: that away and decided to start from scratch. He more
Speaker 1: or less discarded all the changes, all the work that
Speaker 1: had been done for version four point zero, and this
Speaker 1: alienated some of the engineers at dig dot com as
Speaker 1: a result, some of whom left the company because of that.
Speaker 1: And instead he said, let's go in this completely different direction.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of people who argue about
Speaker 1: why he did this. Some people say he genuinely just
Speaker 1: didn't see the value of the revisions. Some say, well,
Speaker 1: this was an effort for him to distance himself from
Speaker 1: the previous CEO. But whatever the purpose, he decided to
Speaker 1: go totally different direction, and it was one that ended
Speaker 1: up being almost universally unpopular among his community. So one
Speaker 1: of the new features of the Kevin Rose led version
Speaker 1: four point zero of dig dot com allowed news sites
Speaker 1: to submit their own content automatically to dig. I cannot
Speaker 1: stress how this alienated the community at dig dot com,
Speaker 1: because keep in mind, up to this point, the whole
Speaker 1: concept was that users were the ones submitting and voting
Speaker 1: on the content that would show up on dig dot com.
Speaker 1: If you thought a story was interesting, you could submit it.
Speaker 1: If other people thought it was interesting, they could vote
Speaker 1: for it. And that's how it could naturally rise to
Speaker 1: the top. Now with version four point zero, a news site,
Speaker 1: a media company could submit its own stuff directly to
Speaker 1: dig dot com, passing that user experience, essentially turning dig
Speaker 1: dot com into more of a normal news aggregator and
Speaker 1: less of a user generated experience. So it seemed completely
Speaker 1: antithetical to the original philosophy behind dig and as a result,
Speaker 1: community members went by nanas. In fact, a lot of
Speaker 1: people said that this was going to be the death
Speaker 1: blow of dig dot com, and arguably that's what did it.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people decided that they would just
Speaker 1: leave and go and use Reddit instead of dig dot com.
Speaker 1: Reddit was much more similar to what dig had been
Speaker 1: in the past. It also didn't help that revision four
Speaker 1: point zero consolidated a lot of those interests that I
Speaker 1: talked about earlier, you know, things like sports and entertainment
Speaker 1: and lifestyle. It consolidated a lot of those and made
Speaker 1: it more difficult to find specific content in those buckets
Speaker 1: because now they were bigger buckets that contained lots of stuff,
Speaker 1: not just these broken out interests. So they also got
Speaker 1: rid of the bury button, so you couldn't bury stories anymore.
Speaker 1: You couldn't vote down a story, and arguably it was
Speaker 1: to make sure that these users couldn't just end up
Speaker 1: taking control of dig and get rid of anything that
Speaker 1: criticized themselves, for example, but it also meant that there
Speaker 1: was if someone if a news outlet published a story
Speaker 1: directly to dig dot com, there was no way for
Speaker 1: you to express your displeasure to vote that story down.
Speaker 1: The only thing you could really do is not voted up.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people felt that this was taking
Speaker 1: the voice of the community away from the community, and
Speaker 1: this was a community based website. Some people decided that
Speaker 1: they would promote stories from Reddit as a way to
Speaker 1: make a dig at dig, so they would submit links
Speaker 1: from Reddit onto dig dot com. It was kind of
Speaker 1: a method of protest, but more people were just leaving
Speaker 1: dig entirely. They were ditching it and going to Reddit.
Speaker 1: In fact, Alexis o'hanian, one of Reddit's co founders, wrote
Speaker 1: an open letter to Kevin Rose, and he was specifically
Speaker 1: criticizing the fact that they had made these changes. Ohanian said,
Speaker 1: the new version of dig reeks of VC medaling and
Speaker 1: VC stands for a venture capitalist or venture capital. So
Speaker 1: o'hanian was essentially calling Dig a sellout, saying, obviously you're
Speaker 1: taking money from these companies in order to have this relationship,
Speaker 1: and it's at the expense of the community that made
Speaker 1: Dig a valuable asset in the first place. He was saying,
Speaker 1: it's not the links that make dig dot com valuable.
Speaker 1: Links already exist out there on the Internet. What makes
Speaker 1: dig valuable is this user engagement, this community that ends
Speaker 1: up supporting various links. That's where the value is. But
Speaker 1: you're completely undermining that by siding with venture capitals investors.
Speaker 1: After just a few short months, it was clear that
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose's heart was not in running this company and
Speaker 1: leading it in day to day operations. It didn't excite him.
Speaker 1: He found it grueling. He's still very much preferred being
Speaker 1: in on the ground floor as a company is just
Speaker 1: starting to find its way. He still thought that was
Speaker 1: the most interesting aspect of business. He was CEO for
Speaker 1: less than six months. Dig then hired on an Amazon
Speaker 1: executive named Matt Williams to take over the role of CEO,
Speaker 1: and Kevin Rose stepped down in August twenty ten. Rose
Speaker 1: himself began to drift away from the company again. He
Speaker 1: was showing more interest in venture capital investments and other ventures,
Speaker 1: and less interest in the company that he founded. By
Speaker 1: March twenty eleven, he officially resigned from dig dot com.
Speaker 1: He remained on as sort of a consultant to the board,
Speaker 1: but he was no longer an official employee. He also
Speaker 1: launched a company called Milk. This was meant to be
Speaker 1: a startup lab for new applications, So if you wanted
Speaker 1: to develop an app, then Milk was supposed to be
Speaker 1: a place where you could incubate these ideas, and Rose
Speaker 1: thought that this would give him the opportunity to work
Speaker 1: on a lot of different projects just as they were
Speaker 1: starting up, which meant that he would constantly be engaged.
Speaker 1: He would never get bored because there'd always be something
Speaker 1: new to work on. Didn't work out that way. The
Speaker 1: first app out of Milk was an application called oinc,
Speaker 1: as in the noise that a pig makes, and it
Speaker 1: was the only app the company ever produced, and rather
Speaker 1: than continue to deve Oink, Rose chose to shut down
Speaker 1: Milk and he joined Google instead. He took over some
Speaker 1: of the people from Milk and they all joined Google Venture,
Speaker 1: which is kind of their startup and spin off lab.
Speaker 1: He also brought the Dignation show to an end in
Speaker 1: late twenty eleven. He said that they had stopped recording
Speaker 1: the show by October twenty eleven, but that the unpublished
Speaker 1: shows would continue to air or to be published until
Speaker 1: sometime in January twenty twelve. And that's when Dignation came
Speaker 1: to an end. It had a two part finale and
Speaker 1: then it was over. Meanwhile, dig dot com was still
Speaker 1: hemorrhaging users. It didn't last much longer after Kevin Rose resigned. Wow,
Speaker 1: this classic episode's a long one, isn't it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we still have some information about dig to get through,
Speaker 1: believe it or not. So we're going to take one
Speaker 1: last break and then finish out this classic episode. On
Speaker 1: July twelfth, twenty twelve, Dig was essentially split into three
Speaker 1: different components and sold off to different buyers. The intellectual
Speaker 1: property of dig dot com itself, the website dig dot
Speaker 1: com it went to a company called Beta Works. They
Speaker 1: bought this once incredibly valuable asset for five hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, this is a company that just a
Speaker 1: few years previous had been valued at two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars. And then the site is sold for
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand As for the other assets, they brought
Speaker 1: in more cash, actually than the intellectual property of dig
Speaker 1: dot com itself. Linked In bought several patents that dig
Speaker 1: dot com owned for four million dollars, so the patents
Speaker 1: were worth more than the website was, and The Washington
Speaker 1: Post spent about twelve million dollars bringing on several members
Speaker 1: of Digg's staff to work on its social code project. Now,
Speaker 1: dig dot com still exists today. If you try to
Speaker 1: navigate to dig dot com, you will see a website.
Speaker 1: It is a news aggregator website. It looks very different
Speaker 1: from what it used to be. Now it looks kind
Speaker 1: of more like a standard news aggregate website with images
Speaker 1: and links to various stories across the web. Users can
Speaker 1: still give stories a thumbs up that can promote some
Speaker 1: stories into a more visible position on the web page,
Speaker 1: but there are human editors who moderate what shows up
Speaker 1: on the page itself, and you can't comment on stories anymore,
Speaker 1: at least not right now. According to Beta Works. The
Speaker 1: reason for this is that comments are hard. That's totally true.
Speaker 1: I am not making fun of Beta Works for saying this,
Speaker 1: because it is really a challenge to implement comments in
Speaker 1: a constructive way on your website, particularly in today's world,
Speaker 1: because it can easily be abused, very very easily. Too
Speaker 1: many people take the opportunity to use a comments section
Speaker 1: to cause mischief. And there's not really a big surprise here.
Speaker 1: It takes very little effort to cause a whole lot
Speaker 1: of commotion using comments, So it takes little work to
Speaker 1: make a big impact. If you're someone who likes to
Speaker 1: cause trouble, that is an open door invitation to do so.
Speaker 1: And obviously we've seen this across other places on the web.
Speaker 1: YouTube's a great example. It's not as bad as four chan,
Speaker 1: but it's a great example. So dig still exists, though
Speaker 1: you don't hear as many folks talk about these days.
Speaker 1: But it does get several million visitors each month. According
Speaker 1: to one source, I saw that it got twelve million
Speaker 1: monthly visitors as of January twenty fifteen, so one would
Speaker 1: presume it's probably around that level or higher now. And
Speaker 1: twelve million monthly visitors isn't anything to sneeze at. It's
Speaker 1: a pretty healthy amount of traffic. As for the founders,
Speaker 1: what are they up to now? Well, Jay Adelson worked
Speaker 1: on several different ventures. After he stepped down as CEO.
Speaker 1: He ultimately co founded a company called Center Electric. It's
Speaker 1: a venture capital firm, and so Adelson is still using
Speaker 1: his experience and money to help launch new companies. Ron
Speaker 1: Gordetski stayed with DIG until July twenty ten, which means
Speaker 1: he left during Kevin Rose's tenure as CEO. He went
Speaker 1: on to co found Flick, the review app that I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier in this episode, and then he transitioned over
Speaker 1: to YouTube. He worked there till February twenty sixteen. He
Speaker 1: then became a digital service expert in the United States
Speaker 1: Digital Service This is a startup company at the White
Speaker 1: House dedicated to using technology to create better tools and
Speaker 1: services for American citizens. No word on how that's going
Speaker 1: right now. Owen Byrne left DIG in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: and he worked for several different companies over the following years,
Speaker 1: including Expedia and trip Advisor. And he was mostly building
Speaker 1: out systems for these companies, so he was working on
Speaker 1: the back end. And you know, once you finish that
Speaker 1: then often you might go on to do it at
Speaker 1: a different company. So that's largely what he did. As
Speaker 1: of January twenty seventeen, he started working for Zipcar in
Speaker 1: San Francisco as a software engineer, and Kevin Rose Well.
Speaker 1: He's still an advisor to Google Ventures, which is again
Speaker 1: that division of Google that is all about creating startups
Speaker 1: and spin off companies. He sits on the board of
Speaker 1: a company called hodin Key, which is a wristwatch enthusiast
Speaker 1: website related I assume to the wristwatch manufacturer out in Europe.
Speaker 1: And he's still involved in venture capital. He invests in
Speaker 1: companies early on while they're still malleable. Dig is an
Speaker 1: interesting story, and many of the elements that were pioneered
Speaker 1: at dig found their way into other platforms like Reddit
Speaker 1: or Twitter or Facebook. All of these ways of sharing content,
Speaker 1: many of them originated over at Dig. So we have
Speaker 1: Dig to thank for a lot of the way our
Speaker 1: social networking sites work today. And also it's easy for
Speaker 1: us to see in retrospect how the decisions that were
Speaker 1: made over at dig dot com ultimately were it's undoing,
Speaker 1: particularly and how it seemingly turned its back on the
Speaker 1: community of users that made it so valuable in the
Speaker 1: first place. But at the time it was probably much
Speaker 1: harder to see that that's what was going to happen.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously you wouldn't make those decisions if you
Speaker 1: knew it was going to lead to the collapse or
Speaker 1: implosion of a company. Democratization on the Internet is a
Speaker 1: tricky thing. So if I ever do an episode about Reddit,
Speaker 1: I'll get into more about the democratization of the Internet.
Speaker 1: Reddit is not a stranger to controversy. It is structured
Speaker 1: very much in a way that similar to the early
Speaker 1: days of dig dot com. But they have been no
Speaker 1: stranger to behind the scenes drama. There have been plenty
Speaker 1: of stories about that over for Reddit, so it's not
Speaker 1: like dig dot com was an example of just bad management.
Speaker 1: It's a very tricky thing to do when you're letting
Speaker 1: your users define the experience. Sometimes that does not turn
Speaker 1: out in a way that's particularly nice. That's it for
Speaker 1: the Dig story, at least as far as it went
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen. Since then, other stuff has happened to Dig.
Speaker 1: For example, a company called buy sell Ads purchased Dig
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen. Don't know how much it paid for that.
Speaker 1: It has gone through a couple of different iterations since then.
Speaker 1: Michael O'Connor took over as CEO. In twenty seventeen, it
Speaker 1: is you know, shut down its dig reader RSS service.
Speaker 1: So yeah, a lot of stuff has changed set over
Speaker 1: the years with dig Maybe I do need to do
Speaker 1: perhaps a short update at some point to talk about
Speaker 1: how things have changed in more recent years. But I
Speaker 1: think it's it's pretty safe to say that Digg's influence
Speaker 1: has been diminished over the last several years. It's not
Speaker 1: frequently in the conversation the way say Reddit is, but
Speaker 1: it played a very important role, particularly for things like
Speaker 1: Discovery back in the earlier days of the web. So
Speaker 1: it is an important part of the story of the
Speaker 1: web overall. So I hope you enjoyed this classic episode
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
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