Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, senior writer with how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. And today's topic comes from a Twitter
Speaker 1: message I received from long time listener and Tricks, and
Speaker 1: I apologize and Tricks if I'm completely mispronouncing your name.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's not the first time, because you've written
Speaker 1: before and we've chatted about your stuff before. But he
Speaker 1: specifically had this to say, have you done an episode
Speaker 1: on the story of dig d I g G. I
Speaker 1: am quite. I'm actually quite unfamiliar with it, but I
Speaker 1: know it's interesting. And here's the thing. I had not
Speaker 1: yet done a story of dig episode, and it is
Speaker 1: pretty interesting and it's a weird tale in many ways.
Speaker 1: It had a meteoric rise once it debuted, and then
Speaker 1: a very well publicized fall from grace and then a
Speaker 1: more quiet attempt at recovery. So today we're going to
Speaker 1: explore the story of dig dot com, what it was,
Speaker 1: how it came about, and exactly why some people say
Speaker 1: it serves 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 said it's
Speaker 1: all apart from other services with similar functions, Like there
Speaker 1: was dell Ish Suss. You might remember that you old
Speaker 1: timers of the Internet. That was sort of a bookmarking
Speaker 1: app where you could link to a page that you
Speaker 1: intend to go back to over and over and you
Speaker 1: could easily share those bookmarks with other people. But the
Speaker 1: whole purpose was this was a reference you intended to
Speaker 1: return 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 were 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. Berry
Speaker 1: means let's bury that story. It's not interesting, it doesn't
Speaker 1: belong here. Ah. It was also meant to allow users
Speaker 1: to determine which stories were the most relevant and interesting,
Speaker 1: and they were to have control. Really, the idea was
Speaker 1: that the users of the site determined what went on
Speaker 1: the site and how that content was arranged based upon
Speaker 1: their actions. So it gave a lot of control to
Speaker 1: its user base, and that had a real appeal to it. Right,
Speaker 1: And 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 uh. Over the years, some
Speaker 1: of the stuff that was going on over at DIG
Speaker 1: kind of made its way to my ears through the
Speaker 1: grape vine, you know, just basic gossip type stuff. Now, fortunately,
Speaker 1: because I'm me, I've forgotten almost all of that. I
Speaker 1: have no I remember hearing a lot about DIG back
Speaker 1: in 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 j Addlson,
Speaker 1: Ron Gorea, Getsky, Owen Byrne, and Kevin Rose. They started
Speaker 1: development on the site back in October two thousand four,
Speaker 1: and they launched Dig on December fourth or fifth, two
Speaker 1: thousand four. So let's talk a bit about each of
Speaker 1: those guys and what they brought to DIG. First, we're
Speaker 1: mentioned j Addleson. He came from Detroit and he grew
Speaker 1: up in as cecil of Welcome to Nightville would say,
Speaker 1: he grew up in Michigan. He got a degree in
Speaker 1: film and broadcasting with a concentration in computer science from
Speaker 1: Boston University in nine. After he graduated, he worked for
Speaker 1: companies like the I s P, the Internet service provider
Speaker 1: net Com. He helped design the Palo Alto Internet Exchange,
Speaker 1: and he later founded a company called Equa Nicks, which
Speaker 1: was another Internet ada center and infrastructure company. So his
Speaker 1: work was primarily on the inner workings of the systems
Speaker 1: that the Internet itself depends upon, you know, not websites
Speaker 1: or but rather the actual infrastructure that allows computers to
Speaker 1: communicate with each other. He worked a lot on those
Speaker 1: those sort of systems, uh. And it was actually in
Speaker 1: his job at Equinox, where the company he had co founded,
Speaker 1: where he would first meet Kevin Rose, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the other co founders of DIG, probably the most
Speaker 1: famous of the founders of DIG. Kevin Rose at the
Speaker 1: time was doing a segment for a show called The
Speaker 1: Screen Savers, and I'll mention that show again when I
Speaker 1: get to Kevin Addison would then become the business manager
Speaker 1: for dig once it became an official thing. He used
Speaker 1: his experience to hire the initial management team for the company,
Speaker 1: and it was Addilson who led the charge in raising
Speaker 1: venture capital shortly after dig launched. He would also become
Speaker 1: the company's CEO in two thouse and five, and he
Speaker 1: would co found Revision three along with Kevin Rose also
Speaker 1: in two thousand 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. Gory Getsky would also co found Revision three
Speaker 1: later on, so he was one of those members. Revision
Speaker 1: three initially was kind of a podcasting and video arm
Speaker 1: of dig uh It's sort of existed It's as its
Speaker 1: own thing, and It's sort of existed as an extension
Speaker 1: of dig itself. Godetski also co founded a company later
Speaker 1: on on called Flick had two f's in the beginning
Speaker 1: is F F L I c K, so flick it
Speaker 1: was a film news and reviews site that based its
Speaker 1: information off of Twitter posts. Google eventually would acquire Flick
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eleven, and Gordetski went on to
Speaker 1: work for YouTube until 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 it's open source
Speaker 1: and it can be embedded into HTML. So essentially what
Speaker 1: Burns 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 the
Speaker 1: basic functions that DIG had when it launched. In return,
Speaker 1: he was rewarded with equity in the company itself, so
Speaker 1: he had some owners ship of DIG when it first launched,
Speaker 1: and his title was senior software engineer and co founder.
Speaker 1: He would stay on with Dig until two thousand seven.
Speaker 1: Then we get to Kevin Rose, who is too freaking
Speaker 1: years younger than I am. Multimillionaire Kevin Rose two years
Speaker 1: younger than I am. I gotta be fair. The dude's brilliant.
Speaker 1: He's a very intelligent guy, so I can't really fault him.
Speaker 1: It's just a case of sour grapes with me. He
Speaker 1: has founded numerous startups, including not only dig but also
Speaker 1: Revision three, a company called Pounce, and another one called
Speaker 1: milk Now. He got his start on the tech TV
Speaker 1: series The Screen Savers. He originally came on to tech
Speaker 1: TV as an I T kind of guy, but eventually
Speaker 1: he started to work behind the scenes as a production
Speaker 1: assistant for The Screen Savers, and gradually he transitioned to
Speaker 1: appearing on camera and eventually became a co host of
Speaker 1: The Screensavers itself. When Leo Laporte left the show, Kevin
Speaker 1: Rose kind of stepped into Leo Report's role on The
Speaker 1: Screen Savers. Later on, Comcast would acquire tech TV and
Speaker 1: merge it with another channel called G four, and Kevin
Speaker 1: Rose initially would transition over with the G four team,
Speaker 1: but by two thousand five, he negotiated his release from
Speaker 1: his contract with G four, and of course by that
Speaker 1: time Dig had already become a thing and had launched
Speaker 1: in late two thousand four. It was Rose and Allison
Speaker 1: who first came up with the idea for a social
Speaker 1: news aggregation service, and Kevin Rose decided he would pay
Speaker 1: for this initial development out of his own pocket. He
Speaker 1: took six thousand dollars of his own savings to fund
Speaker 1: the building of the Dig initial build, so it really
Speaker 1: was his money. I mean, he 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: d I G with one G. But they had a problem.
Speaker 1: Disney had already registered the U r L www dot
Speaker 1: d I G dot com and I don't know if
Speaker 1: you know this, but Disney is not in the habit
Speaker 1: of giving up property that it owns typically, so they
Speaker 1: decided instead to go with two g's and get around
Speaker 1: that problem. They launched the site on December five, two
Speaker 1: thousand four, and on December two thousand four, Kevin Rose
Speaker 1: would mention dig dot com on an episode of the
Speaker 1: Screen Savers, so he essentially got to use the screen
Speaker 1: Savers to promote this other project he had done. Um
Speaker 1: he was co hosting the Screensavers at the time, so
Speaker 1: he took the time to say, Hey, we've got this
Speaker 1: new project called dig dot com. It's a user generated
Speaker 1: news aggregator site and it's a way for us to
Speaker 1: really concentrate on the coolest stories out there on the Internet.
Speaker 1: And so the site began to gather users pretty slowly
Speaker 1: but steadily at first, and back then the site was
Speaker 1: really simple. It listed stories by brief headlines, which were
Speaker 1: also links, so you could click on the little headline,
Speaker 1: which was user generated. People would type out what they
Speaker 1: thought the story essentially was. That would be your hypertext
Speaker 1: link to take you to the story. They would also
Speaker 1: include a brief summary of what the story was about.
Speaker 1: And the more users clicked dig as in I like
Speaker 1: this on a story, the higher it would appear on
Speaker 1: the main page. And as some stories would climb up
Speaker 1: obviously other stories had to drop down lower, and if
Speaker 1: a story dropped down low enough, it would eventually roll
Speaker 1: over to the second page of dig. And this is
Speaker 1: very much like search engines a lot of people will
Speaker 1: only pay attention to that first page. They don't want
Speaker 1: to dig further down into the pages. So once you
Speaker 1: end up on page two, it gets really you see
Speaker 1: a massive drop off on traffic to that link. This
Speaker 1: is true for Reddit, it's true for dig Or, it
Speaker 1: was true for dig, and it's true for search engines
Speaker 1: as well. Being on that main page is prime real estate. Uh.
Speaker 1: And if you were burying a story enough, if enough
Speaker 1: users buried a story, it would drop off entirely. And
Speaker 1: the only way you could see it from that point
Speaker 1: forward is if you enabled an option in your user
Speaker 1: profile to view things that had been buried off the
Speaker 1: page in search results. So you could search for something
Speaker 1: that had been buried off the page and you could
Speaker 1: find it that way, but only if you enabled that
Speaker 1: option in your profile. It was really all about driving
Speaker 1: engagement and community activity. And you might want to know
Speaker 1: what the first few dig stories were, like what appeared
Speaker 1: on Dig's site when it launched. What were the top
Speaker 1: ten stories of dig dot com when it went live?
Speaker 1: I got a list for you. Story number one was
Speaker 1: Cherry o s delayed till Q one of two thousand five,
Speaker 1: and that raises the question, what the heck was Cherry
Speaker 1: O s Well, that was a power PC G four
Speaker 1: emulator for Windows, which is a fancy way of saying
Speaker 1: it was a program meant to simulate an Apple operating
Speaker 1: system so that Windows PC users could actually run Apple
Speaker 1: programs on Windows XP. It was an emulator. It emulated
Speaker 1: the Apple operating system, or rather the Apple processor, not
Speaker 1: really the operating system anyway. Back in late two thousand four,
Speaker 1: it was apparently big news that the program was experiencing delays.
Speaker 1: It would eventually come out on March eighth, two thousand five,
Speaker 1: in case you're curious. Not that it's relevant anymore, but
Speaker 1: there you go. It's story number two said that Creative
Speaker 1: declares war against the iPod. Actually it said de Layer's
Speaker 1: war against the iPod. It left in a typo, but
Speaker 1: we know they meant declare. And this ties into that
Speaker 1: topic I covered not too long ago about the history
Speaker 1: of MP three players. You might remember that Creative was
Speaker 1: one of the companies designing MP three players back in
Speaker 1: the day, and then Apple's iPod rose up to challenge
Speaker 1: Creative and other companies. So this was a story that
Speaker 1: tied into that. The idea that these two companies were
Speaker 1: at war with each other. Both of those first two links,
Speaker 1: cherry os and Creative, were submitted by anonymous users, but
Speaker 1: the third story wasn't. That story was rumors next iPod
Speaker 1: to have downloadable games, and this was a story that
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose himself submitted to DIG back in the early
Speaker 1: development days for the website, when they were still building
Speaker 1: out the site. He submitted this. It managed to become
Speaker 1: popular seventy three days before it was even submitted to
Speaker 1: the website, according to the statistics on the page itself,
Speaker 1: which is kind of funny because you could argue this
Speaker 1: is a bit of foreshadowing for some of Dig's later problems.
Speaker 1: But honestly, this was probably just to test out the
Speaker 1: features before they launched it. I don't think there was
Speaker 1: any real attempt to game the system this early on.
Speaker 1: It was more about making sure the website did what
Speaker 1: they wanted it to do before they launched the site.
Speaker 1: Story number four was one about a torrent search engine.
Speaker 1: I've done episodes about torrents in the past if you
Speaker 1: want to hear more about that. That was another submission
Speaker 1: from Kevin Rose, and some people argue it was Rose
Speaker 1: attempting to get a leg up by dominating Google search
Speaker 1: for torrents search because it was a very popular topic
Speaker 1: back in the day still is to some extent. Story
Speaker 1: five was about the Logitech Z fifty point one surround
Speaker 1: speaker system, probably obsolete at this point. Keep in mind
Speaker 1: that Rose was coming from a tech review and talk
Speaker 1: show background, so it's not a huge shock that almost
Speaker 1: all of the stories on dig back in the day
Speaker 1: where technology related. But then comes story number six. This
Speaker 1: 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 by one get one free Jomba 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: though 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: assumed they mean bargains that belonged to Ben. I wish
Speaker 1: I could tell you what the story was about, but
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 cast skating Style cheat Sheet. So this
Speaker 1: goes back to talking about development creating cast scading styles. Uh.
Speaker 1: Story nine was blog box applications, and story ten was
Speaker 1: I don't know because it disappeared. It was deleted and
Speaker 1: not archived in times, So I guess story ten is
Speaker 1: story not appearing in this podcast anyway. Those were the ten,
Speaker 1: well 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. Alright. So, one of the early features
Speaker 1: that Dig built into its system was comments. Users could
Speaker 1: leave comments about links. They could actually start up an
Speaker 1: entire comment thread. So it turned Dig into kind of
Speaker 1: a forum about news items. It wasn't just a place
Speaker 1: to share or promote or barry news. It was also
Speaker 1: a place to discuss it. And uh. Of course, users
Speaker 1: could end up bearing 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 are 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 a an article that
Speaker 1: I had written on how stuff works to dig directly,
Speaker 1: that would not look so great, right. It was meant
Speaker 1: to be a place where people discovered stuff and shared
Speaker 1: it with others, as opposed to promoting their own work.
Speaker 1: That was the other purpose for the berry button was
Speaker 1: to make sure that this was truly a democratized, user
Speaker 1: generated experience and not something that was dictated to them.
Speaker 1: More on that as we progress now. The engineers that
Speaker 1: did created an algorithm to determine if a story merited
Speaker 1: inclusion on the main site or, in a later revision
Speaker 1: of dig, on one of its major subsections. So, like Reddit,
Speaker 1: dig would eventually become divided into depart ments 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 htm mal file and a little button that
Speaker 1: would would pop up on your page that would allow
Speaker 1: you to have users click on it and submit content
Speaker 1: directly from your page to Dig. That would let people
Speaker 1: either submit a story entirely or to vote up or
Speaker 1: vote up a story. Really you had to go to
Speaker 1: dig if you wanted to bury it. But once upon
Speaker 1: a time you could dig stories on how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Um, I think we even we had a
Speaker 1: Dig button that was active for quite some time before
Speaker 1: we did a site revision. But yeah, it was one
Speaker 1: of those where if you wanted to share what you saw,
Speaker 1: then you could click on the Dig button. It's very
Speaker 1: similar to the way a lot of sites use Facebook
Speaker 1: and Twitter buttons today. In fact, you could argue that
Speaker 1: Dig sort of paved the way for those other sites
Speaker 1: to use that same kind of functionality. Further down the road,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose would also launch a video podcast with Alex
Speaker 1: Albrecht called dig Nation that was one of the cornerstones
Speaker 1: of Revision three. That that video and podcast arm that
Speaker 1: I talked about, that they launched in late two thousand five.
Speaker 1: They used Dignation to talk about some of the top
Speaker 1: stories featured on Dig, and the first episode published in
Speaker 1: two thousand five, several months after Dig had already launched UM.
Speaker 1: Depending upon what source you look at, some people say
Speaker 1: it Dig started or Dignation started in May one, two
Speaker 1: thousand five. Others say July first, two thousand five, which
Speaker 1: seems like a pretty big discrepancy. Uh. I was not
Speaker 1: listening to dick Nation at the time, so I cannot
Speaker 1: independently verify that either way. But anyway, Dig launched in
Speaker 1: December two thousand four, so a few months later you
Speaker 1: get Dignation, and one of the one of the purposes
Speaker 1: for Dignation was to talk about stories that had made
Speaker 1: their way onto Dig and just to be kind of
Speaker 1: a discussion forum for it um. And so in a
Speaker 1: way it became a promotion for the dig dot com website,
Speaker 1: and the two hosts were really personable and funny and informed,
Speaker 1: and so it started getting popular pretty quickly. One of
Speaker 1: the top stories that very first episode was to talk
Speaker 1: about a major revision to Dig, which was even it
Speaker 1: was not even a year old yet and DIG version too,
Speaker 1: I know, was coming out. And uh Also it didn't
Speaker 1: hurt that Kevin Rose and and Alex Albrecht would drink
Speaker 1: a few beers on camera because it made them more personable.
Speaker 1: They didn't get tore up on camera, not typically anyway.
Speaker 1: Their shows could get a little rowdy when they would
Speaker 1: do live shows at say south By Southwest, but generally speaking,
Speaker 1: it just made them seem like approachable human beings who
Speaker 1: were talking about cool stories. So it was a really
Speaker 1: appealing pair that had a very approachable style, and it
Speaker 1: led to great success for Dignation at least for several years.
Speaker 1: Uh I only ever saw them once at a south
Speaker 1: By Southwest. It was just before they concluded the show
Speaker 1: in October two thousand five. Dig reached out to venture
Speaker 1: capitalists to get some funding. Remember, Kevin Rose funded the
Speaker 1: initial launch of Dig with six thousand dollars of his
Speaker 1: own money. The company managed to raise a cool two
Speaker 1: and a half million dollars from various source is, 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, and heard 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 UH started looking into other
Speaker 1: features as well, like a friends system where you could
Speaker 1: befriend other users and follow the kind of stuff that
Speaker 1: they liked. Maybe you might share a common interest with someone,
Speaker 1: and that way it gave you even more opportunities to
Speaker 1: discover cool stories that maybe weren't on the main page
Speaker 1: when you log in, but because your friend liked it,
Speaker 1: you would be able to see more about it. So
Speaker 1: that was what really made Dig turn more into kind
Speaker 1: of a social network than just a news aggregator. Really
Speaker 1: the name of the game was diversification. UH 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 the first
Speaker 1: nine stories, eight of them were about tech. Only one
Speaker 1: was not directly about technology. So it had a limited
Speaker 1: appeal for a very particular audience. Let's call them nerds,
Speaker 1: because I am a nerd. I have a nerd podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm doing it right now. I'm not calling you guys nerds,
Speaker 1: but I'm a nerd. So dig really had an appeal
Speaker 1: to nerds when it first started, and again no disrespect,
Speaker 1: I consider myself one. But by two thousand six, the
Speaker 1: side had really branched out with these their 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. Uh. It was a case of trying to
Speaker 1: make sure that people were using Dig for the way
Speaker 1: they had intended it to be used, and not for
Speaker 1: it to turn into just the wild West. And it
Speaker 1: also showed that they still cared about how Dig operated.
Speaker 1: In August two thousand six, Business Week featured Kevin Rose
Speaker 1: on the cover of its magazine, and Revision three, that
Speaker 1: podcasting company that Rose and his co founders launched in
Speaker 1: late two thousand five, helped Dig secure another million dollars
Speaker 1: in venture capital funding. At this point, Dig itself was
Speaker 1: estimated to valued at two hundred fifty million dollars according
Speaker 1: to The New York Post, so less than two years
Speaker 1: after it had launched, and it was worth a quarter
Speaker 1: of a billion dollars two fifty million dollars. That's crazy,
Speaker 1: but understandable when you realize this was a powerful tool
Speaker 1: for people to share their interests and it was driving
Speaker 1: insane traffic to other websites. Now. In two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose said in a few interviews that he was
Speaker 1: initially a little worried about the types of content that
Speaker 1: could end up on dig because he was worried that
Speaker 1: it might require a lot of policing to make sure
Speaker 1: that the worst stuff on the Internet didn't really just
Speaker 1: bully its way onto the main page. But he said
Speaker 1: the community was consistently pretty good at finding relevant, interesting
Speaker 1: stories and sharing them, and so really the community in
Speaker 1: large part, was policing itself fairly effectively. Now, one time
Speaker 1: this didn't play out the way he wanted was when
Speaker 1: someone posted a link to an encryption key for HD DVD.
Speaker 1: Do you guys remember h D DVDs. That was the
Speaker 1: format that was competing with blue rays for high definition
Speaker 1: video uh and eventually, of course Blu ray one out,
Speaker 1: but for a while it was a pretty tough competition,
Speaker 1: and the encryption key would let you crack the protection
Speaker 1: around h D DVD, which meant that you could then
Speaker 1: copy the content off an HD DVD and potentially distribute it.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of big companies were very upset
Speaker 1: about this because you know, they don't really like piracy
Speaker 1: for obvious reasons. It at least is somewhat linked to
Speaker 1: a drop in revenue, although you can't argue it's a
Speaker 1: one for one case, because if someone steals something, that's
Speaker 1: not to say that they would have bought it otherwise.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just just not true. But sometimes if they
Speaker 1: steal something and share it, it might end up costing
Speaker 1: you in sales. It's just possible to know to what extent, right,
Speaker 1: because you can't guarantee that all the people who download
Speaker 1: something would have otherwise bought it. Still, it was a
Speaker 1: real problem. Now there's nothing directly against the law from
Speaker 1: copying the content on a piece of media that you
Speaker 1: have purchased for the purposes of backup. However, having to
Speaker 1: circumvent encryption gets a little more shady in the eyes
Speaker 1: of the law. So while you could make a backup
Speaker 1: copy you weren't supposed to break encryption preventing you from
Speaker 1: making a backup copy. And this is one of the
Speaker 1: many reasons why pirates versus creators those battles get really
Speaker 1: ugly on both sides, because both sides have they do
Speaker 1: a lot of dancing to justify their actions. I'll say
Speaker 1: that I don't necessarily think that studios or creative companies
Speaker 1: are free of blame in these cases. I also don't
Speaker 1: think that pirates are saints. It's uh complicated issue, al right.
Speaker 1: So Dig's owners kept pulling down links to the encryption
Speaker 1: key that had been posted. They were trying to head
Speaker 1: this off. They didn't want to court a major lawsuit
Speaker 1: with a studio. They wanted to avoid that. They didn't
Speaker 1: want anyone to be able to say, hey, you're hosting
Speaker 1: this illegal encryption key that's letting people bypass the security
Speaker 1: we put on HD DVDs. So they were starting to
Speaker 1: pull down the links, but the users wanted the links,
Speaker 1: and so they kept on posting them, and they found
Speaker 1: tricky ways of posting them. They would name them other
Speaker 1: things in order to try and get around any detection.
Speaker 1: And so eventually Kevin Rose decided he was going to
Speaker 1: side with the community. He said, he said, quote, you'd
Speaker 1: rather see Dig go down fighting than bow down to
Speaker 1: a bigger company. End quote. And he said, if that's
Speaker 1: what you want, that's what we're gonna do. We are
Speaker 1: no longer going to take down those links. And so
Speaker 1: he stopped. He said, we're gonna let them stay up
Speaker 1: on dig because that's what you users want, and that's
Speaker 1: the purpose of dig is to let the users generate
Speaker 1: the stuff that they think is interesting, or at least
Speaker 1: to share the stuff they think is interesting. And so
Speaker 1: he sided with the community on that one. Now, as
Speaker 1: Dig grew, so did its influence. Not only was it
Speaker 1: driving engagement among its users on its own site, it
Speaker 1: also could help drive traffic to other sites. So if
Speaker 1: someone shared, say one of my articles on dig, and
Speaker 1: it made the main page, we would suddenly see a
Speaker 1: huge rush of traffic coming in from Dig. And that's valuable.
Speaker 1: You know. You gotta remember that most of the Internet
Speaker 1: was generating its revenue through page views because the web
Speaker 1: pages were supported by advertising. So the more eyeballs that
Speaker 1: were on the page, the more money you were making.
Speaker 1: It became a goal for many sites to develop content
Speaker 1: that folks would naturally share on Dig. More and more
Speaker 1: began to incorporate the dig button on their pages too,
Speaker 1: and courage this behavior as early as two thousand six. Again,
Speaker 1: it launched in December two thousand four, but as early
Speaker 1: as two thousand and six, other companies were already showing
Speaker 1: interest in potentially acquiring Dig. Yahoo reportedly wanted to scoop
Speaker 1: up the company for forty million dollars, not bad for
Speaker 1: a company that started on six grand Rose himself was
Speaker 1: interested in pursuing a deal with a totally different company,
Speaker 1: news Corp. News Score had just purchased my Space. I
Speaker 1: did a whole episode about my Space ages ago. If
Speaker 1: you want to hear about that story, it's news cores.
Speaker 1: Purchase of MySpace is commonly referred to as one of
Speaker 1: the big big mistakes in mergers and acquisitions in the
Speaker 1: tech world. At the time, news Core was offering sixty
Speaker 1: million dollars to purchase Dig, and Rose wanted to sell.
Speaker 1: He wanted to take take them up on that offer,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't allowed to because Dig had a board
Speaker 1: of directors, and he had to answer to this board
Speaker 1: of directors, and they would not approve of a sale
Speaker 1: to News Corps. They thought that the company was worth
Speaker 1: more than that. They thought Kevin Rose was going to
Speaker 1: drive this company to even greater heights. So even though
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose had created the company, even though he had
Speaker 1: funded the initial company, he didn't have the authorization to
Speaker 1: sell it to another corporation, so he was forced to
Speaker 1: stick with it. UM. He was really upset about this,
Speaker 1: according to several of his friends, and frustrated that he
Speaker 1: couldn't just sell the company that he had created and
Speaker 1: make millions of dollars and then move on to do
Speaker 1: something else. Uh And at this point, Kevin Rose owned
Speaker 1: about sixty per cent of dig dot com. They the
Speaker 1: board 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 of 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 towards
Speaker 1: the end. UH. There were fundamental disagreements that the two
Speaker 1: sides could not see eye to eye on and ultimately
Speaker 1: Google withdrew its intention to acquire Dig, So that was
Speaker 1: a two hundred million dollar deal lost. Kevin Rose was
Speaker 1: beyond frustrated about that. Instead, Dig ended up going up
Speaker 1: for another round of venture capital investment to keep the
Speaker 1: company afloat, because even though it was valuable, it wasn't
Speaker 1: really generating that much revenue. So this time they ended
Speaker 1: up raising twenty eight point seven million dollars from Highland
Speaker 1: Capital Partners. Meanwhile, behind the scenes that Dig Rose was
Speaker 1: battling against his boat board of directors, Rose decided to
Speaker 1: partner up with a designer named Daniel Burke who was
Speaker 1: also working for DIG at the time, and together they
Speaker 1: built a file sharing application that they called pounce po
Speaker 1: w n CE. That's when the board over at DIG said, hey,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, that belongs to us because you work
Speaker 1: for us and Daniel works for us. So you're using
Speaker 1: DIG assets to build a totally different application that should
Speaker 1: belong to the shareholders of Dig. It cannot be its
Speaker 1: own thing. Meanwhile, morale it DIG was on the down slope.
Speaker 1: People are starting to get very discouraged over at Dig,
Speaker 1: and then the board said to Rose, hey, why don't
Speaker 1: you just knock it out with all those other projects
Speaker 1: you're looking at, pay attention to this company that you started.
Speaker 1: You need to make sure you can motivate the people
Speaker 1: at dig dot com. Pour your energy into being innovative
Speaker 1: in this company. Don't just look around for other companies. Now,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose didn't exactly follow orders. He started working on
Speaker 1: a Twitter directory app called we Follow, which he audaciously
Speaker 1: unveiled it south by Southwest in two thousand nine. Dig's
Speaker 1: board went to Addleston, who was still CEO at the time,
Speaker 1: and they told Addson to fire Kevin Rose. So the
Speaker 1: board of directors tells the CEO, you gotta fire this
Speaker 1: co founder. But Rose and Addison had an agreement they
Speaker 1: could only fire each other with the other's consent. In
Speaker 1: other words, they had a veto for any direction that
Speaker 1: the board wanted to take, as long as it was
Speaker 1: about firing one or the other. So instead of firing him, uh,
Speaker 1: DIG decided that, hey, well acquire we Follow. So the
Speaker 1: board of directors was able to acquire this this venture
Speaker 1: that Kevin Rose had created, and reportedly Kevin Rose earned
Speaker 1: a few million dollars like six million bucks as a
Speaker 1: result of this, but as part of that, in order
Speaker 1: for him to get this money, he had to stick
Speaker 1: with DIG a lot a while longer. Around this time,
Speaker 1: Evan Rose started to invest in other companies. Some of
Speaker 1: them turned out to be huge ones, like Twitter, But
Speaker 1: as investments were taking his attention away from DIG, according
Speaker 1: to his contemporaries, Kevin Rose would sometimes just come in
Speaker 1: to DIG once a week or just disappear for days
Speaker 1: and days at a time. The rest of the time
Speaker 1: he was working on other projects, investing in new companies,
Speaker 1: and that's really what excited him. It turned out that
Speaker 1: that's what he was interested in. The early process, when
Speaker 1: there's nothing but potential, a company hasn't cemented itself and
Speaker 1: hasn't turned into its permanent version of itself, he could
Speaker 1: be practically anything. That's when Kevin Rose is interested in
Speaker 1: working with those companies. Uh. It gives them a lot
Speaker 1: of energy and creativity. He's not so much interested once
Speaker 1: it establishes itself and managing day to day activities is
Speaker 1: not really his forte. But he did help a lot
Speaker 1: of companies out this way as a venture capitalist investor,
Speaker 1: as an angel investor, if you will. But the board
Speaker 1: of Dig was getting increasingly frustrated with Kevin Rose, and
Speaker 1: meanwhile he was feeling the same way about the board
Speaker 1: of directors. On the site itself, things were getting pretty problematic.
Speaker 1: There were a group of dig users who had essentially
Speaker 1: gained control of what did or did not make the
Speaker 1: main page. In fact, according to some sources, the top
Speaker 1: one users on dig dot com were responsible for fifty
Speaker 1: six percent of the content on the front page of Dig.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, there are millions of registered users by
Speaker 1: this point, and on people are in charge of more
Speaker 1: than half of what appears on that main page. Now,
Speaker 1: they weren't exactly gaming the system, but they were definitely
Speaker 1: using the system to their advantage, whether knowingly or not.
Speaker 1: You see, the power users the ones who had been
Speaker 1: using dig the most frequently and for the longest. Their
Speaker 1: votes had a heavier weight to them than a new
Speaker 1: user's vote. So if you had been on dig dot
Speaker 1: com since the beginning, and you had been using it
Speaker 1: regularly and you voted up on an article, your vote
Speaker 1: counted way more than my vote if I just joined
Speaker 1: dig dot com the other day. And so that's how
Speaker 1: these top one users we're essentially dictating what would appear
Speaker 1: on the main page. And again, it wasn't that they
Speaker 1: were necessarily setting out to do that. They were using
Speaker 1: dig the way they always had. They were up voting
Speaker 1: stories that they thought were interesting, and they were down
Speaker 1: voting stories that they thought were terrible. Just so happened
Speaker 1: that their votes counted more than anybody else's. So sometimes
Speaker 1: they might attempt to boost or drop a story by
Speaker 1: coordinating their efforts, but it was just as possible that
Speaker 1: they were literally using Dig the way it was meant
Speaker 1: to be used. It's just that they had more influence
Speaker 1: than anyone else did. Now Dig's initial solution to this
Speaker 1: problem because the board of directors, the people behind the
Speaker 1: scenes over a DIG, they weren't really keen on the
Speaker 1: fact that a small group of people were having such
Speaker 1: a huge influence on what was actually being shown. It
Speaker 1: was very frustrating for new users. It was making it
Speaker 1: more difficult to attract people to adopt DIG because if
Speaker 1: you come into a system where it feels like it's
Speaker 1: an old boys network and all the old boys are
Speaker 1: the ones who dictate what happens, it feels like nothing
Speaker 1: you do has any consequence. So they wanted to change
Speaker 1: this up, and they decided to try a couple of
Speaker 1: different methods to do it, but it didn't go over
Speaker 1: so well. Uh. One of the things they did was
Speaker 1: installed some controls behind the scenes to decrease the group's
Speaker 1: influence by essentially de waiting there contributions. Part of this
Speaker 1: meant removing the list of top users from the site,
Speaker 1: which was kind of a a badge of honor to
Speaker 1: get your name listed among the top users. But then
Speaker 1: once they got rid of top users, these same power
Speaker 1: users started to feel like they were being a ended
Speaker 1: or ignored. Many of them felt like they were being
Speaker 1: uh dismissed that all the years that they had been
Speaker 1: putting in working with dig, you know, using the platform,
Speaker 1: promoting stories, burying bad stories, that all of that was
Speaker 1: being swept aside, and so they were feeling like that
Speaker 1: they were being punished for this, even if they were
Speaker 1: just using dig the way they always had. And so
Speaker 1: the company began to alienate some of its core user base,
Speaker 1: and that was a real problem because they started to
Speaker 1: set a new tone. All Right, we're getting into the
Speaker 1: beginning of the end, but before I go any further,
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to think our sponsor all right.
Speaker 1: At this point in its history, Dig had forty three
Speaker 1: million registered users, and dig had started to experiment with
Speaker 1: generating revenue on its own by inserting dig ads into
Speaker 1: its pages. So between various headlines of stories you would
Speaker 1: get promoted advertisement. It would just appear right there. There's
Speaker 1: sort of like the promoted search results that you would
Speaker 1: find in Google. And like those, the ads were clearly
Speaker 1: marked as ads. It wasn't like they were tricking you
Speaker 1: into thinking you were reading a story. They were marked
Speaker 1: as ads, and only that you could actually vote on
Speaker 1: those ads. You could dig or bury. Ads gave users
Speaker 1: a lot of power when it came to advertising, something
Speaker 1: that I think was particularly interesting to allow your user
Speaker 1: base the opportunity to vote down ads. Uh. It seems
Speaker 1: like that would be potentially dangerous from a revenue standpoint,
Speaker 1: but it would also send a real message about whether
Speaker 1: or not advertising was working or very much not working.
Speaker 1: Around this time, Dig also launched apps for the blossoming
Speaker 1: smartphone platforms of iOS and Android. Now, keep in mind,
Speaker 1: the iPhone came out in two thousand seven. Android came
Speaker 1: out in late two thousand seven early two thousand eight.
Speaker 1: This is two thousand nine we're talking about, so all
Speaker 1: of those platforms were still very young, especially when you
Speaker 1: consider the fact that when iOS first launched, you could
Speaker 1: not develop an application for Apple. It was just the
Speaker 1: Apple apps on the original iPhone for a while before
Speaker 1: they launched the the ability for other people to program
Speaker 1: apps for it. Things were not going smoothly. Behind the
Speaker 1: scenes over a dig Kevin Rose and j Adelson were
Speaker 1: having some disagreements about the direction of the company, and
Speaker 1: those disagreements continued to escalate throughout two thousand nine and
Speaker 1: into two thousand ten until Adelson was asked to step
Speaker 1: down as CEO. More or less, he was fired. Kevin
Speaker 1: Rose chose not to use his veto options. So remember
Speaker 1: Adelson and Rose had this agreement where it would require
Speaker 1: their their uh I guess, I guess their agreement with
Speaker 1: the Board of directors before either could be fired, and
Speaker 1: Rose decided not to veto the board's decision to fire Adelson,
Speaker 1: so Eielsen resigned. Essentially he was able to officially, according
Speaker 1: to the the communication he gave, he stepped down from
Speaker 1: the position, but behind the scenes people say that he
Speaker 1: was essentially fired as CEO, but he said he wanted
Speaker 1: to go and work on more startup ideas, and that's
Speaker 1: exactly what he did. I'll talk more about that towards
Speaker 1: the end. Kevin Rose ended up taking over control of
Speaker 1: the company he founded. He became the new CEO of
Speaker 1: Dig on April five. In May, the company laid off
Speaker 1: about ten percent of its work staff. Now, Kevin Rose
Speaker 1: was still listening to the community. One of the things
Speaker 1: that he listened to was their reaction to a tool
Speaker 1: called the dig Bar. The company had launched the dig
Speaker 1: bar earlier, and this was a toolbar that would appear
Speaker 1: above websites, so it would install itself so in your
Speaker 1: browser essentially, so you would see this tool bar whenever
Speaker 1: you go to other websites, and it was meant to
Speaker 1: let people interact with dig without leaving the website they
Speaker 1: were on, So you can go read some other website
Speaker 1: and use this toolbar to leave comments about this particular
Speaker 1: article on dig, but without leaving the website to go
Speaker 1: to dig first. However, a lot of people felt it
Speaker 1: was really intrusive and irritating and distracting. So one of
Speaker 1: his first actions as CEO, Kevin Rose decided to ditch
Speaker 1: the dig bar. He was responding to the community reaction,
Speaker 1: and hopes were running high on Kevin Rose, both from
Speaker 1: the Dig community and the Board of directors. Everyone was
Speaker 1: hoping that Kevin Rose was getting re energized, reinvested in
Speaker 1: the company that he had created. The board had been
Speaker 1: really critical of Rosa's focus on other projects, those other
Speaker 1: things that he was trying to launch while still technically
Speaker 1: working for Dig, but they were hoping that this meant
Speaker 1: he was back on board to lead the company in
Speaker 1: a new direction with innovation. So the big hope here
Speaker 1: was that Kevin Rose was now grown out of a phase,
Speaker 1: according to like the Board of directors, that he would
Speaker 1: no longer just focus on stuff as it was brand
Speaker 1: new and when it interests him, but that he would
Speaker 1: be capable of leading the company in the day to
Speaker 1: day operations of dig dot com. Meanwhile, the company began
Speaker 1: to alpha test the next version of dig dot com.
Speaker 1: This would be version four point. Oh, this is the
Speaker 1: infamous one. This is the one that people totally flipped
Speaker 1: out over for good reason. I don't think that it
Speaker 1: was unmerited. So before Kevin Rose became CEO, dig dot
Speaker 1: com showed off some of its concepts for version four
Speaker 1: point oh at south By Southwest, and a lot of
Speaker 1: people were really excited by what they saw. They thought
Speaker 1: that the innovations were merited, they were good. They felt
Speaker 1: that it was going to add value to the dig
Speaker 1: dot com experience. But once Kevin Rose took over as CEO,
Speaker 1: he essentially threw all of that away and decided to
Speaker 1: start from scratch. He more or less discarded all the changes,
Speaker 1: all the work that had been done for version four
Speaker 1: point oh, and this alienated some of the engineers at
Speaker 1: dig dot com as a result, some of whom left
Speaker 1: the company because of that. And instead he said, let's
Speaker 1: do go in this completely different direction. And there are
Speaker 1: a lot of people who argue about why he did this.
Speaker 1: Some people say he genuinely just didn't see the value
Speaker 1: of the revisions. Some say, well, this was an effort
Speaker 1: for him to distance himself from the previous CEO. But
Speaker 1: whatever the purpose, he decided it to go in a
Speaker 1: totally different direction, and it was one that ended up
Speaker 1: being almost universally unpopular among his community. So one of
Speaker 1: the new features of the Kevin Rose led version four
Speaker 1: point oh of dig dot com allowed news sites to
Speaker 1: submit their own content automatically to dig. I cannot stress
Speaker 1: how this alienated the community at dig dot com, because
Speaker 1: keep in mind, up to this point, the whole concept
Speaker 1: was that users were the ones submitting and voting on
Speaker 1: 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 oh, a news
Speaker 1: site a media company could submit its own stuff directly
Speaker 1: to dig dot com bypassing that user experience, essentially turning
Speaker 1: dig dot com into more of a normal news aggregator
Speaker 1: and less of a user generated experience. So it seemed
Speaker 1: completely antithetical to the original philosophy behind dig and as
Speaker 1: a result, community members went bananas. In fact, a lot
Speaker 1: of people said that this was going to be the
Speaker 1: death blow of dig dot com, and arguably that's what
Speaker 1: did it. Uh So a lot of people decided that
Speaker 1: they would just leave and go and use Reddit instead
Speaker 1: of dig dot com. Reddit was much more similar to
Speaker 1: what dig had been in the past. It also didn't
Speaker 1: help that revision four point oh consolidated a lot of
Speaker 1: those interests that I talked about earlier. You know, things
Speaker 1: like sports and entertainment and lifestyle. It consolidated a lot
Speaker 1: of those and made it more difficult to find specific
Speaker 1: content in those buckets because now they were bigger buckets
Speaker 1: that contained lots of stuff, not just these broken out
Speaker 1: uh interests. So they also got rid of the berry button,
Speaker 1: so you couldn't bury stories anymore. You couldn't vote down
Speaker 1: a story, and arguably it was to make sure that
Speaker 1: these users couldn't just end up taking control of dig
Speaker 1: and get rid of anything that that criticized themselves, for example,
Speaker 1: but it also meant that there was if someone if
Speaker 1: a news outlet published a story directly to dig dot com,
Speaker 1: there was no way for you to express your displeasure
Speaker 1: to vote that story down. The only thing you could
Speaker 1: really do is not voted up. So a lot of
Speaker 1: people felt that this was taking the voice of the
Speaker 1: community away from the community, and this was a community
Speaker 1: based website. Some people decided that they would promote stories
Speaker 1: from Reddit, kind of as a way to make a
Speaker 1: dig at dig, So they would submit links from Reddit
Speaker 1: onto dig dot com. It was kind of a method
Speaker 1: of protest, but more people were just leaving Dig entirely.
Speaker 1: They were ditching it and going to Reddit. In fact,
Speaker 1: Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit's co founders, wrote an open
Speaker 1: letter to Kevin Rose, and he was specifically criticizing the
Speaker 1: fact that they had made these changes. Ohanian said, the
Speaker 1: new version of dig reeks of VC meddling, and VC
Speaker 1: stands for venture capitalist or venture capital, So Ohnian was
Speaker 1: essentially calling Dig a sellout, saying, obviously, you're taking money
Speaker 1: from these companies in order to have this relationship, and
Speaker 1: it's at the expense of the community that made dig
Speaker 1: a valuable asset in the first place. He was saying,
Speaker 1: it's not the links that make dig dot com value.
Speaker 1: The links already exist out there on the Internet. What
Speaker 1: makes dig valuable is this user engagement, this community that
Speaker 1: ends up supporting various links. That's where the value is.
Speaker 1: But you're completely undermining that by siding with venture capitals
Speaker 1: UH investors. After just a few short months, it was
Speaker 1: clear that Kevin Rose's heart was not in running this
Speaker 1: company and leading it in day to day operations. It
Speaker 1: didn't excite him. He found it grueling. He's still very
Speaker 1: much preferred being in on the ground floor as a
Speaker 1: company is just starting to find its way he still
Speaker 1: thought that was the most interesting aspect of business. He
Speaker 1: was CEO for less than six months. Dig then hired
Speaker 1: on an Amazon executive named Matt Williams to take over
Speaker 1: the role of CEO, and Kevin Rose stepped down In August,
Speaker 1: Rose himself began and to drift away from the company again.
Speaker 1: He was showing more interest in venture capital investments and
Speaker 1: other other ventures and less interest in the company that
Speaker 1: he founded. By March two thousand eleven, he officially resigned
Speaker 1: from dig dot com. He remained on as sort of
Speaker 1: a consultant to the board, but he was no longer
Speaker 1: an official employee. He also launched a company called Milk.
Speaker 1: This was meant to be a startup lab for new applications.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted to develop an app, then Milk
Speaker 1: was supposed to be a place where you could incubate
Speaker 1: these ideas. And Rose thought that this would give him
Speaker 1: the opportunity to work on a lot of different projects
Speaker 1: just as they were starting up, which meant that he
Speaker 1: would constantly be engaged. He would never get bored because
Speaker 1: there would always be something new to work on. Didn't
Speaker 1: work out that way. The first app out of Milk
Speaker 1: was an application called oink as in the noise that
Speaker 1: a pig makes, and it was the only app the
Speaker 1: company ever produced, and rather than cont new to develop oint,
Speaker 1: Rose chose to shut down Milk and he joined Google instead.
Speaker 1: He took over some of the people from Milk and
Speaker 1: they all joined Google Venture, which is kind of their
Speaker 1: start up and spin off lab. He also brought the
Speaker 1: dig Nation show to an end in late twenty eleven.
Speaker 1: He said that they had stopped recording the show by
Speaker 1: October two thousand eleven, but that the unpublished shows would
Speaker 1: continue to air or two to be published until uh
Speaker 1: sometime in January, and that's when dig Nation came to
Speaker 1: an end. It had a two part finale and then
Speaker 1: it was over. Meanwhile, dig dot com was still hemorrhaging users.
Speaker 1: It didn't last much longer. After Kevin Rose resigned on
Speaker 1: July twelve, two thousand and twelve, dig was essentially split
Speaker 1: into three different components and sold off to different buyers.
Speaker 1: The intellectual property of dig dot com it's off the
Speaker 1: website dig dot com. It went to a company called
Speaker 1: Beta Works. They bought this once incredibly valuable asset for
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand dollars. Keep in mind This is a
Speaker 1: company that just a few years previous had been valued
Speaker 1: at two hundred fifty million dollars, and then the site
Speaker 1: is sold for five hundred thousand. As for the other assets,
Speaker 1: they brought in more cash actually than the intellectual property
Speaker 1: of dig dot com itself. Linked In bought several patents
Speaker 1: that dig dot com owned for four million dollars, so
Speaker 1: the patents were worth more than the website was, and
Speaker 1: The Washington Post spent about twelve million dollars bringing on
Speaker 1: several members of Dig's staff to work on its social
Speaker 1: code project. Now, dig dot com still exists today. If
Speaker 1: you try to navigate to dig dot com, you will
Speaker 1: see a website. It is a news aggregator website. It
Speaker 1: looks very different from what it used to be. Now
Speaker 1: it looks kind of more like a standard news aggregate
Speaker 1: website with images and links to various stories across the web.
Speaker 1: Users can still give stories thumbs up, it can promote
Speaker 1: some 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 is a great example. It's not as bad as
Speaker 1: four chan, but it's a great example. So dig still exists,
Speaker 1: though 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, So when we presume it's
Speaker 1: probably around that level or higher now, and twelve million
Speaker 1: monthly visitors isn't anything to sneeze at. It's a pretty
Speaker 1: healthy amount of traffic. As for the founders, what are
Speaker 1: they up to now? Well, j Addelson worked on several
Speaker 1: different ventures after he stepped down as CEO. He ultimately
Speaker 1: co founded a company called Center Electric. It's a venture
Speaker 1: capital firm, and so Adelson is still using his experience
Speaker 1: and money to help launch new companies. Ron gore Sky
Speaker 1: stayed with DIG until July, which means he left during
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose's tenure as CEO. He went on to co
Speaker 1: found Flick, the review app that I mentioned earlier in
Speaker 1: this episode, and then he transitioned over to YouTube. He
Speaker 1: worked there until February. He then became a Digital service
Speaker 1: expert in the United States. Digital Service This is a
Speaker 1: startup company at the White House dedicated to using technology
Speaker 1: to create better tools and services for American citizens. No
Speaker 1: word on how that's going right now. Owen Byrne left
Speaker 1: DIG in two thousand seven, and he worked for several
Speaker 1: different companies over the following years, including Expedia and trip Advisor.
Speaker 1: And he was mostly building out systems for these companies,
Speaker 1: so he was working on the back end. And you know,
Speaker 1: once you finish that then often you might go on
Speaker 1: to do it at a different company. So that's largely
Speaker 1: what he did. As of January two thousand seventeen, he
Speaker 1: started working for zip car in San Francisco as a
Speaker 1: software engineer, and Kevin Rose Well he's still an advisor
Speaker 1: to Google Ventures, which is again that division of Google
Speaker 1: that is all about creating startups and spin off companies.
Speaker 1: He sits on the board of a company called hoden Key,
Speaker 1: which is a wristwatch enthusiast website related I assumed to
Speaker 1: the wristwatch manufacturer out in Europe. And he's still involved
Speaker 1: in venture capital. He invests in companies early on while
Speaker 1: they're still malleable. Dig is an interesting story, and many
Speaker 1: of the elements that were pioneered at dig found their
Speaker 1: way into other platforms like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.
Speaker 1: All of these ways of sharing content, many of them
Speaker 1: originated over at dig. So we have Dig to thank
Speaker 1: for a lot of the way our social networking sites
Speaker 1: work today. And also it's easy for us to see
Speaker 1: in retrospect how the decisions that were made over at
Speaker 1: dig dot com ultimately where it's undoing, particularly and how
Speaker 1: it's seemingly turned its back on the community of users
Speaker 1: that made it so valuable in the first place. But
Speaker 1: at the time, it was probably much harder to see
Speaker 1: that that's what was going to happen. I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: you wouldn't make those decisions if you knew it was
Speaker 1: going to lead to the collapse or implosion of a company.
Speaker 1: Democratization on the Internet is a tricky thing. So if
Speaker 1: I ever do an episode about Reddit, I'll get into
Speaker 1: more about the democratization of the Internet. Reddit is not
Speaker 1: a stranger to controversy. It is structured very much in
Speaker 1: a way that is similar to the early days of
Speaker 1: dig dot com. But they have been no stranger to
Speaker 1: behind the scenes drama. There have been plenty of stories
Speaker 1: about that over for Reddit, so it's not like dig
Speaker 1: dot com was an example of just bad management. It's
Speaker 1: a very tricky thing to do when you're letting your
Speaker 1: users define the experience. Sometimes that does not turn out
Speaker 1: in a way that's particularly nice, But that all belongs
Speaker 1: in another episode. For now, it's time to sign off.
Speaker 1: Remember if you have suggestions for future episodes, you can
Speaker 1: drop me a line by emailing me that addresses tech
Speaker 1: stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can also
Speaker 1: drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle
Speaker 1: at both of those is tech stuff h s W.
Speaker 1: Or you can watch me live stream live on Wednesdays
Speaker 1: and Fridays over at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff.
Speaker 1: If you want to see me in action, you'll also
Speaker 1: hear episodes about a month before they published that way,
Speaker 1: Take care and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, is
Speaker 1: it how stuff works dot com