TechStuff Classic: The Digg Story

It all began with a startup led by a TechTV host. Then it evolved into a massively influential site, only to seemingly implode a short while later. What's the story behind Digg?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you. It's a Friday, which means it's time for

(00:25):
a classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published
way back on May fifth, twenty seventeen. It is called
the Dig Story. Digg known as the homepage of the Internet,
at least once upon a time. It still exists. It's

(00:45):
not like it's gone, but it certainly has changed a
great deal since its founding. So let's listen to this
classic episode about Dig. Today we're going to explore the
story of dig dot com, what it was, how it
came about, and exactly why. Some people say it serves

(01:08):
as a lesson in community mismanagement. It's very interesting. First,
let me give you a quick overview of what dig
was all about, and to some extent, is still about,
though the current incarnation of dig is very different from
what was thought of as Dig back in the day.

(01:29):
So do you know Reddit? Okay, that's kind of what
Dig was. Dig was essentially a lot like what Reddit
is now, and a lot of people who used Dig
abandoned it for Reddit, and we'll talk about why in
this episode. But more specifically, Dig was a site where
users could share links to web pages, and it was

(01:51):
part social network, part news aggregator, and it set itself
apart from other services with similar functions, Like there was
dell ish Shuss. You might remember that you old timers
of the Internet. That was sort of a bookmarking app
where you could link to a page that you intend

(02:11):
to go back to over and over and you could
easily share those bookmarks with other people. But the whole
purpose was this was a reference you intended to return
to repeatedly. That's not really what Dig was interested in.
They were more about sharing links to timely pieces of
content like news articles, for example, and then users on

(02:32):
Dig's site could vote. They could boost a topic further
up the main page, or they could end up knocking
it down the main page. Boosting was called digging. You
would dig an article or a link and say that's awesome.
I want that promoted because I think it's really interesting.

(02:53):
If you wanted to vote it down, you buried it.
So there was digging and burying, which is odd because
if we're talking about the physical act. That's very similar,
but in this case, digging means I dig it. Bury
means let's bury that story. It's not interesting, it doesn't
belong here. It was also meant to allow users to
determine which stories were the most relevant and interesting, and

(03:17):
they were to have control. Really, the idea was that
the users of the site determined what went on the
site and how that content was arranged based upon their actions.
So it gave a lot of control to its user base,
and that had a real appeal to it, right, And
we'll dive more into Dig in just a little bit. Also,

(03:40):
just in the interest of full disclosure, I should point
out that while I don't personally know the founders of dig,
we have never really officially met. I think I met
Kevin Rose once, but I know a lot of folks
who are friends with them, so we have a lot
of friends in common. And over the years, some of

(04:02):
the stuff that was going on over at dig kind
of made its way to my ears through the grapevine,
you know, just basic gossip type stuff. Now, fortunately, because
I'm me, I've forgotten almost all of that. I have
no I remember hearing a lot about Dig back in
the day, but I didn't retain any of that information.
I never really used DIG that much myself, so it

(04:25):
never took hold in my brain. However, I thought it
was important for me to disclose the fact that at
least I know some of the same people that the
founders knew, that we ran in the same circles, just
to disclose that. But I don't think any biases have
crept through in my reporting of this because my memory

(04:45):
is so bad. It's not that I am so ethical,
it's that my brain just didn't hold onto the information.
I'd like to think I would be ethical if my
brain did hold onto it. But we'll never know, now,
will we. Anyway. The founders of Dig included Jay Addelson,
Ron Gorrigetsky owen Burn, and Kevin Rose. They started development

(05:10):
on the site back in October two thousand and four,
and they launched dig on December fourth or fifth, two
thousand and four. So let's talk a bit about each
of those guys and what they brought to DIG. First,
we're gonna mention Jay Adelson. He came from Detroit and
he grew up in as cecil of Welcome to Nightville

(05:31):
would say, he grew up in Michigan. He got a
degree in film and broadcasting with a concentration in computer
science from Boston University in nineteen ninety two. After he graduated,
he worked for companies like the ISP, the Internet service
provider Netcom. He helped design the Palo Alto Internet Exchange,

(05:52):
and he later founded a company called Equinix, which was
another Internet data center and infrastructure company. So his yorick
was primarily on the inner workings of the systems that
the Internet itself depends upon, you know, not websites or
but rather the actual infrastructure that allows computers to communicate

(06:12):
with each other. He worked a lot on those those
sort of systems, and it was actually in his job
at Equinox, where the company he had co founded, where
he would first meet Kevin Rose, you know, one of
the other co founders of DIG, probably the most famous
of the founders of DIG. Kevin Rose at the time

(06:32):
was doing a segment for a show called The Screen Savers,
and I'll mention that show again when I get to
Kevin Addison would then become the business manager for Dig
once it became an official thing. He used his experience
to hire the initial management team for the company and
it was Adilson who led the charge in raising venture
capital shortly after dig launched. He would also become the

(06:54):
company's CEO in two thousand and five, and he would
co found Revision three along with Kevin Rose, also in
two thousand and five. Ron Gordetski is a software engineer.
He studied at the University of California, San Diego, and
his role on the team was to be the system's
engineering manager. Gorgetsky would also co found Revision three later on,

(07:18):
so he was one of those members. Revision three initially
was kind of a podcasting and video arm of dig
It sort of existed as its own thing, and it
sort of existed as an extension of dig itself. Gorydetski
also co founded a company later on on called Flick.

(07:38):
Had two f's in the beginning is fflick, so flick.
It was a film news and reviews site that based
its information off of Twitter posts. Google eventually would acquire
Flick in twenty eleven, and Gordetski went on to work
for YouTube until twenty sixteen. Owen Burn, the third co founder,

(08:01):
built the PHP code for the original dig site, and
you might be saying, well, what is PHP. PHP is
an irritating acronym because it's a recursive acronym, which means
that it has its own acronym in its full name.
The full name is PHP Hypertext Processor, which isn't a
very satisfying answer if I ask you what is PHP.

(08:23):
It's a general purpose scripting language and its open source
and it can be embedded into HTML. So essentially, what
Burne's job was was building out the framework for the
original dig site and to add in the functionality of
the basic purposes for DIG. So he was responsible for
making sure that he could actually develop the the basic

(08:46):
functions that DIG had when it launched. In return, he
was rewarded with equity in the company itself, so he
had some ownership of DIG when it first launched, and
his title was senior software engineer and co founder. He
would stay on with DIG until two thousand and seven.

(09:06):
Then we get to Kevin Rose, who is two freaking
years younger than I am. Multi millionaire Kevin Rose two
years younger than I am. I gotta be fair. The
dude's brilliant. He's a very intelligent guy, so I can't
really fault him. It's just a case of sour grapes
with me. He has founded numerous startups, including not only Dig,

(09:29):
but also Revision three, a company called Pounce, and another
one called milk Now. He got his start on the
tech TV series The Screen Savers. He originally came on
to tech TV as an it kind of guy, but
eventually he started to work behind the scenes as a
production assistant for The Screen Savers, and gradually he transitioned

(09:52):
to appearing on camera and eventually became a co host
of the Screen Savers itself. When Leo Laporte left the show,
Kevin Rose kind of stepped into Leo Laporte's role on
the Screen Savers. Later on, Comcast would acquire tech TV
and merge it with another channel called G four, and

(10:12):
Kevin Rose initially would transition over with the G four team,
but by two thousand and five he negotiated his release
from his contract with G four, and of course, by
that time Dig had already become a thing. It had
launched in late two thousand and four. It was Rose
and Allison who first came up with the idea for
a social news aggregation service, and Kevin Rose decided he

(10:36):
would pay for this initial development out of his own pocket.
He took six thousand dollars of his own savings to
fund the building of the dig initial build, so it
really was his money. I mean, he believed in this
enough to put his own cash down. It wasn't a
case of him asking for loans from other people. He

(10:57):
was twenty seven years old at the time. The co
founders settled on the name dig because they originally wanted
Dig with one G. But they had a problem. Disney
had already registered the urlwww dot dig dot com. And
I don't know if you know this, but Disney's not

(11:17):
in the habit of giving up property that it owns typically,
so they decide instead to go with two g's and
get around that problem. They launched the site on December fifth,
two thousand and four, and on December thirteenth, two thousand
and four, Kevin Rose would mention dig dot com on
an episode of The screen Savers, so he essentially got

(11:38):
to use the screen Savers to promote this other project
he had done. He was co hosting the screen Savers
at the time, so he took the time to say, Hey,
we've got this new project called dig dot com. It's
a user generated news aggregator site. And it's a way
for us to really concentrate on the coolest stories out

(11:59):
there on the inner And so the site began to
gather users pretty slowly but steadily at first, and back
then the site was really simple. It listed stories by
brief headlines, which were also links, so you could click
on the little headline, which was user generated. People would
type out what they thought the story essentially was. That

(12:20):
would be your hypertext link to take you to the story.
They would also include a brief summary of what the
story was about. And the more users clicked dig as
in I like this on a story, the higher it
would appear on the main page. And as some stories
would climb up obviously other stories had to drop down lower.

(12:40):
And if a story dropped down low enough, it would
eventually roll over to the second page of dig. And
this is very much like search engines. A lot of
people will only pay attention to that first page. They
don't want to dig further down into the pages. So
once you end up on page two, it it's really

(13:01):
you see a massive drop off on traffic to that link.
This is true for Reddit, it's true for dig Or,
it was true for dig and it's true for search
engines as well. Being on that main page is prime
real estate. And if you were burying a story enough,
if enough users buried a story, it would drop off entirely.

(13:23):
And the only way you could see it from that
point forward is if you enabled an option in your
user profile to view things that had been buried off
the page in search results. So you could search for
something that had been buried off the page and you
could find it that way, but only if you enabled
that option in your profile. It was really all about

(13:47):
driving engagement and community activity. And you might want to
know what the first few dig stories were, like, what
appeared on Dig's site when it launched. What were the
top ten stories of dig dot com when it went live?
I got a list for you. Story number one was

(14:08):
cherryos delayed till Q one of two thousand and five,
And that raises the question, what the heck was CHERRYOS. Well,
that was a power PC G four emulator for Windows,
which is a fancy way of saying it was a
program meant to simulate an Apple operating system so that
Windows PC users could actually run Apple programs on Windows XP.

(14:32):
It was an emulator. It emulated the Apple operating system,
or rather the Apple processor, not really the operating system anyway.
Back in late two thousand and four, it was apparently
big news that the program was experiencing delays. It would
eventually come out on March eighth, two thousand and five,
in case you're curious, Not that it's relevant anymore, but

(14:54):
there you go. Story number two said that Creative declares
war against the iPod. Actually it said delare's war against
the iPod. It left in a typo, but we know
they meant declare, and this ties into that topic I
covered not too long ago about the history of MP

(15:15):
three players. You might remember that Creative was one of
the companies designing MP three players back in the day,
and then Apple's iPod rose up to challenge Creative and
other companies. So this was a story that tied into
that the idea that these two companies were at war
with each other. Both of those first two links, cherryos

(15:36):
and Creative, were submitted by anonymous users. But the third
story wasn't. That story was rumors next iPod to have
downloadable games, and this was a story that Kevin Rose
himself submitted to dig back in the early development days
for the website. When they were still building out the site.

(15:57):
He submitted this. It managed to become pop seventy three
days before it was even submitted to the website, according
to the statistics on the page itself, which is kind
of funny because you could argue this is a bit
of foreshadowing for some of Diggs's later problems. But honestly,
this was probably just to test out the features before

(16:18):
they launched it. I don't think there was any real
attempt to game the system this early on. It was
more about making sure the website did what they wanted
it to do before they launched the site. Story number
four was one about a torrent search engine. I've done
episodes about torrents in the past if you want to
hear more about that. That was another submission from Kevin Rose,

(16:40):
and some people argue it was Rose attempting to get
a leg up by dominating Google Search for torrents search
because it was a very popular topic back in the
day still is to some extent. Story five was about
the Logitech Z fifty three hundred and five point one
surround speaker system, probably obsolete at this point. Keep in

(17:02):
mind that Rose was coming from a tech review and
talk show background. So it's not a huge shock that
almost all of the stories on dig back in the
day were technology related. But then comes story number six.
This was a major story one I think we all agree,
burst free from the tech centric nature of the other stories.

(17:26):
This was buy one, get one free jamba juice. Sadly,
thirteen years later, this offer no longer applies. They laughed
me out of the store. Story seven was called Ben's Bargains.
There was no possessive apostrophe after the end for Ben.

(17:49):
The name Ben b e n, so Ben's bargains. I
assume they mean bargains that belonged to Ben. I wish
I could tell you what the story was about, but uh,
later on it got deleted or merged into another story,
so it's all lost on me. I suppose Ben had
a bargain and I missed it, bummer. Story eight was

(18:12):
a headline called Cascading Style cheat Sheet, so this goes
back to talking about development creating cascading styles. Story nine
was blog box applications, and story ten was I don't
know because it disappeared. It was deleted and not archived

(18:35):
in time, so I guess story ten is story not
appearing in this podcast anyway. Those were the ten, well
nine stories that first appeared on Dig when it premiered.
Now I've got a lot more to say about Dig,
how it developed and how it eventually imploded, but before

(18:58):
I get into that, let's take a quick break to
thank our sponsor, all right. So, one of the early
features that Dig built into its system was comments. Users

(19:19):
could leave comments about links. They could actually start up
an entire comment thread, so it turned Dig into kind
of a forum about news items. It wasn't just a
place to share or promote or bury news. It was
also a place to discuss it. And of course users
could end up burying a news item and make it
drop off the list entirely if they felt that it

(19:40):
was merited. Sometimes people would try to spam Dig, especially
in those early days. I mean really, it was true
for the entire history of Dig, because you've got people
who just like to cause mischief. So there were people
who were trying to spam the page, and luckily the
berry function allowed the community to respond and to get

(20:01):
rid of stuff that was just cluttering things up. The
same was true for anyone who was seen to be
promoting something that was self serving, So For example, if
I were to try and share an article that I
had written on how stuff works to Dig directly, that
would not look so great, right. It was meant to
be a place where people discovered stuff and shared it

(20:24):
with others, as opposed to promoting their own work. That
was the other purpose for the Barry button was to
make sure that this was truly a democratized user generated
experience and not something that was dictated to them. More
on that as we progress now. The engineers that did
create an algorithm to determine if a story merited inclusion

(20:47):
on the main site or, in a later revision of dig,
on one of its major sub sections. So like Reddit,
Dig would eventually become divided into departments like gaming, Lifestyle, Entertainment, sports, science, technology, World,
and Business, and also the offbeat category. And of course

(21:08):
there was the main site, the main page that you
would go to if you went to dig dot com.
That was the primo real estate on dig. That's where
if you wrote a story, that's the page you wanted
it to show up on, sort of like the main
page on Reddit. Very much the same. Dig also created
a button that other sites could host on their own pages,
so you could include this bit of code in your

(21:30):
web page's HTML file, and a little button that would
would pop up on your page that would allow you
to have users click on it and submit content directly
from your page to Dig. That would let people either
submit a story entirely or to vote up or vote
up a story. Really, you'd had to go to dig

(21:51):
if you wanted to bury it. But once upon a
time you could dig stories on HowStuffWorks dot com. I
think we even we had a big button that was
active for quite some time before we did a site revision.
But yeah, it was one of those where if you
wanted to share what you saw, then you could click
on the dig button. It's very similar to the way

(22:13):
a lot of sites use Facebook and Twitter buttons today.
In fact, you could argue that Dig sort of paved
the way for those other sites to use that same
kind of functionality. Further down the road, Kevin Rose would
also launch a video podcast with Alex Albrecht called Dignation

(22:33):
that was one of the cornerstones of Revision three. That
video and podcast arm that I talked about that they
launched in late two thousand and five. They used Dignation
to talk about some of the top stories featured on Dig,
and the first episode published in two thousand and five,
several months after Dig had already launched. Depending upon what

(22:57):
source you look at, some people say it Dig started
or Dignation started in May one, two thousand and five.
Others say July first, two thousand and five, which seems
like a pretty big discrepancy. I was not listening to
Dignation at that time, so I cannot independently verify that
either way. But anyway, Dig launched in December two thousand

(23:18):
and four, so a few months later you get Dignation.
And one of the purposes for Dignation was to talk
about stories that had made their way on to Dig
and just to be kind of a discussion forum for it.
And so in a way it became a promotion for
the dig dot com website, and the two hosts were

(23:39):
really personable and funny and informed, and so it started
getting popular pretty quickly. One of the top stories that
very first episode was to talk about a major revision
to Dig, which was it was not even a year
old yet and Dig version two point zero was coming out.

(24:00):
And also it didn't hurt that Kevin Rose and Alex
Albrecht would drink a few beers on camera because it
made them more personable. They didn't get tore up on camera,
not typically anyway. Their shows could get a little rowdy
when they would do live shows at say south By Southwest,
but generally speaking, it just made them seem like approachable

(24:21):
human beings who were talking about cool stories. So it
was a really appealing pair that had a very approachable style,
and it led to great success for Dignation at least
for several years. I only ever saw them once at
south By Southwest, it was just before they concluded the show.

(24:43):
In October two thousand and five, Dig reached out to
venture capitalysts to get some funding. Remember, Kevin Rose funded
the initial launch of Dig with six thousand dollars of
his own money. The company managed to raise a cool
two and a half million dollars from various sources, including
the founder of Mosaic and Netscape, Mark Andresen. The user

(25:04):
base for Dig started to grow. It grew pretty steadily.
It hit eight hundred thousand users within eighteen months of launching,
which is pretty impressive. Eight hundred thousand registered users, it's
not bad, and the development team was busy adding more
functionality during that whole time, not only did they create
that tag system that allowed dig to divide up stories

(25:28):
into different divisions like whether it was technology or science
or whatever, but they also started looking into other features
as well, like a friend system where you could befriend
other users and follow the kind of stuff that they liked.
Maybe you might share a common interest with someone, and

(25:48):
that way it gave you even more opportunities to discover
cool stories that maybe weren't on the main page when
you log in, but because your friend liked it, you
would be able to see more about it. So that
was a but what really made dig turn more into
kind of a social network than just a news aggregator.
Really the name of the game was diversification. They really

(26:16):
helped Dig a lot because when it first started, it
was almost exclusively focused on technology. You remember when I
was listing out those first ten stories, but first nine stories,
eight of them were about tech. Only one was not
directly about technology. So it had a limited appeal for
a very particular audience. Let's call them nerds, because I

(26:39):
am a nerd, I have a nerd podcast. I'm doing
it right now. I'm not calling you guys nerds, but
I'm a nerd, so Dig really had an appeal to
nerds when it first started, and again no disrespect, I
consider myself one. But by two thousand and six the
site had really branched out with these other categories like
sports and entertainment and lifestyle, and so it had a

(27:02):
broader appeal. It was no longer just for technology enthusiasts.
It was for anybody who wanted to learn about the
coolest stories that were breaking in their particular area of interest.
Another adjustment helped add some credibility to Dig. They decided
to add in the capability for users to report stories
as being inaccurate. So there's a lot of talk today

(27:26):
about fake news, about sites that generate articles that are
not really reflective of reality that end up being misleading
or complete fabrications or lies, or they are trying to
be satire but they never really succeed in being satire. Well,

(27:47):
Dig built in this tool so that users could point
that out and those links could then be pulled from
the various pages on Dig so that they weren't cluttering
things up. They also had filters to help catch profanity
to help cut down on some flame wars that could
go on in comments. As it turns out, when you
let people comment, some people take advantage of that and

(28:10):
abuse the system, So they tried to deal with that
as best they could. They also wanted to make sure
that they could filter out profanity in the headlines and
stories themselves. It was a case of trying to make
sure that people were using Dig for the weight they
had intended it to be used, and not for it
to turn into just the wild West, And it also

(28:32):
showed that they still cared about how DIG operated. In
August two thousand and six, BusinessWeek featured Kevin Rose on
the cover of its magazine, and Revision III, that podcasting
company that Rose and as co founders, launched in late
two thousand and five, helped Dig secure another million dollars
in venture capital funding. At this point, Dig itself was

(28:57):
estimated to be valued at two hundred fifty million dollars
according to The New York Post, so less than two
years after it had launched, and it was worth a
quarter of a billion dollars two hundred and fifty million dollars.
That's crazy, but understandable when you realize this was a

(29:19):
powerful tool for people to share their interests and it
was driving insane traffic to other websites. Now, in two
thousand and seven, Kevin Rose said in a few interviews
that he was initially a little worried about the types
of content that could end up on dig because he
was worried that it might require a lot of policing
to make sure that the worst stuff on the Internet

(29:39):
didn't really just bully its way onto the main page.
But he said the community was consistently pretty good at
finding relevant, interesting stories and sharing them, and so really
the community in large part was policing itself fairly effectively. Now,
one time this didn't play out the way he wanted

(30:00):
was when someone posted a link to an encryption key
for HDDVD. Do you guys remember hddvds. That was the
format that was competing with Blu rays for high definition video.
And eventually, of course Blu ray won out, but for
a while it was a pretty tough competition, and the
encryption key would let you crack the protection around HDDVD,

(30:25):
which meant that you could then copy the content off
an HDDVD and potentially distribute it. And so a lot
of big companies were very upset about this, because you know,
they don't really like piracy for obvious reasons. It at
least is somewhat linked to a drop in revenue, although
you can't argue it's a one for one case, because

(30:46):
if someone steals something, that's not to say that they
would have bought it otherwise. Sometimes that's just just not true.
But sometimes if they steal something and share it, it
might end up costing you in sales. It's just impossible
to know to what extent right, because you can't guarantee
that all the people who download something would have otherwise
bought it. Still, it was a real problem. Now there's

(31:08):
nothing directly against the law from copying the content on
a piece of media that you have purchased for the
purposes of backup. However, having to circumvent encryption gets a
little more shady in the eyes of the law. So
while you could make a backup copy, you weren't supposed

(31:28):
to break encryption preventing you from making a backup copy.
And this is one of the many reasons why pirates
versus creators those battles get really ugly on both sides
because both sides have they do a lot of dancing
to justify their actions. I'll say that I don't necessarily

(31:50):
think that studios or creative companies are free of blame
in these cases. I also don't think that pirates are saints.
It's a complicated issue, all right. So Dig's owners kept
pulling down links to the encryption key that had been posted.
They were trying to head this off. They didn't want
to court a major lawsuit with a studio. They wanted

(32:13):
to avoid that. They didn't want anyone to be able
to say, hey, you're hosting this illegal encryption key that's
letting people bypass the security we put on hddvds. So
they were starting to pull down the links, but the
users wanted the links, and so they kept on posting them,
and they found tricky ways of posting them. They would
name them other things in order to try and get

(32:34):
around any detection. And so eventually Kevin Rose decided he
was going to side with the community. He said, quote,
you'd rather see Dig go down fighting than bow down
to a bigger company. End quote. And he said, if
that's what you want, that's what we're gonna do. We
are no longer going to take down those links, and

(32:54):
so he stopped. He said, We're gonna let them stay
up on dig because that's what you users want, and
that's the purpose of dig is to let the users
generate the stuff that they think is interesting, or at
least to share the stuff they think is interesting. And
so he sided with the community on that one. Now,
as Dig grew, so did its influence. Not only was

(33:17):
it driving engagement among its users on its own site,
it also could help drive traffic to other sites. So
if someone shared, say one of my articles on dig,
and it made the main page, we would suddenly see
a huge rush of traffic coming in from dig. And
that's valuable. You know. You got to remember that most

(33:37):
of the Internet was generating its revenue through page views
because the web pages were supported by advertising. So the
more eyeballs that were on the page, the more money
you were making. It became a goal for many sites
to develop content that folks would naturally share on Dig.
More and more began to incorporate the dig button on
their pages to encourage this behavior as early as two

(34:01):
thousand and six. Again, it launched in December two thousand
and four, but as early as two thousand and six,
other companies were already showing interest in potentially acquiring Dig.
Yahoo reportedly wanted to scoop up the company for forty
million dollars, not bad for a company that started on
six grand Rose himself was interested in pursuing a deal

(34:23):
with a totally different company, news Corp. News Corp had
just purchased MySpace. I did a whole episode about MySpace
ages ago. If you want to hear about that story,
it's news Corp's purchase of MySpace is commonly referred to
as one of the big big mistakes in mergers and
acquisitions in the tech world. At the time, news Corp

(34:45):
Was offering sixty million dollars to purchase Dig, and Rose
wanted to sell. He wanted to take take them up
on that offer, but he wasn't allowed to because Dig
had a board of directors and he had to answer
to this board of directors, and they would not approve
of a sale to news Corp. They thought that the
company was worth more than that. They thought Kevin Rose

(35:07):
was going to drive this company to even greater heights.
So even though Kevin Rose had created the company, even
though he had funded the initial company, he didn't have
the authorization to sell it to another corporation. So he
was forced to stick with it. He was really upset
about this, according to several of his friends, and frustrated

(35:29):
that he couldn't just sell the company that he had
created and make millions of dollars and then move on
to do something else. And at this point, Kevin Rose
owned about sixty percent of dig dot com. The board
though they wanted to hold out for a bigger fish,
they wanted to see a better offer, and eventually, a

(35:50):
couple years later, a bigger fish happened to swim by,
and that fish's name was Google. In two thousand and eight,
Google was rumored to consider Dig for a potential acquisition
for about two hundred million dollars, and this was more
than just rumor. Kevin Rose talked about it. The deal
was well on its way, but it fell apart toward

(36:10):
the end. There were fundamental disagreements that the two sides
could not see eye to eye on and ultimately Google
withdrew its intention to acquire Dig. So that was a
two hundred million dollar deal lost. Kevin Rose was beyond
frustrated about that. Instead, Dig ended up going up for

(36:31):
another round of venture capital investment to keep the company afloat,
because even though it was valuable it wasn't really generating
that much revenue, so this time they ended up raising
twenty eight point seven million dollars from Highland Capital Partners. Meanwhile,
behind the scenes at DIG, Rose was battling against his
boat board of directors. Rose decided to partner up with

(36:55):
a designer named Daniel Burka, who was also working for
DIG at the time, and together they built a file
sharing application that they called pounce Powncee. That's when the
board over at DIG said, hey, wait a minute, that
belongs to us because you work for us and Daniel

(37:16):
works for us. So you're using DIG assets to build
a totally different application that should belong to the shareholders
of DIG. It cannot be its own thing. Meanwhile, morale
at DIG was on the downslope. People are starting to
get very discouraged over at DIG. And then the board
said to Rose, hey, why don't you just knock it

(37:37):
out with all those other projects you're looking at, pay
attention to this company that you started. You need to
make sure you can motivate the people at dig dot com.
Pour your energy into being innovative in this company. Don't
just look around for other companies. Now, Kevin Rose didn't
exactly follow orders. He started working on a Twitter directory
app called we Follow, which he audationed unveiled it south

(38:01):
by Southwest. In two thousand and nine, Digg's board went
to Adelson, who was still CEO at the time, and
they told Adelson to fire Kevin Rose. So the board
of directors tells the CEO, you gotta fire this co founder.
But Rose and Addison had an agreement they could only
fire each other with the other's consent. In other words,

(38:24):
they had a veto for any direction that the board
wanted to take, as long as it was about firing
one or the other. So instead of firing him, Digg
decided that, hey, well acquire we Follow. So the Board
Directors was able to acquire this this venture that Kevin
Rose had created, and reportedly Kevin Rose earned a few

(38:46):
million dollars like six million bucks as a result of this.
But as part of that, in order for him to
get this money, he had to stick with DIG a
while longer. Around this time, Kevin Rose started to invest
in other companies, some of them turned out to be
huge ones, like Twitter, But as investments were taking his
attention away from Dig, according to his contemporaries, Kevin Rose

(39:09):
would sometimes just come in to Dig once a week
or just disappear for days and days at a time.
The rest of the time he was working on other projects,
investing in new companies, and that's really what excited him.
It turned out that that's what he was interested in,
the early process, when there's nothing but potential. A company
hasn't cemented itself, it hasn't turned into its permanent version

(39:33):
of itself, It could be practically anything. That's when Kevin
Rose is interested in working with those companies. It gives
him a lot of energy and creativity. He's not so
much interested once it establishes itself and managing day to
day activities is not really his forte. But he did
help a lot of companies out this way as a

(39:54):
venture capitalist investor, as an angel investor, if you will.
But the board of Dig was getting increasingly frustrated with
Kevin Rose, and meanwhile he was feeling the same way
about the board of directors. On the site itself, things
were getting pretty problematic. There were a group of dig
users who had essentially gained control of what did or
did not make the main page. In fact, according to

(40:17):
some sources, the top one hundred users on dig dot
com were responsible for fifty six percent of the content
on the front page of Dig. Keep in mind there
are millions of registered users by this point, and one
hundred people are in charge of more than half of
what appears on that main page. Now, they weren't exactly

(40:39):
gaming the system, but they were definitely using the system
to their advantage, whether knowingly or not. You see the
power users the ones who had been using dig the
most frequently in for the longest. Their votes had a
heavier weight to them than a new user's vote. So
if you had been on dig dot com since the

(41:00):
beginning and you had been using it regularly and you
voted up on an article, your vote counted way more
than my vote if I just joined diig dot com
the other day. And so that's how these top one
hundred users were essentially dictating what would appear on the
main page. And again, it wasn't that they were necessarily

(41:21):
setting out to do that. They were using Dig the
way they always had. They were up voting stories that
they thought were interesting, and they were down voting stories
that they thought were terrible. It just so happened that
their votes counted more than anybody else's. So sometimes they
might attempt to boost or drop a story by coordinating

(41:42):
their efforts, but it was just as possible that they
were literally using DIG the way it was meant to
be used. It's just that they had more influence than
anyone else did. Now Dig's initial solution to this problem
because the board of directors, the people behind the scenes
over a DIG, they weren't really keen on the fact
that a small group of people were having such a

(42:03):
huge influence on what was actually being shown. It was
very frustrating for new users. It was making it more
difficult to attract people to adopt DIG because if you
come into a system where it feels like it's an
old boys network and all the old boys are the
ones who dictate what happens, it feels like nothing you
do has any consequence. So they wanted to change this up,

(42:26):
and they decided to try a couple of different methods
to do it, but it didn't go over so well.
One of the things they did was installed some controls
behind the scenes to decrease the group's influence by essentially
dewaiting their contributions. Part of this meant removing the list
of top users from the site, which was kind of

(42:48):
a badge of honor to get your name listed among
the top users. But then once they got rid of
top users, these same power users started to feel like
they were being abandoned or ignored. Many of them felt
like they were being dismissed. That all the years that
they had been putting in working with dig, you know,

(43:10):
using the platform, promoting stories, burying bad stories, that all
of that was being swept aside, and so they were
feeling like that they were being punished for this, even
if they were just using Dig the way they always had.
And so the company began to alienate some of its
core user base, and that was a real problem because

(43:30):
they started to set a new tone. All Right, we're
getting into the beginning of the end. But before I
go any further, let's take another quick break to think
our sponsor. All Right, at this point in its history,

(43:53):
Dig had forty three million registered users, and Dig had
started to experiment with generating revenue on its own by
inserting dig ads into its pages. So between various headlines
of stories, you would get promoted advertisement. It would just
appear right there. There's sort of like the promoted search

(44:14):
results that you would find in Google, and like those,
the ads were clearly marked as ads. It wasn't like
they were tricking you into thinking you were reading a story.
They were marked as ads. And not only that, you
could actually vote on those ads. You could dig or
bury ads and gave users a lot of power when
it came to advertising, something that I think was particularly

(44:37):
interesting to allow your user base the opportunity to vote
down ads. It seems like that would be potentially dangerous
from a revenue standpoint, but it would also send a
real message about whether or not advertising was working or
very much not working. Around this time, dig also launched

(44:59):
app for the blossoming smartphone platforms of iOS and Android.
Now keep in mind, the iPhone came out in two
thousand and seven. Android came out in late two thousand
and seven, early two thousand and eight. This is two
thousand and nine we're talking about, so all of those
platforms were still very young, especially when you consider the
fact that when iOS first launched, you could not develop

(45:20):
an application for Apple. It was just the Apple apps
on the original iPhone for a while before they launched
the ability for other people to program apps for it.
Things were not going smoothly. Behind the scenes, o Red Dig,
Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson were having some disagreements about
the direction of the company, and those disagreements continued to

(45:42):
escalate throughout two thousand and nine and into twenty ten,
until Adelson was asked to step down as CEO. More
or less he was fired. Kevin Rose chose not to
use his veto option. So remember, Adelson and Rose had
disagreement where it would require their I guess, I guess

(46:04):
their agreement with the board of directors before either could
be fired, and Rose decided not to veno the board's
decision to fire Adelson. So Ailson resigned. Essentially he was
able to officially, according to the communication he gave, he
stepped down from the position, but behind the scenes people

(46:25):
say that he was essentially fired as CEO. But he
said he wanted to go and work on more startup ideas,
and that's exactly what he did. I'll talk more about
that toward the end, Kevin Rose ended up taking over
control of the company he founded. He became the new
CEO of DIG on April fifth, twenty ten. In May

(46:45):
twenty ten, the company laid off about ten percent of
its work staff, now, Kevin Rose was still listening to
the community. One of the things that he listened to
was their reaction to a tool called the Digbar. The
company had launched the dig bar earlier, and this was
a toolbar that would appear above websites, so it would

(47:07):
install itself so in your browser essentially, so you would
see this toolbar whenever you would go to other websites.
And it was meant to let people interact with dig
without leaving the website they were on. So you could
go read some other website and use this toolbar to
leave comments about this particular article on dig, but without

(47:27):
leaving the website to go to dig first. However, a
lot of people fell It was really intrusive and irritating
and distracting. So one of his first actions as CEO,
Kevin Rose decided to ditch the Digbar. He was responding
to the community reaction and hopes were running high on
Kevin Rose, both from the Dig community and the board

(47:50):
of directors. Everyone was hoping that Kevin Rose was getting
re energized, reinvested in the company that he had created.
The board had been really critical of Rose's focus on
other projects, those other things that he was trying to
launch while still technically working for dig but they were
hoping that this meant he was back on board to
lead the company in a new direction with innovation. So

(48:15):
the big hope here was that Kevin Rose was now
grown out of a phase according to the Board of directors,
that he would no longer just focus on stuff as
it was brand new and when it interests him, but
that he would be capable of leading the company in
the day to day operations of dig dot com. Meanwhile,

(48:35):
the company began to alpha test the next version of
dig dot com. This would be version four point zero.
This is the infamous one. This is the one that
people totally flipped out over for good reason. I don't
think that it was unmerited. So before Kevin Rose became CEO,

(48:58):
dig dot com showed off some of it concepts for
version four point zero at south By Southwest in twenty ten,
and a lot of people were really excited by what
they saw. They thought that the innovations were merited, they
were good. They felt that it was going to add
value to the dig dot com experience. But once Kevin

(49:20):
Rose took over as CEO, he essentially threw all of
that away and decided to start from scratch. He more
or less discarded all the changes, all the work that
had been done for version four point zero, and this
alienated some of the engineers at dig dot com as
a result, some of whom left the company because of that.
And instead he said, let's go in this completely different direction.

(49:43):
And there are a lot of people who argue about
why he did this. Some people say he genuinely just
didn't see the value of the revisions. Some say, well,
this was an effort for him to distance himself from
the previous CEO. But whatever the purpose, he decided to
go totally different direction, and it was one that ended
up being almost universally unpopular among his community. So one

(50:09):
of the new features of the Kevin Rose led version
four point zero of dig dot com allowed news sites
to submit their own content automatically to dig. I cannot
stress how this alienated the community at dig dot com,

(50:29):
because keep in mind, up to this point, the whole
concept was that users were the ones submitting and voting
on the content that would show up on dig dot com.
If you thought a story was interesting, you could submit it.
If other people thought it was interesting, they could vote
for it. And that's how it could naturally rise to
the top. Now with version four point zero, a news site,

(50:54):
a media company could submit its own stuff directly to
dig dot com, passing that user experience, essentially turning dig
dot com into more of a normal news aggregator and
less of a user generated experience. So it seemed completely
antithetical to the original philosophy behind dig and as a result,

(51:17):
community members went by nanas. In fact, a lot of
people said that this was going to be the death
blow of dig dot com, and arguably that's what did it.
So a lot of people decided that they would just
leave and go and use Reddit instead of dig dot com.
Reddit was much more similar to what dig had been

(51:38):
in the past. It also didn't help that revision four
point zero consolidated a lot of those interests that I
talked about earlier, you know, things like sports and entertainment
and lifestyle. It consolidated a lot of those and made
it more difficult to find specific content in those buckets
because now they were bigger buckets that contained lots of stuff,

(51:59):
not just these broken out interests. So they also got
rid of the bury button, so you couldn't bury stories anymore.
You couldn't vote down a story, and arguably it was
to make sure that these users couldn't just end up

(52:20):
taking control of dig and get rid of anything that
criticized themselves, for example, but it also meant that there
was if someone if a news outlet published a story
directly to dig dot com, there was no way for
you to express your displeasure to vote that story down.
The only thing you could really do is not voted up.

(52:43):
So a lot of people felt that this was taking
the voice of the community away from the community, and
this was a community based website. Some people decided that
they would promote stories from Reddit as a way to
make a dig at dig, so they would submit links

(53:05):
from Reddit onto dig dot com. It was kind of
a method of protest, but more people were just leaving
dig entirely. They were ditching it and going to Reddit.
In fact, Alexis o'hanian, one of Reddit's co founders, wrote
an open letter to Kevin Rose, and he was specifically
criticizing the fact that they had made these changes. Ohanian said,

(53:29):
the new version of dig reeks of VC medaling and
VC stands for a venture capitalist or venture capital. So
o'hanian was essentially calling Dig a sellout, saying, obviously you're
taking money from these companies in order to have this relationship,
and it's at the expense of the community that made

(53:50):
Dig a valuable asset in the first place. He was saying,
it's not the links that make dig dot com valuable.
Links already exist out there on the Internet. What makes
dig valuable is this user engagement, this community that ends
up supporting various links. That's where the value is. But

(54:13):
you're completely undermining that by siding with venture capitals investors.
After just a few short months, it was clear that
Kevin Rose's heart was not in running this company and
leading it in day to day operations. It didn't excite him.
He found it grueling. He's still very much preferred being

(54:35):
in on the ground floor as a company is just
starting to find its way. He still thought that was
the most interesting aspect of business. He was CEO for
less than six months. Dig then hired on an Amazon
executive named Matt Williams to take over the role of CEO,
and Kevin Rose stepped down in August twenty ten. Rose

(54:58):
himself began to drift away from the company again. He
was showing more interest in venture capital investments and other ventures,
and less interest in the company that he founded. By
March twenty eleven, he officially resigned from dig dot com.
He remained on as sort of a consultant to the board,
but he was no longer an official employee. He also

(55:20):
launched a company called Milk. This was meant to be
a startup lab for new applications, So if you wanted
to develop an app, then Milk was supposed to be
a place where you could incubate these ideas, and Rose
thought that this would give him the opportunity to work
on a lot of different projects just as they were
starting up, which meant that he would constantly be engaged.

(55:43):
He would never get bored because there'd always be something
new to work on. Didn't work out that way. The
first app out of Milk was an application called oinc,
as in the noise that a pig makes, and it
was the only app the company ever produced, and rather
than continue to deve Oink, Rose chose to shut down
Milk and he joined Google instead. He took over some

(56:07):
of the people from Milk and they all joined Google Venture,
which is kind of their startup and spin off lab.
He also brought the Dignation show to an end in
late twenty eleven. He said that they had stopped recording
the show by October twenty eleven, but that the unpublished
shows would continue to air or to be published until

(56:30):
sometime in January twenty twelve. And that's when Dignation came
to an end. It had a two part finale and
then it was over. Meanwhile, dig dot com was still
hemorrhaging users. It didn't last much longer after Kevin Rose resigned. Wow,
this classic episode's a long one, isn't it. So yeah,
we still have some information about dig to get through,

(56:53):
believe it or not. So we're going to take one
last break and then finish out this classic episode. On
July twelfth, twenty twelve, Dig was essentially split into three

(57:14):
different components and sold off to different buyers. The intellectual
property of dig dot com itself, the website dig dot
com it went to a company called Beta Works. They
bought this once incredibly valuable asset for five hundred thousand dollars.
Keep in mind, this is a company that just a

(57:35):
few years previous had been valued at two hundred and
fifty million dollars. And then the site is sold for
five hundred thousand As for the other assets, they brought
in more cash, actually than the intellectual property of dig
dot com itself. Linked In bought several patents that dig
dot com owned for four million dollars, so the patents

(57:56):
were worth more than the website was, and The Washington
Post spent about twelve million dollars bringing on several members
of Digg's staff to work on its social code project. Now,
dig dot com still exists today. If you try to
navigate to dig dot com, you will see a website.
It is a news aggregator website. It looks very different

(58:18):
from what it used to be. Now it looks kind
of more like a standard news aggregate website with images
and links to various stories across the web. Users can
still give stories a thumbs up that can promote some
stories into a more visible position on the web page,
but there are human editors who moderate what shows up

(58:38):
on the page itself, and you can't comment on stories anymore,
at least not right now. According to Beta Works. The
reason for this is that comments are hard. That's totally true.
I am not making fun of Beta Works for saying this,
because it is really a challenge to implement comments in
a constructive way on your website, particularly in today's world,

(59:00):
because it can easily be abused, very very easily. Too
many people take the opportunity to use a comments section
to cause mischief. And there's not really a big surprise here.
It takes very little effort to cause a whole lot
of commotion using comments, So it takes little work to

(59:22):
make a big impact. If you're someone who likes to
cause trouble, that is an open door invitation to do so.
And obviously we've seen this across other places on the web.
YouTube's a great example. It's not as bad as four chan,
but it's a great example. So dig still exists, though
you don't hear as many folks talk about these days.

(59:42):
But it does get several million visitors each month. According
to one source, I saw that it got twelve million
monthly visitors as of January twenty fifteen, so one would
presume it's probably around that level or higher now. And
twelve million monthly visitors isn't anything to sneeze at. It's
a pretty healthy amount of traffic. As for the founders,

(01:00:03):
what are they up to now? Well, Jay Adelson worked
on several different ventures. After he stepped down as CEO.
He ultimately co founded a company called Center Electric. It's
a venture capital firm, and so Adelson is still using
his experience and money to help launch new companies. Ron
Gordetski stayed with DIG until July twenty ten, which means

(01:00:24):
he left during Kevin Rose's tenure as CEO. He went
on to co found Flick, the review app that I
mentioned earlier in this episode, and then he transitioned over
to YouTube. He worked there till February twenty sixteen. He
then became a digital service expert in the United States
Digital Service This is a startup company at the White

(01:00:44):
House dedicated to using technology to create better tools and
services for American citizens. No word on how that's going
right now. Owen Byrne left DIG in two thousand and seven,
and he worked for several different companies over the following years,
including Expedia and trip Advisor. And he was mostly building
out systems for these companies, so he was working on

(01:01:07):
the back end. And you know, once you finish that
then often you might go on to do it at
a different company. So that's largely what he did. As
of January twenty seventeen, he started working for Zipcar in
San Francisco as a software engineer, and Kevin Rose Well.
He's still an advisor to Google Ventures, which is again
that division of Google that is all about creating startups

(01:01:29):
and spin off companies. He sits on the board of
a company called hodin Key, which is a wristwatch enthusiast
website related I assume to the wristwatch manufacturer out in Europe.
And he's still involved in venture capital. He invests in
companies early on while they're still malleable. Dig is an

(01:01:49):
interesting story, and many of the elements that were pioneered
at dig found their way into other platforms like Reddit
or Twitter or Facebook. All of these ways of sharing content,
many of them originated over at Dig. So we have
Dig to thank for a lot of the way our
social networking sites work today. And also it's easy for

(01:02:12):
us to see in retrospect how the decisions that were
made over at dig dot com ultimately were it's undoing,
particularly and how it seemingly turned its back on the
community of users that made it so valuable in the
first place. But at the time it was probably much
harder to see that that's what was going to happen.
I mean, obviously you wouldn't make those decisions if you

(01:02:33):
knew it was going to lead to the collapse or
implosion of a company. Democratization on the Internet is a
tricky thing. So if I ever do an episode about Reddit,
I'll get into more about the democratization of the Internet.
Reddit is not a stranger to controversy. It is structured
very much in a way that similar to the early

(01:02:53):
days of dig dot com. But they have been no
stranger to behind the scenes drama. There have been plenty
of stories about that over for Reddit, so it's not
like dig dot com was an example of just bad management.
It's a very tricky thing to do when you're letting
your users define the experience. Sometimes that does not turn

(01:03:17):
out in a way that's particularly nice. That's it for
the Dig story, at least as far as it went
in twenty seventeen. Since then, other stuff has happened to Dig.
For example, a company called buy sell Ads purchased Dig
in twenty eighteen. Don't know how much it paid for that.

(01:03:42):
It has gone through a couple of different iterations since then.
Michael O'Connor took over as CEO. In twenty seventeen, it
is you know, shut down its dig reader RSS service.
So yeah, a lot of stuff has changed set over

(01:04:03):
the years with dig Maybe I do need to do
perhaps a short update at some point to talk about
how things have changed in more recent years. But I
think it's it's pretty safe to say that Digg's influence
has been diminished over the last several years. It's not

(01:04:24):
frequently in the conversation the way say Reddit is, but
it played a very important role, particularly for things like
Discovery back in the earlier days of the web. So
it is an important part of the story of the
web overall. So I hope you enjoyed this classic episode

(01:04:46):
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
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