Paul Tassi has a very smart post on the rise and fall of Digg. He writes:
Why did Digg die a slow and painful death? It depends on who you ask. In the wake of this news, nearly every major outlet creditsFacebook and Twitter with delivering the killing blow. While both sites are large and have grown while Digg shrunk, to credit them with the destruction of the site is incorrect. Though both are technically “social media” sites, neither truly replicated the functionality of Digg as a vote-based news stream. Only one other site did: Reddit.
Digg and Reddit were like warring siblings a few years back. Digg was the charming older brother, sending out millions of hits to stories that hit its front page with a lovely web 2.0 design. Reddit was its scraggly younger sibling, a confusing wall of white text and blue links that sent out far fewer hits.
But over time, Digg changed. Redesign after redesign unnerved loyal users. Finally, one new version, v4, was so atrocious that there was a mass exodus from the site altogether. The new site was a disaster both visually and content-wise, as “sponsored links” were thrust onto the front page and users felt like they were being packaged and sold to companies.
Where did this exodus lead? Paul asks. To reddit. Ergo, reddit killed Digg.
But this misses Paul's very own point: the failure of Digg was all its own. Reddit didn't do anything. They chose a different path and it was successful. If they hadn't, surely someone else would have stepped in and filled the void.
Reddit was just lucky that whoever was calling the redesign shots over at Digg was doing such an extremely bad job going about it.
Reddit didn't kill Digg, Digg killed itself.
So don't get too pleased with yourselves you horde of reddit users. You were just in the right place at the right time.
P.S. Thank you reddit for linking to this post. A couple of very brief thoughts on some of the complaints I've read on the major thread:
1) Yes, Forbes contributors are paid based on traffic. No, this does not mean that we're Evil. Okay, I may be Evil, but that's beside the point...
It means that more writers are getting paid, and more views are being aired here at Forbes.
I think that's a really cool thing given the overall state of journalism. In fact, Forbes dead-tree subscriptions are up, too!
Then again, I'm biased.
Still, every publication that relies on eyeballs for its survival pays its writers based on traffic and circulation. Forbes and some other publications have simply adapted to an internet model. It's always best to judge work on its merits, and writers on their integrity and ability.
If you think I'm a terrible writer, I can live with that. But writing me off because I get paid under a specific business model? Meh.
2) This is a blog post, not an "article."
I see this all the time at reddit when one of my very short pieces is linked there. People moan and groan and gnash their teeth down to nubs because it's short. Oh dear lord, it's a short blog post! I've never seen one of those before! Trust me, short blog posts do exist in the wild. I've seen them with my own eyes.
Sometimes I write kind-of-sort-of long posts, too. Sometimes, occasionally, they might qualify as "articles."
Listen, if you don't like my very short blog post, you're in luck - because they're so short they hardly wasted any of your time! You should be thanking me. Besides, it's not the size that counts.
3) If you think it's ridiculous that more than one person has written about reddit vs. Digg on Forbes...
you either A) badly misunderstand how blogging works (at its best, an ongoing back-and-forth - a conversation about ideas, important or otherwise...) or B) misunderstand how important social media has become and the crucial role that a massive site like reddit plays in the evolution of the internet.
Maybe it's trivial, but everything is trivial compared to something else. I write about video games. Trivial! But lots of people find video games interesting, so triviality takes a back seat.
4) No, this "article", er, blog post, is not the most exciting insight ever.
It is not a staggering work of heartbreaking genius. Other people almost certainly thought of this before me. It is just a blog post.
I hang my head in abject shame.
