Tashlan
Don’t talk shit. One does not hear of Abraxas by accident.
Letter from Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian to Digg Founder Kevin Rose, from Internet Archive of http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
Kevin,
It’s been a while since you cleverly debuted digg on ScreenSavers on that “Slashdot Killers” segment.
Funded by Y Combinator, Steve Huffman and I started work on reddit in June 2005, which we launched a month later. A month after that, we learned about digg and realized this was going to be an interesting new space – we had some catching up to do.
Remember those great days? It was long before Facebook was confusing people with awkward privacy settings, before Twitter existed, and even pre-dating the “social media” industry – back when “social media gurus” were simply called “tools.”
You built a remarkably popular website with an adoring fanbase most companies can only dream of. Diggnation was a brilliant decision and paved the way for Revision3, which doesn’t get half of the press it deserves. In short: you were in the zone.
And we got lucky, frankly. We sold to Condé Nast in 2006, which stayed hands off, let the site keep growing, and even encouraged us to open source – the site has grown to over 1/2 million unique visitors a day. And all of that is run by only 4 awesomesauce developers (edit: and one fantastic community manager!); I think the math comes out to 1 dev for every 2 million monthly uniques.
You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round.
I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
Those are your words from that aforementioned 2004 video segment.
Now what matters is how many followers & influence a user has and how many followers & influence they’ve got.
Where have we heard this before: Twitter? Facebook? GoogleBuzz?
Kevin, you absolutely deserve all the credit for starting the movement – fascinating things happen when online communities can efficiently share content. Whales get silly names and we can expose the tragedies our fellow man endures faster than ever before.
It’s a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.
But I’ve got a strong feeling it’s not you making these decisions anymore; and to see your baby abused like this must be awful.
This really should’ve been called “an open letter to digg’s VCs” (but what kind of linkbait would that be?) because they really ought to give the power back to the founder.
All the best,
Alexis
I think that’s why “enshittification” is so aggravating to me. We’ve seen time and time again that users revolt from sites that are cluttered, busy, and stuffed with ads in favor of things that are clean and text based (Digg 4 to Reddit, Myspace to Facebook) but somehow the same people proud of themselves for their clean interfaces end up trying to convince everyone that “actually spam is fine.” Die a hero or live a villain, etc., but I can’t for a moment believe anyone is proud of themselves when stuffing every square inch of a website with bullshit and trying to extract every penny. They know shit looks like shit because they, too, don’t like sites that look like this.
There was a moment in the first Digg revolt where the digg admins were like we hear you, go ahead, post the AAC encryption key. We’ll go into the future together. It hit like crack and we want to see it again, especially since spez and Alexis were cheering that shit on at the time
Honestly like, if he makes it so mods can be popularly elected/unelected, well, he’s gonna end up with the other sort of Reddit protestor – the feral shitposters – tearing down every mod on the whole page. I assume he would have to reverse that policy at exactly the moment he gets rid of his … enemies, I guess? – or else ViolentAcrezMAGAEdition is gonna be running r/worldnews with Roger Stone.