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The Lessons For Facebook, Twitter And Reddit In Digg's Demise

This article is more than 10 years old.

As this photo makes clear, Digg co-founder Kevin Rose does, in fact, have ears. (Photo credit: Joi)

If you're Mark Zuckerberg or Dick Costolo or David Karp, what happened to Digg is the kind of thing that messes with your sleep. If one virtual community can go from being worth almost $164 million to getting sold for parts in just a few years, why not another one?

The good news for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and everyone else is that Digg's fate was avoidable. The precipitous drop in usage that saw its audience slide from 30 million to 8 million in a little more than a year wasn't due to fickle consumer tastes, or to competitive pressure from a hotter rival, whatever some might say. It was self-inflicted, the result of discreet and obvious missteps.

To identify where Digg went off the rails, I talked to the folks who knew it most intimately: its power Diggers. People like Andrew "Mr. Babyman" Sorcini and Amy Vernon spent hours on the site in 2007 and 2008, reading and voting on news, interacting with other community members and competing to improve their rankings by getting more stories onto  the front page.

In their view, here are the lessons to draw from Digg's demise.

You've gotta dance with the one that brung you. A fanatical user base is a mixed blessing. Users who feel responsible for success can be your most fervent champions, but they're also likely to feel aggrieved when their concerns aren't prioritized.

Every company that tries to evolve from a niche product with a cultish following to a mass-market offering has to contend with resistance from its core. There's no way around that except to finesse it. Digg didn't do that. At times it seemed to be going out of its way to antagonize its superfans -- as when it got rid of Shouts, which many community members used for talking to each other, in 2009.

"It was the only major social site that had no means of communication on the actual site," says Vernon. "They just did so many things that showed their complete disregard for the community."

Lip service doesn't count. In 2010, when the Digg team was preparing its "Version 4" makeover, it invited a number of top Diggers to be part of a private beta test. Sorcini and Vernon both participated and gave their feedback. Both hated the changes and said so. "I flatly told them that if they launched this version of Digg, the regular usership would abandon the site," says Sorcini.

It didn't matter. Apparently the Diggers were invited to give them a feeling that they were part of the process, but not actually to be part of the process. "There were no changes made from the private alpha to launching V4 publicly," says Vernon. "They ignored everything we said."

Sorcini's prediction proved accurate, of course. Muhammad Saleem says he blames Digg co-founder Kevin Rose "for not listening to his community," and also blames TechCrunch editor in chief Michael Arrington for "egging him on with moronic bullshit" like this piece urging him to ignore all community feedback and stick to his vision. (Rose didn't respond to a request for comment.)

User experience has to be paramount. The most reviled aspect of V4 was the way it allowed partner publishers to auto-submit articles to the site via RSS feed. Suddenly, what had been a quirky forum for user-submitted stories was overflowing with generic content no actual human had uploaded.

You would think social companies would have learned a lesson from the demise of MySpace, which drove away its audience with a user experience that felt cluttered, spammy and over-monetized. Some have. When Facebook started worrying that faddish social readers were filling users' news feeds with articles and videos they weren't interested in, it slammed on the brakes, even though it meant discomfiting publishers who were counting on the readers as a major new traffic source.

"When you put the need to become profitable over the core purpose of the site, you're going to lose your community," says Sorcini.

The less you do, the more important it is to do it right. Arrington is right about one thing: Facebook has managed, over and over again, to implement some change it wanted to make in the face of resistance from its users. But that doesn't mean Digg could afford to show the same level of nonchalance.

"With Facebook, so many more people use it for so many different things," says Daniel Honigman, director of digital strategy at LoSasso Integrated Marketing and another former power-Digger. It could afford, therefore, to tinker with photos, or the news feed, or its messaging function, knowing that no single change would lead to a walkout. Digg, on the other hand, really only did one thing: aggregated news stories and let users vote on them.

If the Olive Garden changes its pizza recipe and people don't like the new ones, it can ride out the waves. If Pizza Hut does it...that's the problem.

Know your level. Not listening to its users was Digg's cardinal sin, but if there was a deeper failing underlying that, it was overreach. It's worth noting that two of the most successful news aggregators out there, the Drudge Report and Fark, have been all but unchanged for years. Both have very loyal audiences, and neither has done anything terribly aggressive to try to grow them in years. It's not a formula for Facebook-like riches, but it's better than crashing and burning.

Reddit has largely supplanted Digg as the go-to watering hole for social news, avoiding the sort of sudden moves that could have spooked its users. Its growth trajectory has been strong, but Sorcini believes it will soon hit a ceiling. "As successful as Reddit has been in the wake of Digg's downfall, it's kind of a dinosaur," he says. "They'll be superseded by the larger social networks, like Facebook and Twitter." Still, as Matt Drudge can tell you, even a dinosaur can hang around for a long time as long as it knows its niche.

Correction: In the original version of this post, Andrew Sorcini's last name was spelled incorrectly. My apologies for the error.