What did Digg do wrong? A community that does not form a sticky

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[Core Tip] The 200 million-dollar valuation at the peak was a cursory 500,000-dollar day. In the past seven years of Digg the history of what has been the failure, resulting in a promising WEB 2.0 typical representative of the fall to today's imperfect ending? What do Digg's experiences and lessons leave us thinking?

July 12, Digg was Betaworks acquisition, the purchase price is only 500,000 U.S. dollars. Even if the price of the former team and the patent is counted, the total purchase price is only 16 million dollars. Its shrinkage is staggering compared with its 200 million dollar takeover intentions at the height of the summit. What mistakes have been made in the seven-year history of Digg, leading to the end of today's very promising WEB 2.0 typical representative? What do Digg's experiences and lessons leave us thinking?

Vulnerabilities on product mechanisms

From the date of birth, Digg's basic product shape has never changed: Users submit links to various articles, and users will "top" and "Step" (Digg and Bury). Calculate the most popular articles (usually the most frequently used articles) by a specific algorithm and arrange them on the first page in turn.

Digg is characterized by the right to judge the quality of the article from the Web site editor to the hands of the user. Let users show their attitude through Digg and Bury, and decide the ranking of articles based on the opinions of a large number of users. This use of the power of users, basically completely by the user generated and judged the content of the product form and the big line of the portal site are very different. "The right to judge back to the user" is quickly recognized by a large number of users, Digg this popular, become the user generated content of the Web 2.0 typical representative of the site. Today TechCrunch star Author, who was unemployed's MG Siegler, described the excitement of what he had submitted for the first time on top of the page:

After registering for Digg for one months, I submitted the Digg article for the first time on the home page. The feeling was great: the content I picked up was recognized by so many people. I still remember the feeling of pleasure. Digg is like a drug, and I'm addicted.

However, such an ideal state did not last for a long time. With Digg's popularity and the influx of large numbers of users, many flaws in the design of the product are exposed, and despite all the efforts made by Digg, the authorities have been unable to overcome these problems completely:

Ranking of economic benefits

On a site such as Digg, when the user submitted a link to the top of the homepage, it will bring a large number of clicks for their site, so as to gain substantial benefits, in 2008 Google significantly improve the Digg homepage link after the page Rank weight more so. In this case, many people begin to gain interest and try to artificially affect the ranking of their submitted links. A lot of time there are a number of charges after the customer assigned to the top of the link to the first person or organization.

Digg officials quickly became aware of the situation and tried to downplay the effects of the malicious brush rankings by changing algorithms and evaluation mechanisms, but the effort was ineffective. Digg the entire Site home page and the various categories of the first frequent quality of the link content is poor. Until today, this situation has still not been truly resolved. Now if you search the famous foreign mission crowdsourcing website Fiverr, you can see a lot of this aspect of the premium link service, you can only spend 5 of dollars to hire people to their own link brush 200 times "Digg."

Lack of control over content impartiality

In the Web 1.0 era, the editors who followed the unified standard assumed the task of controlling the content and ensuring the fairness of content. By the time the Web 2.0 was created by the user, the program disappeared. Users to submit their own content, express their attitude and value orientation. Many times Web 2.0 sites such as Digg have become a stage for a serious confrontation between different user views. A large number of biased, discriminatory messages appear on Digg, and even produce organized collective action against a particular position or ideology.

In August 2010, for example, independent media AlterNet once reported that there was a long-standing conservative group called Diggpatriots (Digg Patriot) on Digg. They have organized and planned to collectively Bury the libertarian articles on Digg to prevent these articles from appearing on the Digg home page. There are a lot of things like this.

It can be seen that Digg's product form has the original intention of "returning the judge to the user", but it still fails to express the voice and demand of ordinary users. And over time, such problems have not been alleviated, but more and more serious.

Repeated drastic revisions

In the small step run fast iteration becomes the common practice of the Web 2.0 website, Digg practice is extremely alternative--digg actually with version number, every once in a while will make a basic and before completely different big revision. Each time the big revision of the Digg team's senior staff will be committed to the new version will solve a large number of difficult outstanding issues, such as the above mentioned ranking fairness problem is almost always in the commitment list. However, after the real revision, users will be disappointed to find that the improvement effect is very small, their long-term adaptation to the use of habit is often completely broken need to start again.

Such discontent erupted in the fourth major revision of Digg in August 2010. When the fourth revision, Digg almost completely changed the previous design and use of the process, crammed into a lot of social-related new features, but put a number of widely acclaimed, the product is essential to remove the basic features. This includes even the most basic Bury functions.

In addition, this time the revision of Digg also abandoned the past long-term use of MySQL database, instead of Cassandra database. This abrupt change in the basic technology structure of radical behavior has brought serious consequences: in the revision after a long time, Digg is in a very unstable state, a variety of functions frequently error, many times the site simply can not access.

Angry users have chosen to vote with their hands and feet, on the one hand, users to work together repeatedly the direct competitor Reddit news on the top Digg home, on the other hand, a large number of users directly away from Digg to Reddit.

After the revision, Reddit quickly grew, and Digg quickly went into decline and fell. The following images are the traffic trends for Digg (Blue Line) and Reddit (red lines) from September 2010 to February 2011. You can see that after the fourth edition of Digg in August 2010, Digg's visit quickly fell to a trough in September, and then, although there was a rebound, Reddit from the beginning of December to completely exceed digg, from the dust and to leave Digg far behind.

It is worth mentioning is Digg direct competition, today still Reddit, from the date of the creation of almost no in the interface, characteristics and operating processes on what major changes, has been adhering to the simple ordinary, easy to start interface. Although Reddit now looks incredibly primitive, it has succeeded in clinging to a large number of users on its content and operational features, including a large number of people who defected from Digg.

Not forming a viscous community

As a Web 2.0 site where users produce content, Digg has never formed a highly cohesive community. User loyalty is very low, once Digg revised or made other user dissatisfaction, users can use their feet to vote defection to rival camp. This is in addition to the product features that Digg does not strengthen the user relationship, and because Digg has been making all kinds of mistakes on a variety of issues, the consequence of these errors is that users do not have a sense of belonging in the Digg community, and the corresponding viscosity is very low.

For example, in order to repair the inherent vulnerabilities of Digg in the product mechanism, Digg introduced a certain algorithm from the second edition, changed the first edition relies on the number of Digg and Bury to determine the order of the article entries, to the senior users of the operation of higher weight. However, this practice led to the senior user "promises", the general user two-bit situation. Plus the first page entries are often a variety of pay brush ranking behavior pollution, a lot of ordinary Digg users feel that they no matter what content to submit no meaning, will not get the results of their own expectations, so chose to silence or leave.

As TechCrunch editor-in-chief Arlington said, "In the end Digg has become a small circle of entertainment for more than 250,000 core users, and for most people outside the circle, Digg has become irrelevant." ”

Reckless bandwagon and transformation

Twitter and Facebook are emerging social networks that make content sharing easier. On Digg, it takes up to eight steps to send a link.

Founder of--kevin Rose,digg

After a few years of Digg, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are starting to pop up. Sharing in social networks is more convenient, and the emphasis on user relationships makes these sites more user-friendly. Digg felt the threat, so in the August 2010 's great failure of the big revision, Digg removed a large number of essential basic features, but introduced a personalized home page, friends between the attention and attention relationships, friends dynamic push and other social networking features. At that time, Digg was almost transformed into a social network with a shared link, which was similar to the fast-fail iTunes Ping that was later launched.

Such behavior is very bad. At the bottom of that year's TechCrunch, we could see a lot of angry comments from users:

We like the old version of digg! we don't want to focus on Digg for other users!!!

If I'm going to use Twitter, I'm just going to use Twitter, so what's the use of using Digg like Twitter!!!

The Reddit founder, Alexis Ohanian, sent an open letter to Digg founder Kevin Rose, which reviews the Digg-filled version of this:

This new version of Digg ... Copy features from a variety of popular websites and then blindly stack them together. It deviates from Digg's core values, leaving the beginner of "judging the right to the user" far behind.

After the failure of the revision, Digg did not fully learn the lesson, but also involved in social reading and many other areas, but the basic failure. Deviate from the core value of their products, blindly follow the trend of the hot, is the main reason for the decline of Digg.

The taxing left by Digg

Digg's seven-year venture ended imperfectly, but its advocacy of the WEB 2.0 concept of "giving the right to judgment to users" has had a profound impact. Many Internet services today attach great importance to letting users judge content through "top" and "step", and UGC and social elements are also on the way. The decline of the pioneer Digg brings us a lot to ponder:

Are "user-created content" inherently defective and flawed? How to alleviate? How to eliminate and weaken the "user created content" mode of all kinds of interference factors?

In the era of "User creation content", how does the traditional editorial profession play a role in the content creation and reading? How to combine the two? (The article "What kind of reading do we need" before the Geek Park is discussed)

How do you balance the impact of core and average users in a user community? How to maintain the core user enthusiasm and creativity at the same time improve the average user of the product viscosity?

In the face of the endless trend and trends, how should entrepreneurs improve their products properly on the basis of adhering to the core values?

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