Digg

“We have Justin as a CEO who runs kind of like the day to day and builds out, you know, the Reddit competitor version of dig. And then we have, you know, me that I'm kind of more in the labs area where I'm pushing on the edges of ideas and saying, what might we…”

“At that time we were larger than Facebook. And so traffic wise”

“The asset of Dig sold for pennies on the dollar, wasn't really worth a whole lot. But the patents ended up being worth millions of dollars that LinkedIn bought them from us.”

“At when it was first on sale, I had debated buying it when the company went bankrupt and I told Kevin this later, I was like, I debated actually buying it and then just redirecting it to Reddit.”

“In our defense, and I have the email to prove it, we did not know about it when we started Reddit. It was about a month into the company we'd already launched that we'd finally learned about Dig.”

“The goal for V one is just get a thing back online that makes people feel nostalgic for dig. Where, where it left off, maybe not version four, but just before that. And then modernizing some of the obvious stuff. But look, this will not be, you know, the first…”

“I think the first beachhead for dig relaunched ends up being the, look, I'm 41, almost 42. It's like the old head nostalgia for a vibe Z internet... So I assume it's going to be a lot of the like older geeks who were, you know, big dig fans who love, you know,…”

“We're basically in the super cycle of again.”

“They're gonna be so subscale. They're not gonna have an advertising model. It's gonna be like some sort of fucking coin bullshit thing. Like there's, you can't build an advertising model.”

“We put this video on dig and read it and our beta waiting list went from 5000 to 85,000 people overnight.”

“We grew to thirty eight million monthly uniques.”

“This is a decision that never works out for anyone.”

“Kevin Rose had started Digg for 1500 dollars over a weekend, and so there's no technical risk there.”

“When I was in the middle of web two point O, which was the, when dig was at its peak, which was about a 2000, early 2006. You know, we were hitting around thirty eight million people a month using the site.”

“I sold a little bit of my dig stock enough to give me the ammo to go and do small C checks, you know, and put, you know, 25 K into, you know, Twitter's seed round and put, you know, 25 K and, or it was more into Facebook, but they're a little bit later stage.”

“That was part of his success, but I think that that group of individuals actually became pretty trollish, quite honestly, by the end of it, and navigating how to succeed through that was very hard for Digg and for Kevin, and you watched someone like a Reddit c…”

“And when you look at kind of the history of Dick, for example, I think what happened is there were, you know, dozens and hundreds of power users that took over the community And basically resisted change for the better of the business going forward, right?”

“Dig was five times bigger than us. They released a new version of their software that was so Disliked by users that the users came to Reddit.”

“It really was Dig version four. That was a launch in the summer of twenty-ten. Where Dig effectively fundamentally changed as a product. It wasn't just a user experience change. It wasn't just a branding change. It was the functionality and it was the kind of …”

“At the end of 2012, what happened was that Dig was really split apart into kind of three different deals. The first was that a lot of the folks, the people, and the tech went to Washington Post, and then the second was that a bunch of the patents went to Linke…”

“And we think that if we get best kind of discovery and best conversation and we find the intersection between those two, then it can become that stutter step app. And that's where we want to be in five years.”

“He skipped four grades in school and graduated university at just 18, at which point he moved to the States on his own, and within months Was working alongside tech legends Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson at Dig, where he launched their Android mobile app.”

“It was, in fact, one of the top, I think, three traffic news websites at one time in its history with forty-plus million monthly unique visitors”

“It was a really hard, you know, kind of first six weeks, which included laying off about 40% of the staff”

“That probably would have more quickly brought in some additional talent that that, that hadn't kind of lived through the pain of, you know, kind of the V four launch and brought in new blood more, kind of more quickly to really help not only carry new perspect…”

“Digg, for example, is fairly large, ah, in terms of Betaworks companies. It's 15 people.”

“I think Digg, Digg seems to be catering to the wrong crowd. Either they're, ah, acquiescing to investor pressure or, you know, just trying to change their product too much. Maybe they're trying to compete with Twitter too hard. But what they're not focusing on…”

“Well, Reddit is crushing Dig now. I think they're almost twice as large as Dig... In traffic... And uniques per month and page views per month. Or is my understanding, you know, I haven't, I don't have direct access to Reddit numbers anymore, but from what the…”