Re:Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million U...
by vlad on Thursday July 12, 2012 @08:55PM
(#4237681)
Very misleading quote. The full article features disbelief about Compete.com numbers, so it seems as much a critique of Compete.com as it does a story about Digg.
Since I ended up reading the article, I have to wonder if Compete counted Digg buttons on blogs as visits. Facebook, of course, did not even get a Share/Like button until 2.5 years later in late 2009 (http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/facebook-share-buttons/)
It would be easy to get millions of daily uniques if popular newspapers all request your script or image in every article, and sites like Compete don't properly take social buttons into account.
(It's interesting that recent articles have debated if Facebook itself now counts the display or click of a Like button as a visit.)
Re:Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million U...
by Pewpewarrows on Friday July 13, 2012 @10:26AM
(#4239927)
His HN profile immediately talks about running Reddit's servers. And he's using the same recognizable username. I don't know how more obvious it could have been.
Re:Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million U...
by mkramlich on Friday July 13, 2012 @12:23AM
(#4238206)
This re-emphasizes one of my own personal rules of entrepreneurship: when someone offers you a FU money exit, and you don't already have FU money, you take it. You take it and walk. Because if you don't, you might regret it, and who knows what the future will bring. After you reach FU money, it's not like you can't go and try building another new product/service/website/gadget again -- you can, except you'll be starting from a much safer and happier place, with more resources, connections, eyeballs, etc.
Re:Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million U...
by notatoad on Thursday July 12, 2012 @10:03PM
(#4237874)
No maybe about it. Digg lost their market by messing with their product. It's an interesting case, because you can make a direct comparison with reddit: two nearly identical products serving the same market started at the same time. Digg tried to grow too fast and failed, reddit grew at its natural pace and succeeded.
Re:Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million U...
by dmix on Thursday July 12, 2012 @10:37PM
(#4237948)
I don't know... I was part of a big migration to reddit around 2008-2009.
I remember there being tons of threads on Reddit of ex-diggers making fun of Digg around then. There were frequent posts daily about the complete degradation of quality on Digg back then.
The running joke was all the posts on Digg's current frontpage were from Reddits frontpage yesterday.
The redesign (in 2010) was the nail in the coffin.
Since I ended up reading the article, I have to wonder if Compete counted Digg buttons on blogs as visits. Facebook, of course, did not even get a Share/Like button until 2.5 years later in late 2009 (http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/facebook-share-buttons/) It would be easy to get millions of daily uniques if popular newspapers all request your script or image in every article, and sites like Compete don't properly take social buttons into account.
(It's interesting that recent articles have debated if Facebook itself now counts the display or click of a Like button as a visit.)
I sincerely doubt Digg surpassed Facebook's traffic at any point in the company's lifetime.
But, you know, I could be wrong.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1850428
Try not to let it bother you too much.
Or am I mistaken? Maybe if they had just left it alone and did gradual tweaks instead...
I remember there being tons of threads on Reddit of ex-diggers making fun of Digg around then. There were frequent posts daily about the complete degradation of quality on Digg back then.
The running joke was all the posts on Digg's current frontpage were from Reddits frontpage yesterday.
The redesign (in 2010) was the nail in the coffin.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/
Er... Fascinating to see such an old article come up on Hackernews without the age of the article in parenthesis.
That's a derp.