I was a developer at digg from 2007-2010, and I can say his statement is just flat out wrong. Digg did hire great PHP programmers, but that was because they were great programmers, overall. Every single one of them moved, with ease, to other languages when required. In fact, a majority of the backend of v4 was written in Python.

It's also interesting to note that most ex-digg engineers primarily work in a language other than PHP currently.

Really? He touches on 1 of the problems he encountered with digg and you interpret this as Kevin throwing his employees under the bus?

He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now. The site was written in PHP by PHP developers. Somehow that wasn't good enough so he pivoted and replaced them with C++ developers.

Anyway, I liked Digg. Then then newer users got involved and stories they didn't like got buried. The first time I used it the articles were technical and really interesting. Then it got political, stupid memes, etc. In its default state I think it was better than Reddit. Reddit is great but you have to work on it. Clean your browser cache and look at reddit like you're going their for the first time. What do you see? Crap from r/AWW, r/atheism, and r/politics take up all or most of the frontpage.

> He's been throwing his employees under the bus for over a year now.

Yep: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2352521

It wasn't the execution that destroyed Digg, it was the ideas behind v4. It's a remarkable case study in what not to do with a popular community website, and pointing to technical mistakes is just deflection. Maybe the developers were terrible, but that still has very little to do with why Digg failed.

Then unsubscribe from those subreddits and subscribe to those that appeal to your interests. Manicure your own content a little bit.

As a new user, how do you know that it's good enough to be worth logging in and investing the effort? The default front page is your initial impression, and it does not appear like it is likely to attract interesting people to talk to in its current state.

Depends on how they got there. If they just typed in reddit.com in the location bar, you may be right. But I bet a lot of people find the site via a deep link.