Once upon a time, Kevin was not actually an asshole and would give credit to the people who did the work. Perhaps because of me, but more likely because of several years of advice from true assholes, he has risen to the occasion, and now says he "created" this site, when in fact I can 100% guarantee he paid others to do the actual work. Kevin couldn't write a line of code or build an html page to save his life.

If a guy who couldnt write a line of code or build an html page was able to get a startup up and running, raise funds, create one of the top destination site on the net, changed the way we consume news, and be worth millions only a few months after having an idea...then Bravo to him. You got paid, and noone had a gun to your head to do the work.

The beautiful part of this is that you can always go ahead and give us a new way to share news. Digg just scratched the surface.

It might seem a little too ranting if you are unaware of who ojbyrne is but this will help bring more light into the picture. http://owenbyrne.com/resume/

I do respect your criticism, though I think it's a bit hyperbolic. While no one held a gun to my head, I was repeatedly misled by people who I believed, mistakenly, had at least a small amount of integrity.

I am always reminded of the classic Hugh McLeod cartoon: http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/zzzzazzdggg...

Perhaps I'm in that bottom part of the pyramid, but the top section is well populated too.

As with most things Kevin, it was built by digg employees. During their off time of course (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

But he's #1 in "tech", Owen!!!!11

here is something that I always wondered about, did he ever offer you some equity in digg for all the work you did?

Of course. My bitching and moaning is entirely due to the fact that others at the company have been able to sell their equity at attractive prices, while simultaneously flushing the company down the toilet.

Would you like to buy some shares?

Why are you so bitter Owen? Has that been discussed in another topic or post here?

It's mostly captured in the above comment. I'm not really all that bitter.

OH well the story of Digg in the beginning included you and now your no longer there making the above comments.

Really none of my business, but what is your Digg story after... 20 something hires coder off of rent-a-coder site and becomes wildly successful?

I got a little press coverage recently (or more properly our team did): http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/02/27/tripadvis...

Also I'm going to be a keynote speaker at the Dutch PHP Conference in June: http://www.phpconference.nl/

Mostly working hard and getting paid very well at my day job, saving money, trying to unload my digg shares ;-)

And rent-a-coder wasn't involved in digg in any way. Nor really was elance. That's part of the mythology they dreamed up.

Seems like you are not very happy with kevin for some reason. If it's because he didn't give enough credit for your work, well... let's say it's ok but if your comments are outta jealousy... thumbs down. (of course I've hardly heard of an owen related to digg.)

I'm sensitive to your accusation of jealousy because I probably am a bit jealous. However I (and most people who know the whole story) think it's justified. I have gotten a little notoriety out of the experience, however, and it's worth something (it got me my current job, for instance), so I intend to speak up about it as often as I can. There's plenty of people who joined digg long after me who are much more extreme about self-promotion. Probably why you haven't heard of me.

The Internet used to be a nice place for nerds to hide. Every day, we're losing turf to this . . . this narcissists' playground; wefollow.com is further evidence of the decay. Even the once-hallowed niche of geekdom is being overrun by zero-sum games of self-perpetuating egomaniacs who are entirely too obsessed with this concept of having "followers".

It's a list of twitter users sorted by follower count.

Therefore it just reinforces the existing popular users and doesn't expose you to interesting and new people.

Stupid-wank-fest.

Business model: none.

Life expectancy: one week.

You could be wrong. How about having paid twitter users on the front page, or any other page as ad?. Just last week Jason Calacanis offered $250k to twitter, if twitter puts his link on the front page. Once a traffic is established,, not definitely $250k here, but even a few dollars from twitter users for paid links would make him profit.

I refuse to participate in what I call "forced viral" schemes. I'm not going to spam my followers with essentially an advertisement for WeFollow just so I can join it.

Actually the majority of your followers wouldn't see it, only if they have the users with the "show me replies to users I don't follow" setting enabled.

Cool, but the effort is pretty capitalist, make the rich richer :), I rather read a blog that suggest a twitter user every week that doesn't have 2000+ followers :), or maybe list the users that are more suggested in #followfriday

btw, follow me at: http://twitter.com/i_tweet_only_with_my_friends

Hey, thought that was a pretty good idea for finding "rising stars". Seems like it's been done http://www.boxuk.com/followfriday/

This obsession with large-scale followings seems rather pointless, but I do enjoy seeing other developers or interesting people.

I really didn't like the concept from the moment I landed on the site. It's like adding to the stinky concept of 'twitter suggestions'. Both make the flow of twitter so unnatural. @barrackobama follower count is way natural than @britneyspears counter.

LOL there are some people listed as "celebrities" that are definitely NOT celebrities!

This reminds me of Guy Kawasaki's AllTop

currently, it doesn't seem to check back if your followers have increased.

Browsing tags, I wonder why porn hasn't invaded twitter

Holy smokes!

I had a similar idea around a year back - to create a directory with links to blogs and public pages of guys "who have done it" (internet celebs and entrepreneurs).

WeFollow is cool.