Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Don't get me wrong but Digg is run by idiots and that's really how I see it. And I don't see why the shareholders should take it easy on them.



Problem A: An uninspiring leadership which simply wanted to be paid monthly.
Kevin Rose has been missing in action for forever. And now he comes back to rescue Digg and wants to be the knight in shining armour? Yea doesn't work that way. Take for example, Sergey Brin. The guy has drive and he is pumping out products one after another. Look at Bill Gates. He had a hit or two but he didn't stop to party. How about Steve Jobs? These people succeeded because they were involved in day to day business. Kevin was never involved. He was doing a podcast that no one cared about. Really what was he thinking? And the thing that was really wrong with Digg was its leadership, Jay Adelson. I mean you call DiggBar an innovation? The way I see it is that, Digg leadership simply wanted to be paid monthly. And that's it. They wanted an easy life with a fat pay cheque every month. And that’s what they got. You're in the content business for god sake and that too 'news' business where there is no shortage of content. And all you got to show for is a DiggBar with some visualizations? Is this what innovation looks like? I mean are we on the same page here?




Problem B: It’s not the design stupid. It’s the market you should be after.
Digg was never interested in the news market or content market. They made a uni-direction bet where people from across the globe would gather to 'share' news and that's it. That's a very limited and narrow vision for your product. Digg leadership never established themselves as the market leaders. They thought they were the leaders but they never were. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to start branching out, and I don`t mean rev3 videos here. rev3 was a childish idea no matter which way you cut it. Digg is in the news business and it requires you to stay relevant and Digg simply isn't relevant anymore. They had the chance and they squandered it. As a matter of fact they’ve squandered every opportunity. They came up with an idea to interview politician and famous people. Now that was worth some juice but I presume, they simply saw the number and thought, “Nope this can’t work.” Wrong. That was a good idea and instead of making it a feature of Digg, they got rid of it.



Problem C: Now what to do? Hey we can design the future again.
Sebastian your assessment that Digg doesn't have the capacity to grow is correct. Why? It’s because the leadership at Digg approach all problems with a very filtered and narrow vision. I don`t believe they know that there is such a thing as ‘thinking big’. Rather than branching out and looking for ways to expand themselves, Digg is perfectly happy providing top 10 comic strips for the day. No one is interested in licensing rev3 content or any RocketBoom stuff because it’s stupid for the most part. High-Tech is a fast pace industry. You can be the leader today and bozo the clown the next day. That’s one reason why every company wants to hire young talent and would do anything to get them. Diggs approach that a simple redesign will make its problems go away is absurd. And the lack of creativity shows in the redesign. They’ve lowered the standards to copy-pasting rather than innovating.
Diggs needs to grow and spread out rather than limit itself. And I don’t mean make another iPhone app, or Android app or WinMo app. Those things are part of natural progression. They need to control the content or they’ll be irrelevant.