My guess is that the root cause is really Digg's (relative) stagnation. They all expected to sell out years ago and the drudgery and risk is probably getting to them. They took too much VC, shot for the stars, and missed -- the social bookmarking Friendster. Alexis and Steve of Reddit should feel pretty smart right about now.
Jay founded Equinix. After five years, how could he possibly remain interested in yet another news aggregator with gross revenues that are less than his personal wealth? I just find it interesting that Rose is the new CEO. I've always felt that Rose was an actor that Jay hired to play a part, in order to feel like he was putting his film-school background to good use (which is also the reason for the frat-boy fart joke tv show that Rose does).
Kevin's been effectively absent for a year and now is charging in with a mind to rework the imminent V4 release of Digg. Sounds like a risky move; hope it works out for them.
Edit: To clarify, I'm hoping that this move doesn't signal a second-system mindset settling in at Digg HQ.
Yeah, the very idea that there's a launch of a Digg V4 with multi-year dev cycles seems weird to me. Usually you don't do websites as if you're rolling out a new release of Windows.
I can kind of see the point. Website users are infamous for hating change. So it can be easier to make big changes / redesign, and then fix little things, rather than to make small changes that are constantly getting pushback.
Hmm, I can see that reasoning, but I think it might overall be worse. If you change a ton of things all at once, you do get the user gripes over with all at once, but you also have less continuity than if you introduce a few changes here and there. I'm not sure that a website wants to give users the retro feeling they experience when they were used to Windows XP, installed Vista, and now feel like everything's weird and different.
Admittedly that's wishy-washy, and I'm not against bundling up some amount of changes into groups to roll out, especially since presumably some kinds of changes depend on each other anyway. It just seems wrong if it's becoming a huge thing equivalent to traditional product-release cycles.
You can release a new version all at once and avoid user gripes by launching the new version on a subdomain so users can get used to it. Digg did this with their last version and probably will with V4. Facebook and Zappos did as well.
Absolutely fantastic. I hope one day to be able to get into a hissy fit with one of my co-workers and just stop working for a year (but still get paid).
