Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you. It's a Friday, which means it's time for a classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published way back on May fifth, twenty seventeen. It is called the Dig Story. Digg known as the homepage of the Internet, at least once upon a time. It still exists. It's not like it's gone, but it certainly has changed a great deal since its founding. So let's listen to this classic episode about Dig. Today we're going to explore the story of dig dot com, what it was, how it came about, and exactly why. Some people say it serves as a lesson in community mismanagement. It's very interesting. First, let me give you a quick overview of what dig was all about, and to some extent, is still about, though the current incarnation of dig is very different from what was thought of as Dig back in the day. So do you know Reddit? Okay, that's kind of what Dig was. Dig was essentially a lot like what Reddit is now, and a lot of people who used Dig abandoned it for Reddit, and we'll talk about why in this episode. But more specifically, Dig was a site where users could share links to web pages, and it was part social network, part news aggregator, and it set itself apart from other services with similar functions, Like there was dell ish Shuss. You might remember that you old timers of the Internet. That was sort of a bookmarking app where you could link to a page that you intend to go back to over and over and you could easily share those bookmarks with other people. But the whole purpose was this was a reference you intended to return to repeatedly. That's not really what Dig was interested in. They were more about sharing links to timely pieces of content like news articles, for example, and then users on Dig's site could vote. They could boost a topic further up the main page, or they could end up knocking it down the main page. Boosting was called digging. You would dig an article or a link and say that's awesome. I want that promoted because I think it's really interesting. If you wanted to vote it down, you buried it. So there was digging and burying, which is odd because if we're talking about the physical act. That's very similar, but in this case, digging means I dig it. Bury means let's bury that story. It's not interesting, it doesn't belong here. It was also meant to allow users to determine which stories were the most relevant and interesting, and they were to have control. Really, the idea was that the users of the site determined what went on the site and how that content was arranged based upon their actions. So it gave a lot of control to its user base, and that had a real appeal to it, right, And we'll dive more into Dig in just a little bit. Also, just in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that while I don't personally know the founders of dig, we have never really officially met. I think I met Kevin Rose once, but I know a lot of folks who are friends with them, so we have a lot of friends in common. And over the years, some of the stuff that was going on over at dig kind of made its way to my ears through the grapevine, you know, just basic gossip type stuff. Now, fortunately, because I'm me, I've forgotten almost all of that. I have no I remember hearing a lot about Dig back in the day, but I didn't retain any of that information. I never really used DIG that much myself, so it never took hold in my brain. However, I thought it was important for me to disclose the fact that at least I know some of the same people that the founders knew, that we ran in the same circles, just to disclose that. But I don't think any biases have crept through in my reporting of this because my memory is so bad. It's not that I am so ethical, it's that my brain just didn't hold onto the information. I'd like to think I would be ethical if my brain did hold onto it. But we'll never know, now, will we. Anyway. The founders of Dig included Jay Addelson, Ron Gorrigetsky owen Burn, and Kevin Rose. They started development on the site back in October two thousand and four, and they launched dig on December fourth or fifth, two thousand and four. So let's talk a bit about each of those guys and what they brought to DIG. First, we're gonna mention Jay Adelson. He came from Detroit and he grew up in as cecil of Welcome to Nightville would say, he grew up in Michigan. He got a degree in film and broadcasting with a concentration in computer science from Boston University in nineteen ninety two. After he graduated, he worked for companies like the ISP, the Internet service provider Netcom. He helped design the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, and he later founded a company called Equinix, which was another Internet data center and infrastructure company. So his yorick was primarily on the inner workings of the systems that the Internet itself depends upon, you know, not websites or but rather the actual infrastructure that allows computers to communicate with each other. He worked a lot on those those sort of systems, and it was actually in his job at Equinox, where the company he had co founded, where he would first meet Kevin Rose, you know, one of the other co founders of DIG, probably the most famous of the founders of DIG. Kevin Rose at the time was doing a segment for a show called The Screen Savers, and I'll mention that show again when I get to Kevin Addison would then become the business manager for Dig once it became an official thing. He used his experience to hire the initial management team for the company and it was Adilson who led the charge in raising venture capital shortly after dig launched. He would also become the company's CEO in two thousand and five, and he would co found Revision three along with Kevin Rose, also in two thousand and five. Ron Gordetski is a software engineer. He studied at the University of California, San Diego, and his role on the team was to be the system's engineering manager. Gorgetsky would also co found Revision three later on, so he was one of those members. Revision three initially was kind of a podcasting and video arm of dig It sort of existed as its own thing, and it sort of existed as an extension of dig itself. Gorydetski also co founded a company later on on called Flick. Had two f's in the beginning is fflick, so flick. It was a film news and reviews site that based its information off of Twitter posts. Google eventually would acquire Flick in twenty eleven, and Gordetski went on to work for YouTube until twenty sixteen. Owen Burn, the third co founder, built the PHP code for the original dig site, and you might be saying, well, what is PHP. PHP is an irritating acronym because it's a recursive acronym, which means that it has its own acronym in its full name. The full name is PHP Hypertext Processor, which isn't a very satisfying answer if I ask you what is PHP. It's a general purpose scripting language and its open source and it can be embedded into HTML. So essentially, what Burne's job was was building out the framework for the original dig site and to add in the functionality of the basic purposes for DIG. So he was responsible for making sure that he could actually develop the the basic functions that DIG had when it launched. In return, he was rewarded with equity in the company itself, so he had some ownership of DIG when it first launched, and his title was senior software engineer and co founder. He would stay on with DIG until two thousand and seven. Then we get to Kevin Rose, who is two freaking years younger than I am. Multi millionaire Kevin Rose two years younger than I am. I gotta be fair. The dude's brilliant. He's a very intelligent guy, so I can't really fault him. It's just a case of sour grapes with me. He has founded numerous startups, including not only Dig, but also Revision three, a company called Pounce, and another one called milk Now. He got his start on the tech TV series The Screen Savers. He originally came on to tech TV as an it kind of guy, but eventually he started to work behind the scenes as a production assistant for The Screen Savers, and gradually he transitioned to appearing on camera and eventually became a co host of the Screen Savers itself. When Leo Laporte left the show, Kevin Rose kind of stepped into Leo Laporte's role on the Screen Savers. Later on, Comcast would acquire tech TV and merge it with another channel called G four, and Kevin Rose initially would transition over with the G four team, but by two thousand and five he negotiated his release from his contract with G four, and of course, by that time Dig had already become a thing. It had launched in late two thousand and four. It was Rose and Allison who first came up with the idea for a social news aggregation service, and Kevin Rose decided he would pay for this initial development out of his own pocket. He took six thousand dollars of his own savings to fund the building of the dig initial build, so it really was his money. I mean, he believed in this enough to put his own cash down. It wasn't a case of him asking for loans from other people. He was twenty seven years old at the time. The co founders settled on the name dig because they originally wanted Dig with one G. But they had a problem. Disney had already registered the urlwww dot dig dot com. And I don't know if you know this, but Disney's not in the habit of giving up property that it owns typically, so they decide instead to go with two g's and get around that problem. They launched the site on December fifth, two thousand and four, and on December thirteenth, two thousand and four, Kevin Rose would mention dig dot com on an episode of The screen Savers, so he essentially got to use the screen Savers to promote this other project he had done. He was co hosting the screen Savers at the time, so he took the time to say, Hey, we've got this new project called dig dot com. It's a user generated news aggregator site. And it's a way for us to really concentrate on the coolest stories out there on the inner And so the site began to gather users pretty slowly but steadily at first, and back then the site was really simple. It listed stories by brief headlines, which were also links, so you could click on the little headline, which was user generated. People would type out what they thought the story essentially was. That would be your hypertext link to take you to the story. They would also include a brief summary of what the story was about. And the more users clicked dig as in I like this on a story, the higher it would appear on the main page. And as some stories would climb up obviously other stories had to drop down lower. And if a story dropped down low enough, it would eventually roll over to the second page of dig. And this is very much like search engines. A lot of people will only pay attention to that first page. They don't want to dig further down into the pages. So once you end up on page two, it it's really you see a massive drop off on traffic to that link. This is true for Reddit, it's true for dig Or, it was true for dig and it's true for search engines as well. Being on that main page is prime real estate. And if you were burying a story enough, if enough users buried a story, it would drop off entirely. And the only way you could see it from that point forward is if you enabled an option in your user profile to view things that had been buried off the page in search results. So you could search for something that had been buried off the page and you could find it that way, but only if you enabled that option in your profile. It was really all about driving engagement and community activity. And you might want to know what the first few dig stories were, like, what appeared on Dig's site when it launched. What were the top ten stories of dig dot com when it went live? I got a list for you. Story number one was cherryos delayed till Q one of two thousand and five, And that raises the question, what the heck was CHERRYOS. Well, that was a power PC G four emulator for Windows, which is a fancy way of saying it was a program meant to simulate an Apple operating system so that Windows PC users could actually run Apple programs on Windows XP. It was an emulator. It emulated the Apple operating system, or rather the Apple processor, not really the operating system anyway. Back in late two thousand and four, it was apparently big news that the program was experiencing delays. It would eventually come out on March eighth, two thousand and five, in case you're curious, Not that it's relevant anymore, but there you go. Story number two said that Creative declares war against the iPod. Actually it said delare's war against the iPod. It left in a typo, but we know they meant declare, and this ties into that topic I covered not too long ago about the history of MP three players. You might remember that Creative was one of the companies designing MP three players back in the day, and then Apple's iPod rose up to challenge Creative and other companies. So this was a story that tied into that the idea that these two companies were at war with each other. Both of those first two links, cherryos and Creative, were submitted by anonymous users. But the third story wasn't. That story was rumors next iPod to have downloadable games, and this was a story that Kevin Rose himself submitted to dig back in the early development days for the website. When they were still building out the site. He submitted this. It managed to become pop seventy three days before it was even submitted to the website, according to the statistics on the page itself, which is kind of funny because you could argue this is a bit of foreshadowing for some of Diggs's later problems. But honestly, this was probably just to test out the features before they launched it. I don't think there was any real attempt to game the system this early on. It was more about making sure the website did what they wanted it to do before they launched the site. Story number four was one about a torrent search engine. I've done episodes about torrents in the past if you want to hear more about that. That was another submission from Kevin Rose, and some people argue it was Rose attempting to get a leg up by dominating Google Search for torrents search because it was a very popular topic back in the day still is to some extent. Story five was about the Logitech Z fifty three hundred and five point one surround speaker system, probably obsolete at this point. Keep in mind that Rose was coming from a tech review and talk show background. So it's not a huge shock that almost all of the stories on dig back in the day were technology related. But then comes story number six. This was a major story one I think we all agree, burst free from the tech centric nature of the other stories. This was buy one, get one free jamba juice. Sadly, thirteen years later, this offer no longer applies. They laughed me out of the store. Story seven was called Ben's Bargains. There was no possessive apostrophe after the end for Ben. The name Ben b e n, so Ben's bargains. I assume they mean bargains that belonged to Ben. I wish I could tell you what the story was about, but uh, later on it got deleted or merged into another story, so it's all lost on me. I suppose Ben had a bargain and I missed it, bummer. Story eight was a headline called Cascading Style cheat Sheet, so this goes back to talking about development creating cascading styles. Story nine was blog box applications, and story ten was I don't know because it disappeared. It was deleted and not archived in time, so I guess story ten is story not appearing in this podcast anyway. Those were the ten, well nine stories that first appeared on Dig when it premiered. Now I've got a lot more to say about Dig, how it developed and how it eventually imploded, but before I get into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor, all right. So, one of the early features that Dig built into its system was comments. Users could leave comments about links. They could actually start up an entire comment thread, so it turned Dig into kind of a forum about news items. It wasn't just a place to share or promote or bury news. It was also a place to discuss it. And of course users could end up burying a news item and make it drop off the list entirely if they felt that it was merited. Sometimes people would try to spam Dig, especially in those early days. I mean really, it was true for the entire history of Dig, because you've got people who just like to cause mischief. So there were people who were trying to spam the page, and luckily the berry function allowed the community to respond and to get rid of stuff that was just cluttering things up. The same was true for anyone who was seen to be promoting something that was self serving, So For example, if I were to try and share an article that I had written on how stuff works to Dig directly, that would not look so great, right. It was meant to be a place where people discovered stuff and shared it with others, as opposed to promoting their own work. That was the other purpose for the Barry button was to make sure that this was truly a democratized user generated experience and not something that was dictated to them. More on that as we progress now. The engineers that did create an algorithm to determine if a story merited inclusion on the main site or, in a later revision of dig, on one of its major sub sections. So like Reddit, Dig would eventually become divided into departments like gaming, Lifestyle, Entertainment, sports, science, technology, World, and Business, and also the offbeat category. And of course there was the main site, the main page that you would go to if you went to dig dot com. That was the primo real estate on dig. That's where if you wrote a story, that's the page you wanted it to show up on, sort of like the main page on Reddit. Very much the same. Dig also created a button that other sites could host on their own pages, so you could include this bit of code in your web page's HTML file, and a little button that would would pop up on your page that would allow you to have users click on it and submit content directly from your page to Dig. That would let people either submit a story entirely or to vote up or vote up a story. Really, you'd had to go to dig if you wanted to bury it. But once upon a time you could dig stories on HowStuffWorks dot com. I think we even we had a big button that was active for quite some time before we did a site revision. But yeah, it was one of those where if you wanted to share what you saw, then you could click on the dig button. It's very similar to the way a lot of sites use Facebook and Twitter buttons today. In fact, you could argue that Dig sort of paved the way for those other sites to use that same kind of functionality. Further down the road, Kevin Rose would also launch a video podcast with Alex Albrecht called Dignation that was one of the cornerstones of Revision three. That video and podcast arm that I talked about that they launched in late two thousand and five. They used Dignation to talk about some of the top stories featured on Dig, and the first episode published in two thousand and five, several months after Dig had already launched. Depending upon what source you look at, some people say it Dig started or Dignation started in May one, two thousand and five. Others say July first, two thousand and five, which seems like a pretty big discrepancy. I was not listening to Dignation at that time, so I cannot independently verify that either way. But anyway, Dig launched in December two thousand and four, so a few months later you get Dignation. And one of the purposes for Dignation was to talk about stories that had made their way on to Dig and just to be kind of a discussion forum for it. And so in a way it became a promotion for the dig dot com website, and the two hosts were really personable and funny and informed, and so it started getting popular pretty quickly. One of the top stories that very first episode was to talk about a major revision to Dig, which was it was not even a year old yet and Dig version two point zero was coming out. And also it didn't hurt that Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht would drink a few beers on camera because it made them more personable. They didn't get tore up on camera, not typically anyway. Their shows could get a little rowdy when they would do live shows at say south By Southwest, but generally speaking, it just made them seem like approachable human beings who were talking about cool stories. So it was a really appealing pair that had a very approachable style, and it led to great success for Dignation at least for several years. I only ever saw them once at south By Southwest, it was just before they concluded the show. In October two thousand and five, Dig reached out to venture capitalysts to get some funding. Remember, Kevin Rose funded the initial launch of Dig with six thousand dollars of his own money. The company managed to raise a cool two and a half million dollars from various sources, including the founder of Mosaic and Netscape, Mark Andresen. The user base for Dig started to grow. It grew pretty steadily. It hit eight hundred thousand users within eighteen months of launching, which is pretty impressive. Eight hundred thousand registered users, it's not bad, and the development team was busy adding more functionality during that whole time, not only did they create that tag system that allowed dig to divide up stories into different divisions like whether it was technology or science or whatever, but they also started looking into other features as well, like a friend system where you could befriend other users and follow the kind of stuff that they liked. Maybe you might share a common interest with someone, and that way it gave you even more opportunities to discover cool stories that maybe weren't on the main page when you log in, but because your friend liked it, you would be able to see more about it. So that was a but what really made dig turn more into kind of a social network than just a news aggregator. Really the name of the game was diversification. They really helped Dig a lot because when it first started, it was almost exclusively focused on technology. You remember when I was listing out those first ten stories, but first nine stories, eight of them were about tech. Only one was not directly about technology. So it had a limited appeal for a very particular audience. Let's call them nerds, because I am a nerd, I have a nerd podcast. I'm doing it right now. I'm not calling you guys nerds, but I'm a nerd, so Dig really had an appeal to nerds when it first started, and again no disrespect, I consider myself one. But by two thousand and six the site had really branched out with these other categories like sports and entertainment and lifestyle, and so it had a broader appeal. It was no longer just for technology enthusiasts. It was for anybody who wanted to learn about the coolest stories that were breaking in their particular area of interest. Another adjustment helped add some credibility to Dig. They decided to add in the capability for users to report stories as being inaccurate. So there's a lot of talk today about fake news, about sites that generate articles that are not really reflective of reality that end up being misleading or complete fabrications or lies, or they are trying to be satire but they never really succeed in being satire. Well, Dig built in this tool so that users could point that out and those links could then be pulled from the various pages on Dig so that they weren't cluttering things up. They also had filters to help catch profanity to help cut down on some flame wars that could go on in comments. As it turns out, when you let people comment, some people take advantage of that and abuse the system, So they tried to deal with that as best they could. They also wanted to make sure that they could filter out profanity in the headlines and stories themselves. It was a case of trying to make sure that people were using Dig for the weight they had intended it to be used, and not for it to turn into just the wild West, And it also showed that they still cared about how DIG operated. In August two thousand and six, BusinessWeek featured Kevin Rose on the cover of its magazine, and Revision III, that podcasting company that Rose and as co founders, launched in late two thousand and five, helped Dig secure another million dollars in venture capital funding. At this point, Dig itself was estimated to be valued at two hundred fifty million dollars according to The New York Post, so less than two years after it had launched, and it was worth a quarter of a billion dollars two hundred and fifty million dollars. That's crazy, but understandable when you realize this was a powerful tool for people to share their interests and it was driving insane traffic to other websites. Now, in two thousand and seven, Kevin Rose said in a few interviews that he was initially a little worried about the types of content that could end up on dig because he was worried that it might require a lot of policing to make sure that the worst stuff on the Internet didn't really just bully its way onto the main page. But he said the community was consistently pretty good at finding relevant, interesting stories and sharing them, and so really the community in large part was policing itself fairly effectively. Now, one time this didn't play out the way he wanted was when someone posted a link to an encryption key for HDDVD. Do you guys remember hddvds. That was the format that was competing with Blu rays for high definition video. And eventually, of course Blu ray won out, but for a while it was a pretty tough competition, and the encryption key would let you crack the protection around HDDVD, which meant that you could then copy the content off an HDDVD and potentially distribute it. And so a lot of big companies were very upset about this, because you know, they don't really like piracy for obvious reasons. It at least is somewhat linked to a drop in revenue, although you can't argue it's a one for one case, because if someone steals something, that's not to say that they would have bought it otherwise. Sometimes that's just just not true. But sometimes if they steal something and share it, it might end up costing you in sales. It's just impossible to know to what extent right, because you can't guarantee that all the people who download something would have otherwise bought it. Still, it was a real problem. Now there's nothing directly against the law from copying the content on a piece of media that you have purchased for the purposes of backup. However, having to circumvent encryption gets a little more shady in the eyes of the law. So while you could make a backup copy, you weren't supposed to break encryption preventing you from making a backup copy. And this is one of the many reasons why pirates versus creators those battles get really ugly on both sides because both sides have they do a lot of dancing to justify their actions. I'll say that I don't necessarily think that studios or creative companies are free of blame in these cases. I also don't think that pirates are saints. It's a complicated issue, all right. So Dig's owners kept pulling down links to the encryption key that had been posted. They were trying to head this off. They didn't want to court a major lawsuit with a studio. They wanted to avoid that. They didn't want anyone to be able to say, hey, you're hosting this illegal encryption key that's letting people bypass the security we put on hddvds. So they were starting to pull down the links, but the users wanted the links, and so they kept on posting them, and they found tricky ways of posting them. They would name them other things in order to try and get around any detection. And so eventually Kevin Rose decided he was going to side with the community. He said, quote, you'd rather see Dig go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. End quote. And he said, if that's what you want, that's what we're gonna do. We are no longer going to take down those links, and so he stopped. He said, We're gonna let them stay up on dig because that's what you users want, and that's the purpose of dig is to let the users generate the stuff that they think is interesting, or at least to share the stuff they think is interesting. And so he sided with the community on that one. Now, as Dig grew, so did its influence. Not only was it driving engagement among its users on its own site, it also could help drive traffic to other sites. So if someone shared, say one of my articles on dig, and it made the main page, we would suddenly see a huge rush of traffic coming in from dig. And that's valuable. You know. You got to remember that most of the Internet was generating its revenue through page views because the web pages were supported by advertising. So the more eyeballs that were on the page, the more money you were making. It became a goal for many sites to develop content that folks would naturally share on Dig. More and more began to incorporate the dig button on their pages to encourage this behavior as early as two thousand and six. Again, it launched in December two thousand and four, but as early as two thousand and six, other companies were already showing interest in potentially acquiring Dig. Yahoo reportedly wanted to scoop up the company for forty million dollars, not bad for a company that started on six grand Rose himself was interested in pursuing a deal with a totally different company, news Corp. News Corp had just purchased MySpace. I did a whole episode about MySpace ages ago. If you want to hear about that story, it's news Corp's purchase of MySpace is commonly referred to as one of the big big mistakes in mergers and acquisitions in the tech world. At the time, news Corp Was offering sixty million dollars to purchase Dig, and Rose wanted to sell. He wanted to take take them up on that offer, but he wasn't allowed to because Dig had a board of directors and he had to answer to this board of directors, and they would not approve of a sale to news Corp. They thought that the company was worth more than that. They thought Kevin Rose was going to drive this company to even greater heights. So even though Kevin Rose had created the company, even though he had funded the initial company, he didn't have the authorization to sell it to another corporation. So he was forced to stick with it. He was really upset about this, according to several of his friends, and frustrated that he couldn't just sell the company that he had created and make millions of dollars and then move on to do something else. And at this point, Kevin Rose owned about sixty percent of dig dot com. The board though they wanted to hold out for a bigger fish, they wanted to see a better offer, and eventually, a couple years later, a bigger fish happened to swim by, and that fish's name was Google. In two thousand and eight, Google was rumored to consider Dig for a potential acquisition for about two hundred million dollars, and this was more than just rumor. Kevin Rose talked about it. The deal was well on its way, but it fell apart toward the end. There were fundamental disagreements that the two sides could not see eye to eye on and ultimately Google withdrew its intention to acquire Dig. So that was a two hundred million dollar deal lost. Kevin Rose was beyond frustrated about that. Instead, Dig ended up going up for another round of venture capital investment to keep the company afloat, because even though it was valuable it wasn't really generating that much revenue, so this time they ended up raising twenty eight point seven million dollars from Highland Capital Partners. Meanwhile, behind the scenes at DIG, Rose was battling against his boat board of directors. Rose decided to partner up with a designer named Daniel Burka, who was also working for DIG at the time, and together they built a file sharing application that they called pounce Powncee. That's when the board over at DIG said, hey, wait a minute, that belongs to us because you work for us and Daniel works for us. So you're using DIG assets to build a totally different application that should belong to the shareholders of DIG. It cannot be its own thing. Meanwhile, morale at DIG was on the downslope. People are starting to get very discouraged over at DIG. And then the board said to Rose, hey, why don't you just knock it out with all those other projects you're looking at, pay attention to this company that you started. You need to make sure you can motivate the people at dig dot com. Pour your energy into being innovative in this company. Don't just look around for other companies. Now, Kevin Rose didn't exactly follow orders. He started working on a Twitter directory app called we Follow, which he audationed unveiled it south by Southwest. In two thousand and nine, Digg's board went to Adelson, who was still CEO at the time, and they told Adelson to fire Kevin Rose. So the board of directors tells the CEO, you gotta fire this co founder. But Rose and Addison had an agreement they could only fire each other with the other's consent. In other words, they had a veto for any direction that the board wanted to take, as long as it was about firing one or the other. So instead of firing him, Digg decided that, hey, well acquire we Follow. So the Board Directors was able to acquire this this venture that Kevin Rose had created, and reportedly Kevin Rose earned a few million dollars like six million bucks as a result of this. But as part of that, in order for him to get this money, he had to stick with DIG a while longer. Around this time, Kevin Rose started to invest in other companies, some of them turned out to be huge ones, like Twitter, But as investments were taking his attention away from Dig, according to his contemporaries, Kevin Rose would sometimes just come in to Dig once a week or just disappear for days and days at a time. The rest of the time he was working on other projects, investing in new companies, and that's really what excited him. It turned out that that's what he was interested in, the early process, when there's nothing but potential. A company hasn't cemented itself, it hasn't turned into its permanent version of itself, It could be practically anything. That's when Kevin Rose is interested in working with those companies. It gives him a lot of energy and creativity. He's not so much interested once it establishes itself and managing day to day activities is not really his forte. But he did help a lot of companies out this way as a venture capitalist investor, as an angel investor, if you will. But the board of Dig was getting increasingly frustrated with Kevin Rose, and meanwhile he was feeling the same way about the board of directors. On the site itself, things were getting pretty problematic. There were a group of dig users who had essentially gained control of what did or did not make the main page. In fact, according to some sources, the top one hundred users on dig dot com were responsible for fifty six percent of the content on the front page of Dig. Keep in mind there are millions of registered users by this point, and one hundred people are in charge of more than half of what appears on that main page. Now, they weren't exactly gaming the system, but they were definitely using the system to their advantage, whether knowingly or not. You see the power users the ones who had been using dig the most frequently in for the longest. Their votes had a heavier weight to them than a new user's vote. So if you had been on dig dot com since the beginning and you had been using it regularly and you voted up on an article, your vote counted way more than my vote if I just joined diig dot com the other day. And so that's how these top one hundred users were essentially dictating what would appear on the main page. And again, it wasn't that they were necessarily setting out to do that. They were using Dig the way they always had. They were up voting stories that they thought were interesting, and they were down voting stories that they thought were terrible. It just so happened that their votes counted more than anybody else's. So sometimes they might attempt to boost or drop a story by coordinating their efforts, but it was just as possible that they were literally using DIG the way it was meant to be used. It's just that they had more influence than anyone else did. Now Dig's initial solution to this problem because the board of directors, the people behind the scenes over a DIG, they weren't really keen on the fact that a small group of people were having such a huge influence on what was actually being shown. It was very frustrating for new users. It was making it more difficult to attract people to adopt DIG because if you come into a system where it feels like it's an old boys network and all the old boys are the ones who dictate what happens, it feels like nothing you do has any consequence. So they wanted to change this up, and they decided to try a couple of different methods to do it, but it didn't go over so well. One of the things they did was installed some controls behind the scenes to decrease the group's influence by essentially dewaiting their contributions. Part of this meant removing the list of top users from the site, which was kind of a badge of honor to get your name listed among the top users. But then once they got rid of top users, these same power users started to feel like they were being abandoned or ignored. Many of them felt like they were being dismissed. That all the years that they had been putting in working with dig, you know, using the platform, promoting stories, burying bad stories, that all of that was being swept aside, and so they were feeling like that they were being punished for this, even if they were just using Dig the way they always had. And so the company began to alienate some of its core user base, and that was a real problem because they started to set a new tone. All Right, we're getting into the beginning of the end. But before I go any further, let's take another quick break to think our sponsor. All Right, at this point in its history, Dig had forty three million registered users, and Dig had started to experiment with generating revenue on its own by inserting dig ads into its pages. So between various headlines of stories, you would get promoted advertisement. It would just appear right there. There's sort of like the promoted search results that you would find in Google, and like those, the ads were clearly marked as ads. It wasn't like they were tricking you into thinking you were reading a story. They were marked as ads. And not only that, you could actually vote on those ads. You could dig or bury ads and gave users a lot of power when it came to advertising, something that I think was particularly interesting to allow your user base the opportunity to vote down ads. It seems like that would be potentially dangerous from a revenue standpoint, but it would also send a real message about whether or not advertising was working or very much not working. Around this time, dig also launched app for the blossoming smartphone platforms of iOS and Android. Now keep in mind, the iPhone came out in two thousand and seven. Android came out in late two thousand and seven, early two thousand and eight. This is two thousand and nine we're talking about, so all of those platforms were still very young, especially when you consider the fact that when iOS first launched, you could not develop an application for Apple. It was just the Apple apps on the original iPhone for a while before they launched the ability for other people to program apps for it. Things were not going smoothly. Behind the scenes, o Red Dig, Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson were having some disagreements about the direction of the company, and those disagreements continued to escalate throughout two thousand and nine and into twenty ten, until Adelson was asked to step down as CEO. More or less he was fired. Kevin Rose chose not to use his veto option. So remember, Adelson and Rose had disagreement where it would require their I guess, I guess their agreement with the board of directors before either could be fired, and Rose decided not to veno the board's decision to fire Adelson. So Ailson resigned. Essentially he was able to officially, according to the communication he gave, he stepped down from the position, but behind the scenes people say that he was essentially fired as CEO. But he said he wanted to go and work on more startup ideas, and that's exactly what he did. I'll talk more about that toward the end, Kevin Rose ended up taking over control of the company he founded. He became the new CEO of DIG on April fifth, twenty ten. In May twenty ten, the company laid off about ten percent of its work staff, now, Kevin Rose was still listening to the community. One of the things that he listened to was their reaction to a tool called the Digbar. The company had launched the dig bar earlier, and this was a toolbar that would appear above websites, so it would install itself so in your browser essentially, so you would see this toolbar whenever you would go to other websites. And it was meant to let people interact with dig without leaving the website they were on. So you could go read some other website and use this toolbar to leave comments about this particular article on dig, but without leaving the website to go to dig first. However, a lot of people fell It was really intrusive and irritating and distracting. So one of his first actions as CEO, Kevin Rose decided to ditch the Digbar. He was responding to the community reaction and hopes were running high on Kevin Rose, both from the Dig community and the board of directors. Everyone was hoping that Kevin Rose was getting re energized, reinvested in the company that he had created. The board had been really critical of Rose's focus on other projects, those other things that he was trying to launch while still technically working for dig but they were hoping that this meant he was back on board to lead the company in a new direction with innovation. So the big hope here was that Kevin Rose was now grown out of a phase according to the Board of directors, that he would no longer just focus on stuff as it was brand new and when it interests him, but that he would be capable of leading the company in the day to day operations of dig dot com. Meanwhile, the company began to alpha test the next version of dig dot com. This would be version four point zero. This is the infamous one. This is the one that people totally flipped out over for good reason. I don't think that it was unmerited. So before Kevin Rose became CEO, dig dot com showed off some of it concepts for version four point zero at south By Southwest in twenty ten, and a lot of people were really excited by what they saw. They thought that the innovations were merited, they were good. They felt that it was going to add value to the dig dot com experience. But once Kevin Rose took over as CEO, he essentially threw all of that away and decided to start from scratch. He more or less discarded all the changes, all the work that had been done for version four point zero, and this alienated some of the engineers at dig dot com as a result, some of whom left the company because of that. And instead he said, let's go in this completely different direction. And there are a lot of people who argue about why he did this. Some people say he genuinely just didn't see the value of the revisions. Some say, well, this was an effort for him to distance himself from the previous CEO. But whatever the purpose, he decided to go totally different direction, and it was one that ended up being almost universally unpopular among his community. So one of the new features of the Kevin Rose led version four point zero of dig dot com allowed news sites to submit their own content automatically to dig. I cannot stress how this alienated the community at dig dot com, because keep in mind, up to this point, the whole concept was that users were the ones submitting and voting on the content that would show up on dig dot com. If you thought a story was interesting, you could submit it. If other people thought it was interesting, they could vote for it. And that's how it could naturally rise to the top. Now with version four point zero, a news site, a media company could submit its own stuff directly to dig dot com, passing that user experience, essentially turning dig dot com into more of a normal news aggregator and less of a user generated experience. So it seemed completely antithetical to the original philosophy behind dig and as a result, community members went by nanas. In fact, a lot of people said that this was going to be the death blow of dig dot com, and arguably that's what did it. So a lot of people decided that they would just leave and go and use Reddit instead of dig dot com. Reddit was much more similar to what dig had been in the past. It also didn't help that revision four point zero consolidated a lot of those interests that I talked about earlier, you know, things like sports and entertainment and lifestyle. It consolidated a lot of those and made it more difficult to find specific content in those buckets because now they were bigger buckets that contained lots of stuff, not just these broken out interests. So they also got rid of the bury button, so you couldn't bury stories anymore. You couldn't vote down a story, and arguably it was to make sure that these users couldn't just end up taking control of dig and get rid of anything that criticized themselves, for example, but it also meant that there was if someone if a news outlet published a story directly to dig dot com, there was no way for you to express your displeasure to vote that story down. The only thing you could really do is not voted up. So a lot of people felt that this was taking the voice of the community away from the community, and this was a community based website. Some people decided that they would promote stories from Reddit as a way to make a dig at dig, so they would submit links from Reddit onto dig dot com. It was kind of a method of protest, but more people were just leaving dig entirely. They were ditching it and going to Reddit. In fact, Alexis o'hanian, one of Reddit's co founders, wrote an open letter to Kevin Rose, and he was specifically criticizing the fact that they had made these changes. Ohanian said, the new version of dig reeks of VC medaling and VC stands for a venture capitalist or venture capital. So o'hanian was essentially calling Dig a sellout, saying, obviously you're taking money from these companies in order to have this relationship, and it's at the expense of the community that made Dig a valuable asset in the first place. He was saying, it's not the links that make dig dot com valuable. Links already exist out there on the Internet. What makes dig valuable is this user engagement, this community that ends up supporting various links. That's where the value is. But you're completely undermining that by siding with venture capitals investors. After just a few short months, it was clear that Kevin Rose's heart was not in running this company and leading it in day to day operations. It didn't excite him. He found it grueling. He's still very much preferred being in on the ground floor as a company is just starting to find its way. He still thought that was the most interesting aspect of business. He was CEO for less than six months. Dig then hired on an Amazon executive named Matt Williams to take over the role of CEO, and Kevin Rose stepped down in August twenty ten. Rose himself began to drift away from the company again. He was showing more interest in venture capital investments and other ventures, and less interest in the company that he founded. By March twenty eleven, he officially resigned from dig dot com. He remained on as sort of a consultant to the board, but he was no longer an official employee. He also launched a company called Milk. This was meant to be a startup lab for new applications, So if you wanted to develop an app, then Milk was supposed to be a place where you could incubate these ideas, and Rose thought that this would give him the opportunity to work on a lot of different projects just as they were starting up, which meant that he would constantly be engaged. He would never get bored because there'd always be something new to work on. Didn't work out that way. The first app out of Milk was an application called oinc, as in the noise that a pig makes, and it was the only app the company ever produced, and rather than continue to deve Oink, Rose chose to shut down Milk and he joined Google instead. He took over some of the people from Milk and they all joined Google Venture, which is kind of their startup and spin off lab. He also brought the Dignation show to an end in late twenty eleven. He said that they had stopped recording the show by October twenty eleven, but that the unpublished shows would continue to air or to be published until sometime in January twenty twelve. And that's when Dignation came to an end. It had a two part finale and then it was over. Meanwhile, dig dot com was still hemorrhaging users. It didn't last much longer after Kevin Rose resigned. Wow, this classic episode's a long one, isn't it. So yeah, we still have some information about dig to get through, believe it or not. So we're going to take one last break and then finish out this classic episode. On July twelfth, twenty twelve, Dig was essentially split into three different components and sold off to different buyers. The intellectual property of dig dot com itself, the website dig dot com it went to a company called Beta Works. They bought this once incredibly valuable asset for five hundred thousand dollars. Keep in mind, this is a company that just a few years previous had been valued at two hundred and fifty million dollars. And then the site is sold for five hundred thousand As for the other assets, they brought in more cash, actually than the intellectual property of dig dot com itself. Linked In bought several patents that dig dot com owned for four million dollars, so the patents were worth more than the website was, and The Washington Post spent about twelve million dollars bringing on several members of Digg's staff to work on its social code project. Now, dig dot com still exists today. If you try to navigate to dig dot com, you will see a website. It is a news aggregator website. It looks very different from what it used to be. Now it looks kind of more like a standard news aggregate website with images and links to various stories across the web. Users can still give stories a thumbs up that can promote some stories into a more visible position on the web page, but there are human editors who moderate what shows up on the page itself, and you can't comment on stories anymore, at least not right now. According to Beta Works. The reason for this is that comments are hard. That's totally true. I am not making fun of Beta Works for saying this, because it is really a challenge to implement comments in a constructive way on your website, particularly in today's world, because it can easily be abused, very very easily. Too many people take the opportunity to use a comments section to cause mischief. And there's not really a big surprise here. It takes very little effort to cause a whole lot of commotion using comments, So it takes little work to make a big impact. If you're someone who likes to cause trouble, that is an open door invitation to do so. And obviously we've seen this across other places on the web. YouTube's a great example. It's not as bad as four chan, but it's a great example. So dig still exists, though you don't hear as many folks talk about these days. But it does get several million visitors each month. According to one source, I saw that it got twelve million monthly visitors as of January twenty fifteen, so one would presume it's probably around that level or higher now. And twelve million monthly visitors isn't anything to sneeze at. It's a pretty healthy amount of traffic. As for the founders, what are they up to now? Well, Jay Adelson worked on several different ventures. After he stepped down as CEO. He ultimately co founded a company called Center Electric. It's a venture capital firm, and so Adelson is still using his experience and money to help launch new companies. Ron Gordetski stayed with DIG until July twenty ten, which means he left during Kevin Rose's tenure as CEO. He went on to co found Flick, the review app that I mentioned earlier in this episode, and then he transitioned over to YouTube. He worked there till February twenty sixteen. He then became a digital service expert in the United States Digital Service This is a startup company at the White House dedicated to using technology to create better tools and services for American citizens. No word on how that's going right now. Owen Byrne left DIG in two thousand and seven, and he worked for several different companies over the following years, including Expedia and trip Advisor. And he was mostly building out systems for these companies, so he was working on the back end. And you know, once you finish that then often you might go on to do it at a different company. So that's largely what he did. As of January twenty seventeen, he started working for Zipcar in San Francisco as a software engineer, and Kevin Rose Well. He's still an advisor to Google Ventures, which is again that division of Google that is all about creating startups and spin off companies. He sits on the board of a company called hodin Key, which is a wristwatch enthusiast website related I assume to the wristwatch manufacturer out in Europe. And he's still involved in venture capital. He invests in companies early on while they're still malleable. Dig is an interesting story, and many of the elements that were pioneered at dig found their way into other platforms like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook. All of these ways of sharing content, many of them originated over at Dig. So we have Dig to thank for a lot of the way our social networking sites work today. And also it's easy for us to see in retrospect how the decisions that were made over at dig dot com ultimately were it's undoing, particularly and how it seemingly turned its back on the community of users that made it so valuable in the first place. But at the time it was probably much harder to see that that's what was going to happen. I mean, obviously you wouldn't make those decisions if you knew it was going to lead to the collapse or implosion of a company. Democratization on the Internet is a tricky thing. So if I ever do an episode about Reddit, I'll get into more about the democratization of the Internet. Reddit is not a stranger to controversy. It is structured very much in a way that similar to the early days of dig dot com. But they have been no stranger to behind the scenes drama. There have been plenty of stories about that over for Reddit, so it's not like dig dot com was an example of just bad management. It's a very tricky thing to do when you're letting your users define the experience. Sometimes that does not turn out in a way that's particularly nice. That's it for the Dig story, at least as far as it went in twenty seventeen. Since then, other stuff has happened to Dig. For example, a company called buy sell Ads purchased Dig in twenty eighteen. Don't know how much it paid for that. It has gone through a couple of different iterations since then. Michael O'Connor took over as CEO. In twenty seventeen, it is you know, shut down its dig reader RSS service. So yeah, a lot of stuff has changed set over the years with dig Maybe I do need to do perhaps a short update at some point to talk about how things have changed in more recent years. But I think it's it's pretty safe to say that Digg's influence has been diminished over the last several years. It's not frequently in the conversation the way say Reddit is, but it played a very important role, particularly for things like Discovery back in the earlier days of the web. So it is an important part of the story of the web overall. So I hope you enjoyed this classic episode and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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