Digg.com Sold To Betaworks For $500,000

New submitter MyFirstNameIsPaul writes "The once popular social news website Digg.com, which received $45 million in funding, is being sold to to Betaworks for $500,000. From the article: 'Betaworks is acquiring the Digg brand, website, and technology, but not its employees. Digg will be folded into News.me, Betaworks' social news aggregator. This is not the outcome people expected for Digg. In 2008, Google was reportedly set to buy it for $200 million.'" Update: 07/13 12:26 GMT by S : Looks like real number is about $16 million.

Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco

[Darundal]

IIRC, he left around the time of the Digg 4 update (the one that killed Digg and caused it's users to flood tons of other sites).

Re:Slashdot won't go for even that

[icebike]

Slashdot is very old when measured in Digg lives.

I used Digg.com a lot now I use Reddit.com

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Digg was good for social media. People would submit stories, and then the cool ones would come to the top. Apparently a minor problem arose with power users who could spam their friends with messages,"Digg this cuz ur my friend", and a lot of them would. These power users eventually started getting corporate sponsor to astroturf, and their friends were oblivious so they still got Diggs. The actual user base didn't have much of a problem with this as you could read user names and just ignore them. I think the proper solution was to allow people to permanently ignore user posts, then power user spam would have been fixed.

Where Digg went wrong was,"We gotta beat these power users to their own game!" So they made it so users could no longer submit stories. And then your entire feed was all corporate sponsored advertising. This is equivalent of turning prime time television into one giant informercial. I know nothing of value is lost there, but in social media, this is a group of people moderating news and it was pretty valuable until they killed it thinking we're all bunch of sheep who will just sit there and read advertisements all day.

I'm glad Digg.com is dead. I just hope Reddit.com doesn't pull something stupid too.

Re:Look on the bright side

[evilviper]

The only way to make money in this game is to piss off the users as you slap them in the face with the reality that they aren't customers.... they are the product. Yet the sole reason a social media site exists is because users want to be there,

Every criticism you offer about online / social web sites could be equally well applied to something like broadcast television... And yet, they've been operating and profitable for a half-century now, with no end in sight, and the future looks fairly bright for them after the switch to HDTV, with only minimal potential for 'disruptive technology' on the horizon that could upset the good-old business model.

Google is making money giving stuff away, anyone else?

Yes: TV & Radio.

Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco

[Anonymous Coward]

Digg was much bigger than /. when it was going at full steam, had better and more timely articles, and much bigger discussions due to its larger community. But the board chose a ridiculous redesign for V4 and refused to listen to the voice of the users. They thought the dip in numbers would be a temporary thing, people would soon come back. Well, they didn't. They left in droves.

When the writing was on the wall, Rose bailed out giving control to others to try to resurrect the product his braindead decisions killed. They didn't, they just followed the same path into the grave yard. Not that Rose is too bothered, he made a personal fortune to allow him to be financially independent for the rest of his life.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: I was a Digg user six years

[Lucas123]

Kevin Rose did everything he could to drive away long-time, loyal users, first by killing off any social networking aspect and then by revamping the entire site so that it didn't resemble the original or have any of the functionality that made it popular. It was idiocy gone wild. Personally, I think Betaworks just got ripped off big time. Digg's been going down the drain for two years now, and nothing's going to revive it at his point. Why do you think Rose took a job with Google?

Re:Reddit is already dead

[mr100percent]

Once you disable certain obnoxious subreddits in your profile, the site actually becomes wonderful. Just turn off /r/atheism, /r/adviceanimals, and maybe /r/politics, and add the many TV/movie related and other cultural subreddits and you have a nice party.

Re:The Writing is on the Wall, Slashdot

[zippthorne]

The phrase, "bully pulpit" does not mean what you're using it to mean. In that phrase, (credit to Teddy Roosevelt?), "bully" is a synonym for, "awesome" or "grand."

When you speak from a regular pulpit, everyone in the room listens, typically of the order of 200 people, because a larger room would be too large for the "amplification" technique of "sticking a hollow box over the speaker's head." The presidency is a bully pulpit because when you speak as President, potentially 300 million are listening.

Re:What happened to Digg?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

I used to visit Digg several times a day. Then they did a site redesign that was horrible.

It's important to point out that Digg v4 was quite a bit more than a "redesign". The closest thing I can compare it to is a ground-up rewrite of a major piece of software, where the new version not only looks different, but is missing some fundamental or well-liked features that were present in the previous versions.

Digg v4: How To Successfully Kill A Community [searchengineland.com]

It's hard to understate just how badly Digg screwed itself over with v4. The backlash was like nothing I had ever seen in, or read about, any similar circumstance. I had Digg Support close my account toward the end of the user revolt. (I refused to migrate to Reddit, though, because that site's design was (and still is) just terrible. It might have good content, but even the Mona Lisa can't spruce up a rusted-out utility shed.)

Earlier this week I got the urge to visit Digg for the first time in a long time... and it is such a sad, pathetic thing to behold. Where the most popular stories on the front page used to break 1000 "diggs", they now have two- maybe three-hundred diggs. Where submissions usually had a minimum of several dozen comments, now only the most popular stories seem to break a dozen. Most have only one or two...