Digg.com Sold To Betaworks For $500,000 193
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.
When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco (Score:5, Interesting)
If I remember correctly, wasn't Digg supposed to be the new Slashdot without the hardcore Geek Cred? Didn't Kevin Rose speak directly to CmdrTaco about the failings of Slashdot? Kevin doesn't seem that bad a guy, actually, but he had two major failings that I can see:
- Not selling at the top of the market, which is usually hard to gauge anyway, (and didn't he leave some time ago?)
and the most important failing:
- Dumping Sarah Lane so that she could later travel the world on Honeymoon and get a brain eating parasite.
Better Days to them both.
Forget Digg... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ephemeral values of interwebs properties (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why I won't buy stock in fazebook.
Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps Diggs' new owners will use "cvs update -r DIGG_UPDATE_3" or whatever and undo the heinous redesign ?
Reddit is already dead (Score:2, Interesting)
Reddit is already dead from a usability standpoint. The largest subreddits are unrefutably crap, and the overall site is overrun by the hordes of idiots who infect the few decent, smaller subreddits. Unfortunately, the site has degenerated into a massive karmawhoring party and it is no longer easy to find quality links in the sea of regurgitated memes, 37-panel ragecomics about dropping a piece of toast, and Facebook screenshots. I never really cared for Digg, but did frequent Reddit from 2008 to 2010 before I could no longer tolerate the painfully obvious downward trend in quality. A part of me hopes Conde Nast will just kill it.
Now, I just trawl Slashdot and wait for a good catch. (The Slashdot moderation system is imperfect, but superior to the ones used by Digg and Reddit.) The NetworkWorld-esqe spam posts are annoying, but the accompanying angry comments that eviscerate the stupid headlines are amusing. Overall, the signal-to-noise ratio is higher here -- I particularly enjoyed the recent lighthearted threads about C: 1 [slashdot.org], 2 [slashdot.org].
Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco (Score:5, Interesting)
digg is still bigger than slashdot.. about 5x bigger
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/slashdot.org [alexa.com]
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digg.com [alexa.com]
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
results of bad censorship (Score:1, Interesting)
I deleted my own account with them several years ago due to my disgust with this behavior.
Re:When Kevin Rose Wanted to Eat a Taco (Score:4, Interesting)
But unfortunately Slashdot has one of the better and smarter public discussion boards. (Which doesn't really bode well for the others including digg)
Dig focuses mostly on the links. Slashdot focuses on the discussion. Digg gets more hits but Slashdot people stay on it longer.