Digg’s skimmer hit the bottom of the pot!

In the startup environment, it is a habit to talk about successes to keep our hopes alive for the future, but it is a big mistake to forget the failures of the past and not benefit from the experiences of the past. For this purpose, the Ecomotive team has collected the experiences of a series of failed startups, so that reviewing their failed stories may be a basis for the success of new startups in Iran’s startup community. This collection will be published and made available to the audience in the form of the story of failure. We review the eighth part of this series, which deals with the story of the failure of the startup Digg.

Digg was a news aggregator that categorized interesting news from various fields (science, politics, etc.) on the front page of its site and provided it to users. The latest version of this site was launched on July 31, 2012 to support data sharing on other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

The news site, which allowed users to vote on content, was so popular that in 2012 it had an estimated 3.8 million unique monthly visits in the US, even spawning social networks with similar capabilities, including reddit became

In July 2012, following controversial changes and restructuring at the company, its founders parted company and continued to sell Digg in three parts, the Digg brand, its website and its technology, for $500,000 to its current owner, Beta Works sold. At one point in 2008, the value of the site was estimated at 160 million dollars.

But what happened during this time for Digg to suddenly fall so far? The most important event was the birth of powerful social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which allowed their users to send a link to their friends, then their friends simply clicked on the link and after commenting, sent it back to the first place. These same networks caused the number of Digg visitors to drop. But in the meantime, Digg’s competitor; That is, Reddit was experiencing an upward trend in its visits. Reddit’s overtaking was due to the controversial changes it made in 2012, including changes to the site’s design that took users away from the features they wanted and made it more complicated and difficult to find information. In addition, it deprived them of the possibility of direct communication between users. These changes caused Digg’s audience to drop, and they turned to competing social networks, such as Reddit.

Of course, the Digg site also had some problems. Among other things, it was not really democratic. A person could create several accounts or, thanks to having many friends, his article could make it to the top of the news and be on the front page. Or even a group of users could keep it out of sight by giving a negative score to a story due to political opposition or taste. Bugs like this would reduce the credibility of the site. To solve these problems, Digg made a bigger mistake and by removing the ability to send links to friends, it referred users to Twitter and Facebook. Thus, by outsourcing his social network, he officially delegated power to other networks.