<story><title>Digg&apos;s v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)</title><url>https://lethain.com/digg-v4/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deergomoo</author><text>Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues.&lt;p&gt;I don’t even remember there &lt;i&gt;being&lt;/i&gt; technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>what-the-grump</author><text>Digg was Digg, then V4 launched, and it was no longer Digg. It was really that simple, oh hey I should check Digg maybe there is something interesting went to oh hey I need to find something else to check because Digg is stale, the new UI had much lower information density, coupled with less content meant that there was no reason to go back if you could find a faster feed.&lt;p&gt;New stuff like reddit, insta, twitter, simply took over filling the urge to hit f5 for latest content.</text></comment>
<story><title>Digg&apos;s v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)</title><url>https://lethain.com/digg-v4/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>deergomoo</author><text>Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues.&lt;p&gt;I don’t even remember there &lt;i&gt;being&lt;/i&gt; technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mustacheemperor</author><text>It’s interesting that as users, we think of v4 as this pivotal moment when the platform changed forever - but the article’s author seems to think of it more as the inflection point of ongoing problems that had built up for a while.&lt;p&gt;Especially with a high profile implosion like this, it’s really interesting to contrast our experience in the userbase to an internal perspective.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly.</text></comment>