Trouble at Digg and Netscape 2.0?
Digg’s troubles boil down to two things:
a) its inherent model is ripe for abuse and excess: sure people initially “dig” the concept, but eventually you alienate the good and honest posters to protect against the dishonest diggers… that’s just economics and sociology at play.
and
b) in this era of “get rich quicker Web 2.0 schemes” who wants to volunteer to be a de facto editor and see you make the cover of Business Week (with a false statement about making $60M mind you)? If advertisers/investors are drooling over Digg because its user base is so smart and educated, are we surprised that eventually, top diggers would wise up and feel that:
“we’re in general agreement that we are no longer wanted, and our hours of submitting and keeping the site alive is no longer appreciated…some are leaving for newsvine, some for netscape etc…i have started participating in newsvine…i would appreciate it if you didnt name names in the post, because digg bans people over nothing.”
Just wait until factor b) really kicks in online. That’s innate psychology, nothing technology can solve folks!
In Netscape’s case… man, I’d give Jason Calacanis the benefit of doubt any day but that had disaster written all over it. For the past five years I worked indirectly with Netscape. I was impressed with the site’s resiliency over the years. The traffic, the readers. It was a niche site, but it was something that had value. Small is beautiful and Netscape was not even all that small!
What’s that saying: don’t fix it if it ain’t broken? Hindsight is indeed 20/20 but if AOL Time Warner or Jason had Digg-envy they should have launched a new site… oh wait, that’s already out there: Reddit, Newsvine, etc…
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