Why The New Digg Will Fail
Wednesday, August 1, 2012 at 6:22PM 
You have to feel sorry for the new Digg team. Here they are taking on a sinking ship, starting everything almost from scratch, and they have millions of eyes looking for something to pick at. Now most people are picking on things that can be explained quickly with one line. "They just launched and are starting from scratch." This means that they will be low on features.
Why launch before every bell and whistle is ready? Well I would assume three answers for that. The first being that they need to strike while the iron is hot. People are still talking about them buying the Digg domain. Being able to relaunch a website of that caliber from scratch is pretty impressive. The second reason they launch before every bell and whistle is ready is because a website like this is never fully ready. It needs to constantly evolve and keep moving or it will die just like the old Digg. If it makes a wrong move (Digg 4 anyone) it dies too. So why not start when you at least have a functional skeleton? The third and most important reason is to keep people talking. If you blow your entire load all at once people have no reason to blog about you anymore. That is when you die in a forest with no one around to care. But people love to bitch, so they will always find something to complain about. Which brings me to my next thoughts.
They come from a company that leaned very hard to the iOS side of things. So hard it seems that they have no clue as to how big Android is now. I can deal with them launching an iPhone app before an Android app, but they don't even mention they are working on it in their FAQ! It's like Android is the redheaded stepchild instead of the fastest growing mobile OS in the world (and by many numbers already the biggest).
My second complaint is that everything is one big clusterfuck. Tech news is mixed in with world news. Entertainment is mixed in with sports. It's all one big sloppy mess. Yeah, I understand that you just launched but this could have been solved in a few minutes. You don't know how to start a new table within a database? I can't program worth crap and I can do that! Again, they could have at least mentioned something in their FAQ.
So will those three things make the new Digg fail? Not really. What will make the new Digg fail is that they seem to be so stressed about being the new Digg that they are not thinking straight. Their priorities seem to be out of whack. Things that are not as important are being focused on while things that will make people dismiss this new project and not return are being put aside. Stop thinking about making the old Digg fans happy. They are part of what killed the old Digg and made it not able to move forward. Stop trying to make the tech bloggers happy. If you want to go mainstream you need to leave them behind. Think about what the stupid mainstream wants. Sure they are idiots, but cater to them and you have billions of eyeballs. How do you get them in? Most importantly, work on that FAQ because it is missing some major questions that floods of people are going to have.
P.S. I hope I am wrong and wish you the best of luck proving me and all the rest of us negative bloggers wrong.
