exdiggemployee

For me, personally, we never really thought about Reddit too much. It was always just this poorly designed site that was slowly gaining traction. I never really used Reddit until after I left Digg. Basically Reddit is what I missed about Digg in the old days.

Great question. I was there in its heyday but also in the decline. The morale was extremely high during the good times. It was a really fun company to work for and the people I worked with were extremely intelligent. I think that most people don't know that the reason it took so long for us to complete the redesign was because we worked on 2 versions of v4. The version you see on digg right now is v4 version 2. Building 2 completely new versions of digg took a gigantic toll on the engineering group and the morale. We were so burnt out by all the work we were doing that we couldn't see straight. By the time v4 came out we were just so relieved to get something out. We knew it was going to flop, the management didn't care that we were warning them that this wasn't going to be the right solution.

The algorithm was in fact different on v4. The strategy was to change the algo over time with what we were seeing on the site to fight spam, etc. But it was basically too late by then. As mentioned in another comment, more emphasis was put on following mainstream media and making it easier for them. V4 gave less power and tools to users to choose what goes on the front page. The My News feature was supposed to fight that to make it more social, so you can see what your friends are digging but the majority of users on digg had 0 friends.

The truth is, we couldn't. We built it in such a way that there was no going back after we turned on v4. The v4 redesign involved a complete overhaul of the front end and the backend. It wasn't just a new skin that we could turn off.

One of my favorite features Digg had that Reddit has never had is recommendations. I always found unique stories on that thing. I could see Reddit doing recommendations in a different way. Based on the subreddits I follow and the stuff I upvote, recommend more subreddits that I would be interested in following.