Digg Users Are Doing Their Best To Kill An Acquisition

We have heard this story before Keving rose and Jay Adelson having been selling the business since 2006. IAs I remember wasn’t Jay Adelson brought in to sell the company 2 years? think Yahoo was buying it and the New york times at one point. If they can get 500 Million why not they have well built brand. There compeitors are okay, but not as well recongnized as digg.com.

the same thing happened with flickr and youtube users during acquisition. youtube users were very entertaining posting funny video replies abt google and how it wud kill the community of youtube. flickr photos abt a MS acquisition of yahoo is also creative and funny.

in the end no user is happy abt the company’s acquisition and ofcourse most founders will feel the oppposite when they are making a fortune.

Maybe Im growing out the Digg demo. After almost 4 years of use.

Im a bit tired of the same old stories:

LoLcats, Nintendo, Mario, Clinton/Obama (where Ron Paul go), Super Smash Brothers, boobies(well never will tire of them) and stupid people tricks!

I guess that is where democratized news leads us and is snapshot of our society! Yeah for boobies though!

Digg’s traffic makes it a perennial favorite of M&A rumors, but its rabid fan base, err community, would all jump ship in the case of any of them turning out to be true.

I stopped visiting Digg on a daily basis when the tech news began getting drowned out. The real story is how Slashdot was around first and will still be standing after all these “democratic” news sites burn out.

@3 - very true. the standard selection of Digg articles could be a reflection of our society and the content we crave (I’m still hoping its not!). Any democratized news site will have to eventually meet the demands of the market/community it serves. However, I’m not sure Digg has done all it could to protect the quality of “the news experience” for its users. Perhaps the submission free-for-all is what’s killing the quality of the content.

Digg is mainly populated by the young tech crowd 14-25 year olds.

Kevin Rose just turned 31 and is more than likely ready to go “Corporate” himself and back to having a normal life behind the scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kevin has already planned/built a superior Digg+Pownce style service.

So, what was that about the wisdom of crowds, again??

Maybe I don’t get it, but aren’t entrepreneurs (especially those who offer something for free) allowed to make money anymore?

Seriously - I’m asking to be educated about why people think Digg is a none-profit?

God, I hope MS do buy it if it forces all these childish idiots to leave. One of the reasons I don’t visit it much is down to the comments and lets not talk about the other!

lol @ “bastion of free speech”. I’m a member of Digg (reddit and others), but if you’re not an apple/obama/ron paul/peta fanboy then you will summarily be dugg down and ostracized.

@9, I agree.

If anything, an MS acquisition will purge Digg of all the fanboys and make the content better.

Seems as though the Digg’ers are on track to kill Hillary with all the negative stories I see about her. It is interesting because, that backfired on Ron Paul. His ties to the fringe made him an extremely unattractive candidate. Digg did not help his cause.

Digg is nothing short of a cult. They typically get fired up about anything tech related, no just Microsoft or Apple related. @6: You’re right younger teens crawl the site. Do I discourage Digg? No. I think it is time for Digg to grow up.

Digg needs to remain independent to remain successful.

Naturally, that does not mean Kevin Rose cannot sell it to cash out.

Digg will be effectively dead in 2 years or less. In this case, the community is not loyal enough to stave of a mass migration to better technology.

That’s very selective comment selection if you ask me. Go read the comments on many digg acquisition stories over time and you will see plenty of supportive comments for Kevin to sell and comments congratulating him on his success.

This story is nothing but a troll…

if digg is acquired by microsoft, it will be the end of reddit for me.

Digg is cool, but the mob sucks.

@8, Andrew, I don’t think Digg users expect Digg to be non-profit; they just want Kevin at the top, not one of the corporations they’ve come to see as ‘evil’.

Personally, I like Kevin Rose as the figurehead (minus his Apple fanaticism), but I don’t think a buy-out by MS would necessarily be a bad thing. I actually do like some of MS’s products and services.

I have used Digg since day one almost and I would honestly never use it again if this happened.

Do you know what happens when people get pissed off on internet forums?

They create a new internet forum on another domain and take all the users with them, since they are mostly networked through IM and social networking. This is exactly what will happen if digg is purchased by Microsoft.

The big difference between Digg and Pligg, technically, is a few developers and some server clusters. The will of the Digg users is FAR stronger than Kevin Rose or the servers running the website. If the digg users get mad, there will be no more digg.

This is VERY rare for a website. MySpace for instance could do anything and it wouldn’t matter. Digg users are the tech Elite. They will not stand to be pushed around by a domain name. Guaranteed. There will be another website up in 24 hours from the acquisition and the users will leave.

acquisition by microsoft would kill digg. but kevin rose has to make money right?

and I will be part of it.

Shame that a site with better technology has attracted such a following. The, users there don’t know what they got, that’s fer sure.

These comments just illustrate how far up their ass digg users shove their heads. Digg is a business. Kevin wants to make money. This exemplifies that free services are detrimental.

The Digg community, like any other mob, is irrational, stupid, and you don’t want them to be pissed at you.

This reminds me to Paul Graham’s article about trolls: http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html

Uh, no, reddit doesn’t want the Digg users.

Is this post here because Michael’s story was flagged in-appropriate or was it really intended as the posts says ? Digg - ChatterBox!

What these users don’t understand is that with equity financing, Digg from the beginning was set down a path towards sale. It might not be ideal, but Reddit did the same thing and much earlier.

Has Digg jumped the boat?

Digg users are the next labor movement.

The next UAW, AFL-CIO, etc. The contributors to user vetted aggregators like Digg are the ditch diggers of the next 25 years … the on-line grunts who’s hard work isn’t yet worthy of putting on a resume.

Yet.

Microsoft is a bully. With money. And now he wants to buy yahoo and digg. Which one do we let him have…

Perhaps a deal gets killed because the buyer realizes there’s no revenue model?

Lets put it this way. I hate everything Microsoft does. And no PR in the world is going to change that. They Need a whole new turnover of their thinking, company culture, design, UIs, and image.

I hate digg - i don’t see why people use it;
digg itself, and the concept.

Read news from the top news sources - and that’s it.
who gives a hell about ‘votes’…from that bland site

totally agree with Lawrence. Who are these strange people that care to spend their time voting on news clips? Who the hell digs DIGG?

This is interesting, Michael. Have some silly comments by a handful of angry digg users actually scared away Microsoft? I’ve found that a vocal minority can dominate what seems like the ‘message of the masses’ for a little awhile, but the proof is in the analytics. Even voluntary survey I’ve seen of diggers shows a majority of users are on Windows machines browsing with Firefox. I’m sure the digg referrer logs show the same (despite the perception of a disproportionate Apple base)

Microsoft hating is fashionable. Digg comment threads are a worse echo chameber than any other. Yes, People really will be pissed (myself included) and no doubt, digg will lose a lot users if it goes through, but Microsoft shouldn’t care about losing those users anyway…not if they’re serious about buying the site in the first place.

This is interesting. The power of the community. I am not a Digg user. Every time I tried to, their registration seems not to work well for me. But as I have gone to the site couple of times, the content is not all that appealing to me. Nonetheless, they have a good amount of traffic.

I wander what will happen.

Digg only exists by the grace of Kevin’s tech TV following.
Look what happened to Netscape when they put a clone on their front page?

That will be Digg when it is acquired. Esp by Microsoft.

80% of digg users could successfully clone the entire website. That’s unlike any other website demographic.

would they be happier if YHOO buys Digg?

Chris, that’s nonsense. Digg will continue to do well even if Microsoft buys them. It’ll continue to make partnerships and grow. It has such a huge audience, with or without the teenage, anti-MS die-hards. And where there’s a huge audience, there will be people trying to get their stories seen.

Maybe Digg losing the 100% reactionary crowd would improve Digg as a source for news. But something tells that most of them wouldn’t give up Digg, once they realize it’s still Digg.

Digg is such a lame site full of major dorks. How in the hell does anyone come up with such a crazy valuation? Kevin is a dork, but he is not dumb and is ready to take the money and run before people start getting a clue. Web 2.0 madness at its finest.

“Maybe Digg losing the 100% reactionary crowd would improve Digg as a source for news.”

Like Netscape right? Digg was a slashdot for younger people. The only way digg would survive a Microsoft buy out would be to turn it into a lame social site like MySpace with butt ugly pages. Digg isn’t your run of the mill startup. Rose built the site on a foundation of die hard geeks.

Imagine if Commander Taco was made to kiss Gates’s pinky ring? How many people would still read the articles? If you don’t know who Commander Taco is, then perhaps you shouldn’t comment on this thread.

If M$ is in, I’m out.

They already control what gets posted on digg and what gets advertised.

Just try loading digg and see the first urls being called, msn, acquantive, and so on.

M$ already has its hands on it.

Fuck em!

M$ is a great company in positive transition.. not necessarily bad.

I hope Digg is reddited by Google,because Google have a plan to reddit for it,Facebook have the hope with me,oh…

Honestly, digg has seen a lot of attention from the higher up developers (Scott Guthrie etc).

I sincerely hope to god they don’t buy digg, solely because you get “Digg’d” for running adblock on firefox. I mean seriously, why would someone want to buy a site where the core demographic essentially consists of mother’s basement dwellers on their xp pc’s acting like they have a mac while beating off to anime always facing the bay area like some sort of koran ritual?

I know I wouldn’t.

@18

“tech Elite”? More like tech bottom-feeders. I mean sure it’s better than a FPS message board, but that’s about it. Digg is full of ignorant, internet-addicted, skill-less, life-less leeches. It’s just tabloid news with a tech spin.

If the “community” had it’s shit together enough to organize a mass-exodus post-Microsoft that would at least be something marginally worth of respect. But don’t fool yourself, because you won’t fool anyone who matters–Digg users ain’t goin anywhere.

Netscape undermined their own user base: bad explanations; bad publicity; bad cloning attempt (trying to control with iframes); trying to pay users to switch from Digg; thus, more bad publicity. I have no idea how Propeller.com is doing now so who knows. It’s not like Netscape couldn’t have worked. It just didn’t go about it properly. Yahoo’s method, at least, seems a little smarter, by having a separate area and featuring front page stories within their portal.

As a longtime Slashdot reader, I can say that it’s obvious that Digg has much less in common nowadays than it did starting out. Sure, there’s a big crossover of tech enthusiasts, which includes reactionary MS bashers. But those people are becoming less influential on Digg. And that’s OK. There’s room for more than one news stream.

Additionally, it’s not like MS or Google would banish negative MS or Google stories. Maybe in the past they’d be that stupid, but not now. Censorship, more than anything, would get people revolting/leaving.

Oh no, I would not want the Digg crowd suddenly homeless and looking for a new haunt.

Please don’t find YC!

Passionate users = Pro accounts. There’s your business model Kevin.

@17. Yeah. Maybe a Microsoft buyout would make it usable again.

want to share high quality news?

get into http://popdup.com

what? move to Mixx? like if Mixx would not sell out for a bunch of cash??

doh… Digg is/has been at least run by geeks for a while.

Mixx on the other hand is being run by ex-Yahoo corporate sales/mktg people. they’ve had $$$ printed in their foreheads the day they bought the domain name. at least Digg was real (whatever that means) for a while. Mixx is pretty and dandy but I trust NOTHING out of their exec team.

there i’ve said it…

I gave up on digg a long time ago because of this exact mentality from their userbase. They are the most whiny annoying children I have ever seen in my entire life and I can’t stand it.

No offense to Kevin or the digg team, they built a great product and it took off like nobody’s business, but this type of site just doesn’t work once it hits the breaking point.

So these diggtards really thing Kevin owns 100% of Digg and its not already part of corporate america?

A MSFT acquisition would be interesting in terms of seeing what Microsoft would do to Digg’s technology platform; would they leave the company to run as a separate entity within MSFT, or would they try to swap out the various open source components with their software?

I can understand that Digg users want Digg to retain its innocence, but the problem is Digg is a business, not a charity. If users want a free service that isn’t going to sell to some big company, they should one themselves.

Maybe if MS buys Digg, it’ll leave Yahoo alone.

What’s the big deal? YouTube is still YouTube under Google (though a tad less full of pirated content, but that was bound to happen sooner or later), Flickr is pretty much the same under Yahoo. Instead of these people whining about acquisitions like this, maybe they should point out situations where an acquisition of this nature DID “ruin” a site.

The only one I could think of was, really, Barnes & Noble buying TheSpark. Beyond that, I can’t think of much.

A MSFT could actually take Digg to the mainstream. I have been using Digg for over a year and enjoy the articles and video selection, but feel that the site could benefit from some mainstream users (submitted articles).

Plus, whats wrong with Jay making some $$$…….. he deserves it

I remember when the ‘community’ at MP3.com jumped all over Robertson for selling out. It was a smart move with terrible timing, as I told him and everyone else. Months before and it was $500MM+… waited too long cause all the noise (it seemed to me) and ended with what? $123MM… people just couldn’t believe… check that… some STILL can’t believe he built it for the money and not because he ‘cared’… saps. anyway - sell it if you can and get as much as you can get. so what people’s feelings get hurt. you didn’t build it for them anyhow - you built it for the money.

The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter what they do. Users won’t be happy either way. Right now they’re preaching about how Digg is the “bastion of free speech”, but not a month goes by where Digg is not accused of censorship, and moderation (though this has been cleared up time and time again).

Comments like, “Kevin Rose doesn’t care about you” make me laugh. Why the hell should he? They certainly don’t care about Kevin, and why should they feel any less of him for cashing out (oh, I mean “selling out”, right?).

Some of these users are ridiculously pathetic. They act as though Digg is a site owed to them, and that money should not be made from the internet, or advertising on it.

The truth is, the majority of vocal Digg users are a pathetic bunch of losers, who don’t want to see success in any one else.

Kevin: just fucking sell the thing. Everyone wants to be a millionaire, this is your shot, and you’ll go on to do bigger and better things. This community of bandwidth leeches are unimportant, and you’ll gain absolutely zilch from pleasing them.

I think these acquisition rumours will probably peter out as before, as behind the scenes Microsoft or whoever look through the hype and realise exactly what they’d be getting, and quietly walk away. Why any big company would want to dip their hand into the razorblade tombola that is Digg’s community I’ve no idea.

i’m so confused - is it still ‘cool’ to hate microsoft? don’t people have anything better to do? i’m more worried about elgoog…

It seems to me that Techcrunch is totally responsible for this problem, it is you that keeps running these stories which have so far ALL turned out to be false, why don’t you try getting your stories right for a change? You have a real nerve running a rumour then running a story about all the rumours. Your ego is clearly the real problem!

@61 - Chris Hill

Honestly, I’m more likely to believe this blog than the, “We’re not selling, I promise!” post on the Digg blog…

I mean think about it…what’s the exit strategy for a site like Digg? There really is no other option. It’s either sell or attempt to be the next Craigslist, one of the last great indies, but I don’t think the $11MM of VC behind them will allow that to happen

They could always choose to take the harder “exit” route — IPO

I love reading about how the evil corporations will ruin thing for everyone. Do you think if Google or Microsoft spend that much to purchase Digg that they will want to overhaul the site and “ruin” it? I didn’t see much change in YouTube after they were purchased by Google.

well as long they do not delete out comments and submissions it is ok but can not digg survive alone? they can.. they can monetize their 20 million plus unique visitors with more services. they can do merger with cragielist 4 example.

If I were Kevin I would absolutely sell Digg.

Over the last couple of years they have failed to keep pace with the gamers and spammers, and half the stories that gets frontpaged now are button-pushing BS with half-truths and hyperbole - the headlines especially have become ridiculously sensationalist and poorly represent the stories. So much propaganda.

The Ron Paul campaign especially treated Digg like its personal bitch, and it was really scary how many people drank that koolaid readily as if the popularity of his stories were just amazing and organic grassroots support which weren’t completely orchestrated and gamed.

Also the tech staff at digg has not been able to deal with everyday code problems and respond to user’s feedback in a timely manner - I think the users have been clamoring for a new comments system for 2 years - it crashes Firefox for christs sakes - and they still havent fixed it.

The experiment is over, Digg is losing its edge, just sell it, take some money home and thanks for the ride Kevin.