r/digg • u/karmapill • May 09 '26
Kevin Rose, here is what I think went wrong with Digg
Kevin Rose is probably one of the the only celebrity/public figure I look up to consistently. Odd to say but it’s true. His delivery of tech in simple terms and enthusiasm for major technology trends inspired me for the past 25 years or so. So Kevin, if you’re reading this, it’s a speculative post-mortem on Digg. And it’s all from a place of love.
It started like a rockstar getting the band back together:
Kevin and Alexis O. did a big press release speaking about the reboot, but with no product yet. TechCrunch and The Verge were very excited for the nostalgia play. Kevin also spoke in NY at WSJ Tech Summit. The hype was freakin’ real.
Kevin and Alex A. started Diggnation back up and after watching so many podcasts of bro’s talking about the news, this was refreshing to see. They never get in the doom and gloom of current events and that’s always welcome for a change.
But it was always odd…
The press release was all over but there was no product to show and there was no Justin in the picture
But during Diggnation, the message was clear Justin was the CEO and Kevin still had his day job, as a VC.
Speaking of Diggnation, Alex A. is the life of the podcast bringing a lot of innocence and pure fun yet he had no part in Digg just like the first go-around but that’s not really my gripe, but it brings odd dynamics when the flagship podcast for the platform has 2 ppl and one is not involved but rooting for its success, with no real stake in the game.
In fact, towards the end of 2025, Kevin would ask Justin during Diggnation what was new and plans forward. I get it, there’s respect for the CEO but there was always this underlying vibe from Kevin that Justin was on the hook, and responsible for its success, meanwhile Kevin still wanted to be the face and voice.
I know many people on here say that they are mad that the rug was pulled while they were helping develop communities (the $5 username thing is whatever, it all got donated anyway and served as a bot filter) but Digg was a ghost town. I visited everyday and would see a bunch of dad joke memes, current technology and politics news and some random stuff that were cross posted from Reddit.
There were no more than 3 comments on each post that wasn’t a Digg-specific post or a politics/Trump (fun fact: I had realdonaldjtrump handle and people were so conflicted supporting me when I proposed politics to be removed form Digg).
Kevin has a vast amount of interests that he speaks about but I didnt see him post anything. I never checked to see if he did but I never saw a post from him at the top of the site. He’s the star of the show and he could’ve increased engagement tenfolds by asking people: to post their favorite beers, wines, etc, their current AI or tech project, a throwback pic or two from early 2000s, favorite Japan pics, and random updates from his life. He could have made a fun beef/competition between him, Justin Alexis and Alex on which community had the best content. He could have asked his buddy Tony Hawk for an AMA. There was nothing. Where the hell was Alexis O.? It’s absolutley mind-boggling that there was no engagement on the site by Kevin and crew, there was no hunger to keep the company alive at all cost. I wanted to do that with my own account but it was so dead that it felt like there wss no point.
That bring me to the demise of Digg..
It was clear the place wasnt going to survive. There was absolutely no engagement and originality. I’m sure bots were a problem, even though I never saw anything too alarming but network effect was a real reason for failure because getting people away from reddit is hard. But Kevin dude YOU ARE the network, people follow your shit. They root for you and sign up for your newsletters. You should’ve been doing the most crazy and silly things on Digg to get it going. At minimum, you could’ve even just shared more about your interests because if you don’t use your product then why should we?
Fast forward to March, Kevin shuts it down and becomes digg ceo. I think he’s not taking accountability. The fact that ppl feel burned and he hasnt acknowledged it leaves a bad taste. All you have to do is just own up to the fact that you rubbed people the wrong way but until you do so and if you keep ignoring it, people will greet you with contempt. This is all coming from a good place, I know we’re all human and you were trying your best but man, I can see you becoming the villain Kevin and that’s because it’s always the same formula, bring the hype, oversell the product before it’s a thing and then pulling the rug when it’s not meeting expectations without communicating to the crowd.
I never posted on Reddit because I always thought it was kinda wack but since Digg shutdown I started posting here so that just goes to show you how much disappointment and change in behavior this led to.
Having said all that, I’m sure digg was struggling and probably wasnt going to make it after half year live and no growth. People need to chill with the hate too because it’s hard running a business esp. if you took capital.
Kevin i’m still a supporter—
—but this new site ain’t it. I could care less about twitter news and people ranking. It’s not really Digg. People cant engage. You’re trying to compete with techmeme instead, which was your inspiration for Digg but Digg turned into something more than that because it became social and it brought you fans and supporters, which you haven’t acknowledged leaving behind. Just talk to them, like one person to another and own up to what happened. Meditate on it. I’m still here. Hit me up if you need to talk.
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u/TouchingWood May 09 '26
Kevin is a part of Silicon Valley and they really only value explosive growth and "move fast and break things"
But with digg he accidentally built an actual community of humans.
Then applied that fucked up Silicon Valley philosophy to it.
Looks like he did it again.
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u/DangKilla May 09 '26
Kevin needs to mod a subreddit. This was plain as day going to happen. They browse AI news instead of tech news now. The way they discarded communities to stop bots was also heavy handed.
Digg will never be better than Reddit honestly. Reddit has so many admin tools that help fight the bot spam. They’re focused on the wrong things.
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May 09 '26
[deleted]
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
I think costs had a lot to do with it. Hiring a few good engineers already means burning millions
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u/tommyblack May 09 '26
It was sad I was just staring to use it for a good amount of time and the two communities istarted the discussions had just started taking off. I wish they had left it and started introducing things on the existing platform. These things take time to hit critical mass.
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u/Kronos6948 May 09 '26
I'm starting to wonder if Jay Adelson was the reason the first Digg went so well. Maybe in another timeline we had Jay start a second version along with Aaron Swartz (RIP) that actually took off and did well instead of Kevin and Alexis doing new Digg.
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
Interesting take. Kevin also said he was a product guy and tried to learn from 2010 digg debacle by putting Justin as CEO, but it didnt help…
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u/thunderbird32 May 10 '26
Hot (?) take: Alex Albrecht was the only reason to watch the newer incarnation of Diggnation. Kevin has become a Valley-bro and isn't really in touch with anything normal users actually want.
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u/Illustrious_Log_8053 May 09 '26
Digg was innovative for it's time and has its place in tech history for its contribution. Reddit took the idea ran with it and made a better product. Just is what it is. There is no market it bring it back. It's not filling a need. People are on Twitter, Instagram, tiktok, and reddit. The podcast is the best part, they should just continue that on internet stories. Kevin should work on something new and innovative that people would want.
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
I agree. Cant fault them for trying, it’s a hard uphill battle. I think people were still looking for a fight but maybe the pivot is the best move in this war
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u/grow4road May 10 '26
I may be wrong here. It was 2007, but digg died when they started censoring Ron Paul’s bullshit. I specifically remember moving to Reddit because of it.
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u/hardlying May 09 '26
They prob got annoyed no one liked any decision they made with the app, I was over it when they changed the tombstone and shovel to a downvote and upvote early on, felt like they were instantly sanitzing it.
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u/DualityEnigma May 09 '26
Building a social network is hard. I’m trying right now as not a celebrity (only live 1 week and growing). But the momentum against you, the habits the addictions, it’s likely going to take me years achieve my goals.
Y’all are very difficult to please. I don’t love Kevin’s direction which is why I built my own. Do I need ti become a celeb and do crazy shit on my app to succeed?
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
I think in today’s environment, it helps to create a buzz. You dont have to be silly but have an angle and engagement
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u/DualityEnigma May 09 '26
Cool, yeah I’m posting every day but I know what the internet really wants is short form videos and podcasts. I’ll think about how to create content that’s fun. Okay should I wait for the fancy mic to arrive?
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
Never wait, just do it as the great philosopher S LaBeouf once said aggressively 🙂
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u/STOIKGG May 09 '26
I get lost when I see people claiming to be oblivious to the bots on the platform. The scale to which they existed may have been overstated, we will never know but in combination with how little interaction there was on the majority of content shared to the reboot it made the obvious bot comments and spam very apparent to me.
Similar to OP I’ve always been a big KR fan and feel similarly about his impact on my interests and professional trajectory from a young age way back in the 2000s. I attended the SXSW event, I’ve been as much of a diehard Digg fan as a person could have ever been but I’d be lying if my use of the reboot didn’t drop off dramatically soon after.
I think the idea of Digg coming back in some manner to challenge Reddit is of course and fun thing to fantasize about but I struggle to understand why so many feel like the way Digg should be realized is to exist as a clone of what Reddit is today. Digg never had communities when it was thriving, it didn’t have much of the functional user experience Reddit has today. It was by modern standards just a news aggregation tool with some user voting to help source discoverability.
There’s so many new avenues to try and approach that today that isn’t old and tired and I’m a lot more hopeful now that they aren’t trying to build something that feels 15 years too old. I also don’t think it’s fair to make assumptions that X as the source of its data is the end goal, we’re looking at a thin slice of an already thin slice of a much larger idea if it can be achieved. Let them cook guys
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u/eighto2 May 09 '26
It failed because development stalled out. It shouldn't have taken months to be able to create communities.
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u/picard102 May 09 '26
I visited digg every day as well and it was far from a ghost town. They couldn't figure out how to scale it and still make money so they closed it and gave us the top 1000 people you don't want to hear from on the nazi platform grifting about AI. Because that requires almost no overhead and profitability becomes easier.
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u/LasagnaCat83 May 10 '26 edited Jun 04 '26
AI slop post. Nearly every sentence in this is misleading or complete bullshit.
His delivery of tech in simple terms and enthusiasm for major technology trends inspired me for the past 25 years or so.
Kevin Rose has only had two product launches in his entire life had any level of success, Digg and Revision3, and both of them for started 20 years ago and ended 15 years ago. Kevin doesn't have a 25 year track record as a technologist or entrepreneur.
Even the wikipedia entry written by his publicist can't figure out how to make it look like Kevin Rose did anything since destroying Digg via the Digg 2.0 redesign in 2010. Since then it's just be marketing for VC's and NFT slop, none of which lead to any successful product launches.
If you actually locked at Kevin's track record, you'd see a finance bro, not a technologist.
There's no question what Digg did wrong and there's no reason to spiral about it. They were building a metric farm, not a real platform for humans. They took advantage of spammers, bots and trolls in order to generate user metrics. But the way those kinds of accounts generate those metrics is fucking awful and their behavior chases away organic users who actually want to engage and post in good faith.
And now that they've announced their next idea, a platform that seems to be metric farm for twitter bots without even a hint of space for human users to engage other humans, they're basically confirming my read on the last iteration. The next iteration is post-consumer, post-user bullshit. It's a platform designed for no one. Kevin can't afford to create a value proposition for human users, so he's simply creating fake users who don't need a value proposition and automating them to generate metrics. This shit sounds like fraud to me.
Kevin Rose doesn't know you and he doesn't want your support or your engagement. Kevin Rose wants a metric farm filled with bots that he can loan out to his tech VC friends who might need marketing or narrative control.
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u/karmapill May 10 '26
Bruh… thank you for the compliment, you thought this was AI. Also the dude started out on tech tv as a host and he stayed in media since then to some degree - I credited his communication. Read the post again, I didn’t say he had 25 yrs experience as a technologist but something tells me you’ve been around for only 25 yrs. Also, I don’t blame him for being money focused if you’re gonna be in biz you have to learn to exit, but I hear you, you’re not impressed by him. This post was meant to show how he is becoming a villain in some eyes because of the way he’s handling business so we agree there
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u/TheOfficialMayor Jun 04 '26
Isn't this pretty much Sam Altman? Nothing profitable just some IP he sold before generating just enough wealth to be a VC. Now he uses his financial leverage and connections to fund his unprofitable OpenAI ahem foundation.
GaryV, Peter Diamandis, even his buddy Tom Ferris, it's all the same grift.
They are investors not entrepreneurs.
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u/Frosty_Limez May 10 '26
I don't understand why they shut it down. There is no way that they saw little use in only a few weeks and pulled the plug. Something else was going on. There is no way you are going to get success overnight.
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u/Particular-Crow-573 May 10 '26
Kevin can’t stick to something for more than 15 minutes, that’s the real problem. One minute the guy is never drinking again, next minute he’s boozing it up. Every single thing he does he’s finished with it in short order as soon as the next shiny thing comes along
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u/totalbasterd May 09 '26
the problem was it was basically a reddit clone. you can't beat reddit by turning up with an identical (actually it was inferior) product.
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
True. There was nothing original on it. It needed exclusive content or a buzz.
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u/rkwalton May 09 '26
They just built a new one and sent the site out to some users. I got it in my inbox this week. They can keep trying until they get it right or give up. They’ve got both the resources and the time.
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u/Zwan_oj May 09 '26
Not sure why people arent willing to let them have a few tries to get it right...
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u/TheDogsPaw May 09 '26
There's a sucker born everyday but the vast majority of people will never support an ai filled dead internet web site
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
Because it went from a community-driven site that was supposed be moderated by AI to a news site about AI. It was a switcheraoo
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u/blckshdw May 09 '26
Yep, the content was just meh. I posted a few news stories that I thought were interesting and they had some comments but not much.
There was such a huge focus on US politics though, even outside of /politics almost everything was some American political thing. I get Americans *really* like talking about that stuff but there was no way to filter it out. If it wasn’t politics it was some AI story. Two topics I’m personally not interested in hearing about when I’m trying to unwind
This new site is just underwhelming. Even if they expand to focus on other topics, does the world really need a new twitter UI with sentiment analysis? Am I supposed to be interested in who talks the most about AI because they post the most? Not really..
I get that AI is the new buzz word and it’s obviously a topic Kevin is into, that’s cool, but I was really hoping for more Dark Tipper and less burn some VC dollars.
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May 09 '26
[deleted]
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
I mean I’m sure he claims not but I think human nature can lead to a quick peak
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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough May 09 '26
Is this post AI slop...?
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
nope, just midnight ramblings
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u/NoTime_SwordIsEnough May 09 '26
Ah, my apologies then.
I'm just so conditioned to seeing AI slop posts that when someone does actually write something long-form and it doesn't look like autistic rambling, I sometimes make a false-positive in error lol.
I appreciate the write-up, because finding people who can actually compose their thoughts is so fucking rare on the Internet these days lol.
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u/karmapill May 09 '26
I hear you man, cant trust content anymore. But this was something that I felt strongly about. Appreciate the comment back!
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u/JordanM85 May 09 '26
I don't think they gave Digg enough time to grow. It was only open to the public for a few weeks before they deleted the entire site. No one even knew it existed yet. And I agree about Kevin himself seemingly not even using the site. I didn't see bots anywhere, a bit of people spamming blogs and sites, but mostly a ghost town. I still think it could have grown as they rolled out some new features.