by deergomoo on 6/6/2023, 11:30:17 AM
by biorach on 6/6/2023, 10:54:58 AM
> Our API server was a Python Tornado service... and one of the most frequently accessed endpoint was used to retrieve user by their name or id. Because it supported retrieval by either name or id, it set default values for both parameters as empty lists. This is a super reasonable thing to do! However, Python only initializes default parameters when the function is first evaluated, which means that the same list is used for every call to the function. As a result, if you mutate those values, the mutations span across invocations.
How on earth did such a well-known Python footgun ever make it into production? This is the kind of thing that should leap out of the screen for even a mid-level Python developer - and once you've been trained by bitter experience it's very easy to spot.
by drumhead on 6/6/2023, 1:01:30 PM
Original Digg was what reddit is now. And Reddit was what Hacker news is now. But luckily I cant see a mass migration here from reddit. I cant even see a reddit replacement. Discord is the platform of choice for discussion these days. Most users will either drift off there or find alternative single issue forums to replace what they were viewing on Reddit. This is one of the places i'll come to but I'll see if I can find other communitities with a decent level of activity as well.
by yalogin on 6/6/2023, 12:16:37 PM
I was really hoping there would be an analysis of why the v4 was needed from a revenue point of view. The v4 essentially winked the company because no one likes the UX/UI. Digg insisted on it. Interestingly years later, Reddit followed the same route. They moved to the exact same UI that I hated with digg. Luckily they kept the older UI which is what kept me with the site. I am yet to get an answer about why the redesign was necessary and what it would give them they couldn’t get with the old design
by dmazin on 6/6/2023, 10:54:37 AM
I seem to recall that, years ago, this article's photo[1] of Digg engineers sitting together for the v4 launch used to get posted every now and then. Usually, the idea was to shock people about how awful open offices were. Only today did I learn that this was a photo of an unusual event, and not how people usually sat at Digg.
Or maybe I'm thinking of a different photo?
by tyingq on 6/6/2023, 12:04:13 PM
A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.
by donatj on 6/6/2023, 1:02:59 PM
I have been through several full rewrites of major money makers. It’s almost always a really bad idea. Almost being the key word.
Beyond second system syndrome, you really have no idea what your users actually like about your product vs your competitors. You’re too close to the product.
A rewrite that breaks users muscle memory and frustrates them is the perfect time for a jump to a competitor.
You are basically always better off mutating over time at a much more tolerable rate.
by runlevel1 on 6/6/2023, 6:17:24 PM
Fun fact: Digg sold SendGrid its hardware after Digg v4 flopped. This made up a good chunk of our first data center.
IIRC, it was a bunch of Penguin Computing boxes in an Equinix DC in San Jose. I think we probably retired the last of them in early 2015.
by shortlived on 6/6/2023, 11:20:07 AM
> We had so little capacity that we had decided to reimage all our existing servers and then reprovision them in the new software stack.
That's terrifying!
by neom on 6/6/2023, 11:16:14 AM
Kevin Rose: We migrated from LAMP to Cassandra because LAMP doesn't scale and Cassandra does.
by Andrex on 6/6/2023, 3:16:26 PM
Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their early history, because it's nostalgic for me.
What people don't realize is Digg actually had four founders, depending on how you count them. Owen Byrne[0] has as his bio "The person who built digg for $1000 @ $10/hour, lol". Going by that, I don't think he shared in any equity.
The whole site was bootstrapped for apparently $6000 total.
People also think Digg turned down Google's $200 million offer, but it was the other way around. Google walked away after some due diligence.
Knowing all this, Digg's fall seems kind of inevitable. That said Reddit never really filled that hole IMO.
by ndjdhdidve on 6/6/2023, 12:52:47 PM
techbros had the lesson of their life, and learned nothing.
still can't relate the failure of adding incremental value and foatering community... defends to again spending all the time on a full rewrite that wasn't even load tested.
the sad part is that the whole team did have success! most of them went to be leaders elsewhere spreading their cancerous big-and-bust with their layoff cycles.
techbro privilege is real. maybe similar to the political class. no other professions allow such reckless failures.
by iJohnDoe on 6/6/2023, 7:01:00 PM
I was an avid user of Digg. I remember having to force myself not to spend too much time on the site. I enjoyed the content. Always interesting stuff was posted. I also enjoyed the funny comments. I remember the epic downvotes. The Dumbledore comments. The Photoshop comments. The DVD key comments. Lots of fun.
My memory of what happened was this. There was some infighting about the comment threads and how they should be implemented. A new approach got implemented. The site started crawling any time you clicked on a comment. Everyone was saying that of course it wasn’t going to work and a particular person’s approach shouldn’t have been used. The site became unusable. After that it became a blur, because I must have stopped using the site. I believe the downfall of Digg occurred around these changes.
I would be curious of other people’s timeline.
by synack on 6/6/2023, 10:16:21 PM
There was an internal alpha build of Digg v4 that had "verticals", which were kinda like subreddits. If there weren't enough stories to fill up the front page, the backend would run a search query and fill in relevant stories from other verticals, or even external search engines. As a vertical got more users, the user-voted stories would be given priority over the algorithmically chosen ones.
From a user perspective, this meant that there was already a subreddit for any topic you could conceive of, even if nobody had ever submitted a story to it. It was pretty magical.
Sadly, this whole system was axed in order to get the thing launched before we ran out of money. I bet you could do an even better version of it now with recommendations based on LLM prompts.
by thih9 on 6/6/2023, 4:44:40 PM
Note that this is about the 2010 launch. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4
by nunobrito on 6/6/2023, 11:25:03 AM
Albeit unpopular opinion, this kind of things is one of the reasons why I'll always push for Java instead of a jigsaw of different languages that sound cool.
Stability, scalability and simplicity. Yes, you read correctly.
Whomever complains that Java is bloated or complex, needs only to look on who is writing that "piece" of code. Expert developers will write proper code that anyone can maintain and keep simple.
Too bad for Digg. Was a good site.
by knorker on 6/7/2023, 11:31:56 PM
Digg v4 failed because the user experience was basically equal to if when someone forgets to renew their domain, and a squatter put up some BS spam site in its place.
There was no place for users on Digg v4. And without users, it's hard to get revenue.
Was it unreliable at first? I didn't even notice. I just saw what they were aiming for, and noped out.
by cainxinth on 6/6/2023, 12:39:23 PM
I still read Digg, along with HN, Reddit, slashdot, metafilter, lobste.rs, kottke, boing boing and many other sources of news and links. I’ve always been an information junkie. High brow, low brow, I don’t care. I want it all.
by EdwardDiego on 6/6/2023, 11:13:37 AM
Waiters? ...really?
by TheCaptain4815 on 6/6/2023, 1:37:20 PM
People comparing this to reddit today and anticipating a downfall to a new flashy competitor are in for a rude awakening. A huge portion of the country believes in "hate speech" and "election misinformation" as a major issue in the country.
If the original reddit were introduced today with the exact same owners (RIP Aaron), rules, and layout, they'd be cut off by AWS, their IP provider, called Nazi's on CNN, etc.
On top of that, it's clear a site such as Reddit pushes their political viewpoints forward. Why would they give up such power for a more "balanced" and "fair" site. Look what happened in 2016 when the DNC leaks occurred and Trump stuff was on the frontpage day and night.
Personally I hope this does happen and would LOVE to see a few things defaulted in the new reddit.
1) Allow viewing of removed comments. 2) Give mods the ability to remove upvotes in comments (for a more OG message board vibe) 3) A different type of view for a political post. Maybe instead of just seeing the best comment, you'd get the ability to see the top comment + top rebuttal or something.
Good read. Interesting that the author’s takeaway is that folks consider Digg v4 to be a catastrophic launch because of the myriad technical issues.
I don’t even remember there being technical issues, I just remember logging in one day to find a website I enjoyed replaced with a bunch of crap I wasn’t interested in.