Catching up with Slashdot today, I read about Digg.com being sold to Betaworks:
The once popular social news website Digg.com, which received $45 million in funding, is being sold to to Betaworks for $500,000. From the article: ‘Betaworks is acquiring the Digg brand, website, and technology, but not its employees. Digg will be folded into News.me, Betaworks’ social news aggregator. This is not the outcome people expected for Digg. In 2008, Google was reportedly set to buy it for $200 million.
This brings back a lot of memories. Back when Digg.com started, it became a “big thing” almost instantly. There was plenty of hype around it, and many people went as far as predicting the death of Slashdot. Digg was supposed to be some sort of new and better Slashdot. But when I tried using Digg.com, I immediately thought that that was not the case.
The two sites are very different. One of the most obvious difference is that Slashdot is more focused on the technology, and Digg covers pretty much everything and anything. But that wasn’t the most important difference for me. The most important for me was that Slashdot seems to be focused around discussions and commentary, while Digg.com was just a delivery system for the news articles. And even back then there were numerous resources where you could find news. Finding the news hasn’t been the problem for years. But finding good commentary and discussions has always been. And still is.
Slashdot comments were and still are its greatest value. Digg had discussions as well, but somehow they weren’t as valuable. And if I think about it for a second, for me personally, the greatest value of Digg was not the actual site Digg.com, but the Diggnation show. Which, once again, provided commentary and discussions of the top stories from Digg.com. Too bad that is discontinued now as well.