Interview: Digg.com's founder on competition, scaling, user moderation and the future of everybody's favorite UGC site.
Successful entrepreneurs come in myriad shapes and sizes.
There's the uber geek. The uber jock. The uber coifed.
Then there's Kevin Rose, former TechTV media darling (and Jason Schwartzman look-alike) turned founder of one of the most successful user-generated sites on the Web.
The soon-to-be 29-year-old Rose launched digg.com in December 2004. Although he says he never expected the site to be that popular, by the next July digg.com had nearly 10 million page views per day. Today, the site garners about even more significant traffic and frequent comparisons to geek forum Slashdot.
Recently, the site has also attracted criticism, with some observers questioning the value of digg's user-generated content.
We caught up with Kevin Rose to ask him a few questions about user content, digg's future and digg's competition.
A lot of online observers give digg credit for galvanizing a new type of news coverage, sometimes referred to as "news 2.0." Longtime citizen media proponent Jeff Jarvis even mentioned digg recently as an alternative to mainstream media. But who do you see as digg's competitors? Is it other news sites, such as reddit.com or Slashdot? Is it mainstream media? All of the above?
We're really not competing with mass editor-controlled media in any way. It's more of a symbiotic relationship where we're a clearing house for directing users to the best online content. Digg will forever remain as an independent democratic user-driven Web site. With mainstream media, a handful of editors determine what is important. With digg, the masses do. We just provide the level playing field in which users express and share their interests.
In terms of competition, we've seen several clones of digg appear, but do not really see them as threats, as none has been able to develop the critical mass of users that digg has. We have been compared to Slashdot and del.icio.us, but our model is really quite different.
You wrote in the digg blog that you're concentrating on moving digg beyond tech coverage. What new areas will you be expanding into? Are there different obstacles to overcome when trying to attract a less tech-centric audience?
We are currently working on the third release of dig—internally we call it "genesis." It's truly the beginning for what will become a platform for users to share and rank ALL types of news and information online.
I like using digg. There's a lot of fun content. But there's also a lot of crap, and sometimes stories that get promoted to the front page are misleading or just plain wrong. Do you have any plans to implement a stricter moderation system or other way of controlling the reliability of posts?
We've just turned a new feature live that allows users to mark posts as inaccurate. Once the community has marked it as such, a message will be displayed at the top of the story. This system operates and is marked much like a Wikipedia entry that contains information that is potentially inaccurate. We've found that the digg community is very efficient about self-policing the site and reporting inappropriate or inaccurate stories. This new feature will give them one more tool to do this.
What are the limits of user-generated content, as it applies to digg?
Digg was started with a focus on tech news. Given the strong user response to the digg methodology for promoting stories, we will soon be giving users the ability to explore and submit content of any type. There will be no limit to the types and quantity of stories that digg will accept. Digg isn't a popularity contest, stories that are "dugg" by 10 or 10,000 people carry the same weight—what's most important to us is connecting users with the information and news that is most important to them as that news breaks.
Is it really necessary to have 5,475 friends on MySpace?
Ha, MySpace is a crazy place. At first it was just close friends, then the invites started pouring in and I couldn't stop clicking "accept." It's addicting. Those poor MySQL engineers, those friends queries must be insane.
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