Digg's Kevin Rose: We've got to be more than a fanboy hub

LONDON--Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It's time to grow up.

"We have to do better," he said in his talk, called "The Future of News," and said that it's time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. "Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?"

Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts--those are the people actually "Digging." That indirectly confirmed what Digg critics hve been saying all along: that it's reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories.

As a result, Rose explained, Digg's strategy going forward--one of the reasons why it raised $28.7 million in a Series C round last month--is to make the service more relevant to the average user. Digg has started to experiment with personalization and recommendation, something that Rose frequently discusses in his town hall Webcasts with the company's CEO, Jay Adelson. Introducing a "similar users" feature on the "upcoming" page of Digg increased friend adding fourfold and Digging by 40 percent.

Rose, who has ditched his trademark shaggy coif for a more mature buzz cut, didn't actually talk much about the future of news beyond Digg, but implied that he hopes Digg will be an industry example for the ongoing evolution of something much broader. He also didn't say anything about the pressures of an unfriendly economic climate, but his down-to-business attitude suggested that he realizes things aren't just fun-and-games for Web 2.0 anymore.

The impetus right now, he kept stressing, is to make a social news site personally relevant.

Digg has a lot of data that it hasn't opened up yet, and that it will start rolling out to the public to make the site more relevant for average people. Pooling users into "dynamic" groups by interest is paramount, as is customizing the site for people who might not want all those stories about iPhones and Barack Obama. Beyond that, there's more: Digg has used internal algorithms to identify what Rose calls "prescient users," or tastemakers who have a high probability of Digging something early on that will eventually become very popular.

One person in the audience asked Rose whether catering to uber-niche interests will actually be a negative force for Digg's young users, narrowing their worldview. Again, Rose said that the expansion of the site will provide all kinds of opportunities: filtering Diggs by regions of the world, for example. Internationalizing the site, on that note, is also a big goal, and should start to roll out late next year. And though the site now relies on its display ad contract with Microsoft, "Diggable ads" in some form will eventually help Rose's company make a few extra bucks.

But Rose, a bona fide geek hero, assured the audience--a crowd of developers mostly from the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, many of whom looked like they were young enough to be skipping school for the conference--that Digg won't lose its wacky-news cachet as it matures and expands.

"We truly believe the front page of Digg will always be that random (and) crazy," Rose said. "We don't want to get rid of that."

[n3td3v]

he needs to grow up as well and stop drinking beers on diggnation, its like bush playing golf.

[SparkyDude03]

Diggnation is a personal podcast regarding the personal interests of the respective hosts. They state that they pick some of the most popular stories on Digg, but others that they find interesting as well, which makes it personal interest. And guess what? That is perfectly fine. So if a personal non-commercial podcasts' hosts want to share a few beers on the show it's well within reason. No one forces you to watch, so don't knock it, or just don't watch it.

[klmay65]

@n3td3v
It's like Bush playing golf? What?
That is a great example of the kind of thing that prevents DIGG from being taken seriously.
Grow up and come to the adult's table.

[Comment4U]

If Kevin thinks the front page of Digg is random, he does not know is own site very well. The site is in the pocket of a couple of blogs (you know the 2 I mean) and will never grow beyond that -- it's simply too easy to game the system.

[rmm3]

I believe he got his haircut for a charity event, not to look more mature

[ducttapeBigSexy]

"...it's reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories."

I used to check out Digg all the time, but that's the exact reason why I stopped going there. What's sad is I just loaded up Digg, and the top stories include a story about the iPhone and about Obama.

[Penguinisto]

Sorry, but Digg is IMHO best suited for the teenagers and the undergrad set, and they have a very long way to go before they shake that reputation (and to be honest, they haven't done too much to try...)

I'll stick with Slashdot, thanks.

/P

[Kev_Orng]

I hate it when I click a link and a Digg page loads up. It's not so bad if I click through to the article posted, but sometimes I can't resist the urge to see the trainwreck in the comments. That's when I start to lose brain cells. Digg's commenters, while orders of magnitude more mature than Youtube commenters, are still just petty and insulting.

For fun, Digg should do what Youtube did, and take this idea from XKCD http://xkcd.com/481/

Other than that, if he wants to raise the level of discourse, then any comment containing the word "fanboy" should be subject to moderation before posting. The people who use it are mainly interested in insulting, not discussing.

[Harrison912]

Caroline, thanks for a great article. I enjoy Digg and the help it gives me in finding material for my safety and security site's tips page. Good to know they're always trying to do better.

[Mr. Dee]

I think Digg is one of the worst things that has happened to the net. It promotes irresponsibility and a lack of maturity. If Digg did not exist, stories like Steve Jobs is dead or Steve Jobs is having a heart attack would not even make it into mainstream media. Of course, the site can become better, but how much so? I think it needs to be reigned in.

[jbrandonbbx]

I think Digg has to get more personal, because they won't be able to scale unless they do. The drive-bys are great for ad rev today, but not for the long-term. I wrote about this in my blog today:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/kevin_rose_personal

[jon.nield]

Its interesting how many want to pin digg as the irreverant, immature, web 2.0 company that needs to shape up... It might be easier to point out the 2.0 companies that don't have that kind of mentality.

[rnieves1977]

I concur.

[Kev_Orng]

I'm not trying to tar Digg as irreverent and immature that needs to shape up. However, some of the people posting in the comments certainly fit that description. They can get downright insulting to each other. But, of course, not as bad as YouTube's commenters.

If Digg has decided that it needs to make itself more relevant, then one thing it can do is to find a way to encourage more engaging discourse in the comments, without resorting to censoring. If the commenters grow up, then people who have something intelligent and useful to say won't be afraid to say it.

[tamarweinberg]

If Digg wants to do better, they need to get rid of their community management team and its leadership under Jen Burton and find a community manager who actually acknowledges the impact of the community on Digg's success.