You know, when a tanker full of eggs hits a rail car of charcoal and they roll into the propane factory? You don't get omlettes for Lubbock, you just get a stinky mess.

Digg Is Not A Stinky Mess

Well, it's a fascinating mess, some sort of mixture of socialism run amuck and web bubble captitalism.

By socialism I mean that people profess to want to "do good" while gaming the system like mad, pretending money doesn't matter and not understanding the tragedy of the commons.

(Capitalists would profess to being efficient, game the system like mad, say money is just a score counter, and sell you a share in the commons. More for a share on the golf course side.)

In any case, it's a chaotic system with Ron Paul screeds fighting with lolcats for front page attention by 10M readers. You have ardent wikipedia like zealots burying anything sniffing of SEO or SPAM or just not-what-we-like. You even have an entire sub-industry of people selling tools and techniques and Amazonian Mechanical Turks to game the system.

I liked the grand Bazaar in Istanbul too.

So Digg Went Down. Again.

Surfing over to Digg in the morning is my personal equivalent of choosing the long supermarket checkout lane so I can finish The Enquirer. So what do I see first thing this morning:

No, you're down because your servers crashed like, well, like that egg truck earlier. It may well have been because your engineers made an excusable mistake - we've all been there. But I think it is because of bad management.

Hubris, Look It Up

Kevin Rose, who I admit bugs me, said in Amsterdam recently:

Moreover, the Digg-founder told me that the company is large enough now - 55 employees - for things to happen on their own. He used to panic when the servers crashed, now he has a team to take care of a crisis like that.

Kevin, dude, get a team that prevents crisis. Better yet, and I know this is going to sound strange to a 30 year old, hire some guys in their late 40's and early 50's who've run data centers and development teams bigger than your current company. Ask them to put some process in place.

I will quote your own words back at you:

Interviewer: So the first question that comes to everybody's mind is: how can you handle three start-ups at the same time?

Rose: "It's a matter of getting the right management in place".

Ok, so you've clearly got the wrong management in place. Not because your system went down (though that really shouldn't happen) but because it happens often enough that nobody was surprised.

Moving Forward

I dunno what to say. I've heard the same rumors as everyone else - "Digg for sale at $200M" or "$400M Buyout of Digg Rumored."

I will say that if I were giving Kevin some advice I'd tell him to pick one company and pay 100% attention to it. I'd pick Digg over Pownce or MyBlogLog or whatever else he's got going on.

And if he didn't listen I'd pick up the phone and start calling friends who had tens (or hundreds) of millions in stock from Webvan, Pets.com, Scient, etc, etc.