Digg

Digg appears in Steve Huffman on Reddit’s Origin Story, Sale, and Return as the larger, earlier competitor to Reddit. Steve Huffman says Digg had launched first, was bigger, and benefited from Kevin Rose’s fame among the target audience.

Huffman also treats Digg as a learning surface. Being smaller let Reddit watch larger competitors take heat and make mistakes first, a pattern he says later extended to Twitter and Facebook as well.

Jared Friedman, Partner, Y Combinator; Co-founder, Scribd adds Digg as part of Scribd’s launch-distribution burst. Jared Friedman says Scribd quickly reached Hacker News, TechCrunch, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, and mainstream media, helping the company move from nearly broke to multiple Series A term sheets.

Connections

• Scribd, Jared Friedman, Hacker News, Slashdot, and Reddit - launch-distribution context added by the Jared Friedman episode.
• Reddit, Steve Huffman, and User-Powered Content Platform - competitive product context.
• Platform Community Governance and Long-Lived Startup Decisions - platform lessons Reddit could observe before repeating.