176. The Epic Fail of Digg V.4 With Will Larson

176. The Epic Fail of Digg V.4 With Will Larson

Author: Brian McCullough August 6, 2018 Duration: 49:56
This story has gone down in Silicon Valley lore as the ultimate cautionary tale. Digg was the earliest high flying startup in early social media. But then, other startups like Facebook and Twitter started to steal the limelight. So Digg tried to keep up by launching the infamous Digg version 4. And… it’s a disaster. Users hate it. So much so, that many people feel that the reason Reddit is Reddit today is because the Digg community fled their en-masse. Digg Version 4 has become a much cited horror story for when a redesign can be so disruptive it can kill a company. So, what’s the real story behind this urban legend? Today, we talk to Will Larson, who today is at Stripe, was a young engineer working on the launch of Digg version 4. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Brian McCullough's Internet History Podcast digs into the foundational stories of our digital world, exploring the pivotal moments and forgotten detours between the rise of the first mainstream web browser and the dawn of the modern mobile era. This isn't just a dry recounting of dates and corporate maneuvers. Instead, the podcast weaves together the intersecting threads of technology, business, and the profound societal shifts they triggered. You'll hear about the personalities, the breakthrough products, the spectacular failures, and the cultural phenomena that collectively built the internet as we know it. Each episode serves as a chapter in a larger, ongoing narrative about how connectivity reshaped everything from commerce and communication to creativity and community. For anyone curious about how we got here, this series provides essential context, revealing the human drama behind the code and the hardware. Tune in for a deeply researched, engagingly told chronicle of the forces that defined a generation and continue to shape our future.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Internet History Podcast
Podcast Episodes
202. The del.icio.us Story With Joshua Schachter [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:57
Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, is someone I’ve wanted to talk to from the very first day of this podcast. As we’ll discuss, del.icio.us was such a standard bearer of the web 2.0 era. Of user generated content.…
201. The History of Audible With Angelika Fuellemann [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 25:04
Angelika Fuellemann is a designer who worked early on with BookSense.com, then got hired by Audible early on, so this is the early story of Audible. It’s funny… audio, streaming music, podcasts, audiobooks, it seems so o…
200. Professional Blogging Pioneer Josh Marshall [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:16:11
Josh Marshall is one of the key people who brought blogging into the realm of serious, award winning and respectable journalism. The story of his blog/publication, Talking Points Memo, or TPM is the story of blogging bec…
199. Is Tech Making Us- Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:29
Is technology really rotting our brains, destroying our society... or is that what everyone has always worried about with every technological advance, going back to tv, or telephones, or even writing letters? The new boo…
198. Inventor of the Hashtag, Chris Messina [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:05
Well, as we say in this episode, he’ll always be known as the inventor of the hashtag, but Chris Messina has been central to so many things in tech over the last 20 years or so. Helped Mozilla launch Firefox. Founded Bar…
196. Google, Twitter and More With Karen Wickre [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:27:13
Everyone knows Karen Wickre, because she’s one of those classic connectors. Once we finally got in touch, I wasn’t surprised to learn we knew about half a dozen of the same people though we had never remotely crossed pat…
195. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:24:20
Kevin Scott is the current Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft. We talk about his entire career, how being an academic seemed to be his path before he transformed the ads system at Google. Then he revolutionized the en…
194. The History of the ISP Industry With Sonic's Dane Jasper [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:25:32
Today we continue my efforts to preserve the history of the ISP industry. Today it feels like the Internet is simply all around us all the time, but there are amazing entrepreneurial stories about how that crucial infras…