It’s not every day Google offers you $200 million dollars for your popular tech start-up. And if that deal doesn’t work out, you should consider yourself extremely lucky when another company comes along and offers you $80 million. Kevin Rose, founder and former CEO of Digg didn’t think so.
After turning down offers like these, he went on to greenlight a series of incredibly dumb decisions that led to his stepping down as CEO, a dwindling user base, and ultimately today’s news that Digg has just been acquired for a paltry $500 million. LOL did I say million? I meant $500 thousand.
As Gizmodo puts it: Digg Sells Itself for Pathetic Pocket Change: $500,000
TechCrunch’s summary of the slow, sad decline of Digg reads like an obituary:
Once a poster child of the Web 2.0 revolution, Digg slowly faded into the background over the last few years, especially after its 4.0 update alienated many of its users. After that, Digg never quite found a niche for itself as content sharing moved to social networks like Twitter and Facebook (and the competing social sharing site Reddit). It still has a sizable amount of users, but it’s really just a shadow of its former self today. While an announcement like today’s acquisition would once have received hundreds of “diggs” and comments within a few minutes, the fact that today’s announcement has only 16 diggs and four comments so far is rather telling.
Hindsight is a bitch.
Thanks for the fun while it lasted, Kev. I had a good time digging things for a few years there, and there was even a time when I used Digg more than I do Twitter. But then you had to go changing things around for no good reason and bein’ all mega-rich and not caring about Digg anymore and shit. And now you get to hear a collective “We told you so” from all your disgruntled past and present Digg users.
Here’s to you, Kevin Rose. You win today’s Fail Horn.
Press Play to Receive Your Prize:
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/48302326″ iframe=”true” /]
(I still think you’re kinda hot though.)
