I’ve gotten a lot of responses to my post about Digg, and I want to clarify a couple things.
I wrote, Even if they still have the systems and the desire to roll back, they don’t have the talent to maintain Digg v3.
I wasn’t saying that the current team is untalented. I know them to be an extremely bright group, and I have great respect for them. They are my friends and co-workers, and I meant them no disrespect.
I’ll put it another way: The institutional knowledge needed to maintain and extend Digg v3 no longer exists. The people who knew how Digg v3 works – and more importantly why it works that way – are gone. The people who still work there haven’t worked with the v3 code in any significant way in many months. It’s not that they couldn’t do it, but it would take some time to get up to speed with the v3 code.
Every indication from Digg has been that they will continue iterating on v4, and I think that’s the right thing to do. But I also think that going back is simply not an option, for the reasons I outlined.
I also said, rolling back to v3 would be an admission that v4 is a failure,
which some might see as me calling v4 a failure. I don’t think that’s the case; it’s too early to say that it’s a failure or a success. Certainly, some people are upset, and this should surprise no one. Everyone at Digg knew that any change would make some number of users angry.
Discussion