Did Digg just fire their content editor for not labeling a sponsored link?

This entire piece is conjecture, but it is not exactly wild. It is mostly circumstantial. I subscribe to Digg’s The Daily Digg and read it once a week, mostly because I find few, but not all, the content very interesting — not that that is Digg’s fault.

I have often noticed that one of the links in their daily newsletter is sponsored, and lately a lot of it seems to come on Squarespace’s behalf.

Yesterday’s newsletter carried a note in the header and read, “Monday’s edition … featured a sponsored post that was not properly labeled … As is our longstanding practice, the offending editor has been thrown into the Great Pit of Carkoon … On a related note, we’re looking for a new editor.”

It is understandable that such a mistake, although unacceptable — legally and otherwise — was going to be made sooner or later. When you have a real live human sitting behind a computer, preparing a newsletter, you have got to be prepared to tackle such things.

Digg may be looking for a second editor to assist their existing one, but their tone assures us of no such thing. It seems likely, to me, that Digg just fired their content editor and is on the lookout for a new associate editor, as their website reads (as of February the 5th, 2014).

What I believe is the unlabeld link in question

This is not the first time Digg has had an employee thrown into the Great Pit of Carkoon: back in 2010, they fired their VP of engineering, John Quinn, after his plan of switching to Cassandra in a bid to replace replace mySQL was blamed for the website’s long and repetitive downtime.

Digg’s biggest competitor is Reddit — and, granted, I am somewhat of a Reddit junkie. Their understandable goal will be to take over Reddit and become the go-to place for people such as myself who are overly fond of the news. But firing people for small faults is hardly a good strategy.

Secondly, Reddit is edited, for a practical purposes, by its users. No sponsored links or any of that business model comes in. In fact, Reddit is a fine subset of the Internet — another example of something successfully run by people’s unanimous decisions. So long as Digg puts aggregating everyday news into the hands of one person, their catching up with Reddit’s standards is a long shot.

And so long as they fire people like clockwork they can expect to get little done with consistency. (Two may not be clockwork, but Digg’s other notable layoffs have been their firing of 25 people a couple of years ago to keep the company alive, and their firing of Google (and subsequent replacement with Microsoft) as their ads delivery network.)

Once again, Digg may not have fired anybody, but the fact that they held an editor responsible for not labeling a sponsored link (which is what they are doing as I gather from their email note) and then on a related note are looking for an associate editor, sounds pretty conclusive.

Digg has potential. Perhaps it is only looking in the wrong places to exploit it.

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