1d ago

Digg founder Kevin Rose offers to buy Pocket from Mozilla

Robert Kevin Rose (born 1977) is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV's The Screen Savers. From 2012 to 2015, he was a venture partner at GV.

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21h ago

Digg founder Kevin Rose offers to buy Pocket from Mozilla

62 comments

New Pocket: now with blockchain and AI.
- You'll be able to save websites as NFTs! Yay!!!
  
  I feel like that's just urls but with extra steps!

Final nail in the coffin.
- Get a shovel. Time to Digg.
  
  Digg: the founding father of enshittification
- lol

Digg is still alive?
- It's going to re-launch soon
  
  And the Apollo developer is apparently consulting on the mobile experience in one last “fuck you” to Reddit.
  
  Yeah they just had some bugs last go around and needed a bit of time (give or take 13 years) to fix them.
  
  Kevin Rose is in charge again? I thought he sold Digg after the massive failure that was v4 back in 2010.
  Either way, I'm glad to see that digg is coming back. Reddit needs more competition. I'm hopeful that they will succeed this time around and steal back the user base that migrated to reddit and helped make them become the evil giant they are today (I am one such migrant).
  
  lol. About 10 (maybe more) years too late
  
  They’re joining the fediverse.
- What is dead can never die
- That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even Digg may come back.
  
  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kevin Rose Digg wgah'nagl fhtagn
- It died so hard it underflowed and came back to life. Poorly most likely.
- And they even hired the Apollo app dev
  
  Really? Apollo was the best client, kinda miss it and the reddit that used to be.
- I missed out on Digg and started right with Reddit, if it is alive or back, it would be a fun experiment (or maybe not a fun one).
- It was restarted in like the last year.
- No.
  
  Rose just bought the name back. It’s relaunching soon.

Pocket is something that I think sounds super neat in theory, but I never actually personally found any use for it.
And while I don't think it was wrong for Mozilla to try to find an avenue for a more diversified income, I feel like they overpaid for Pocket, and it was the wrong thing to try to make money from.
- My main issue is that they forced it on everyone. You had to explicitly opt-out instead of opt-in. If they had made it an extension and recommended it on upgrade or something, I would've been fine with it. Or if they had a very clear privacy policy around it. But the rollout was sketchy enough that I knee-jerk disabled it when I saw it.
  The idea itself is totally fine, desirable even. I have an ereader, and it makes a ton of sense to save things for later reading. But the product rubbed me the wrong way, so I refused to use it.

I have disabled Pocket since it was first offered in FF.

Digg will take it over?
I'll put down some money to see how fast this will be a closed source enshittified subscription product
- … it’s always been a close sourced subscription service.

Good news for Kobo owners!
- As someone who's never used Pocket but recently got a Kobo and saw there's an integration, I was a little annoyed they were shutting it down. I wonder if Kobo will create their own service to fill the gap? Given how hackable the device is, I'm sure the community will if they don't.
  
  I hope that we can just transition form Mozilla Pocket to Digg Pocket without much hassle, but that probably won't happen. I understand all the hate for Pocket I've seen over the last two days because it's useless to most people, but man, there's a really good use case for Kobo owners.
  
  Same. I literally got a Kobo last week (hoping for a Mother's Day sale that never happened).

Then they release Pocket v4 which everyone hates, usage dwindles but they refuse to roll back, and then it finally dies.

Thank goodness, my smattering of defunct porn links will be saved

I thought pocket was okay for finding stuff to read while pooping, but I turned it off when I started getting horoscope and astrology articles in my science feed.
- That sounds more like Flipboard than Pocket?
  But I've not used either in many years, and I've never been a fan of algorithmic discovery, so it's possible Pocket went down that route, too.

Didn’t know he did something on Screen Savers. But I seem to remember the show being much older than what they mention.
EDIT oh I see I misread the dates in OP. It makes more sense now.
- Yeah he was on Screen Savers with Sarah Lane (who he dated) and then Alex Albrecht. TechTV was bought by G4 and Screen Savers became Attack of the Show. While at TechTV, he started digg and actually advertised it on the Screen Savers, without clarifying that he was the owner (sneaky). Later, G4 fired all the Tech TV staff, so Kevin worked on digg full time. He went on to start diggnation podcast with Alex Albrecht — which they’ve recently brought back. As many know, when digg v4 launched, it was widely rejected, and the site lost its user base to Reddit. Now he’s trying to revive it with one of the Reddit cofounders after more than a decade.
- I distinctly remember the two Kevins as hosts around the time I watched G4TV. I ended up playing a game called Blockland for years after they showed it on air. Somehow I never realized Kevin Rose went on to become that Kevin Rose.
  
  I still call him the Dark Tipper
  
  I used to be in a constant state of amazement that there was a cable TV channel dedicated to gaming. Screen savers was such a fun show.
- He was literally on air talent lol
- Used screen savers to bootstrap digg by free advertising

Wish someone had done this for Reader

He really wants to get his hand in the Pocket pool.

If its not turned into a pay thing take it!

62 comments