Apparently the Digg "algorithm", back when it worked, was one human being?

I've seen a few lists of "do things that don't scale" success stories, because VCs and founders love to write up survivorship bias success porn, but I'd be much more interested in a collection that included both successes and failures so that you could at least attempt to figure out what differentiated the successes and the failures.

@danluu So the lesson here is "moderation works"
@brooklynmarie @danluu the other lesson is, if you have a moderately popular website that does one thing different from everyone else, don't eliminate that one thing.

@danluu #SiliconValley: The Many #WizardsOfOz.

"pay no attention to the [ones] behind the curtain[s]"

@danluu
So Kevin Rose was referring to a flesh and blood person when he talks about the Digg algorithm in this interview?
https://youtu.be/SlGzyoby3A0
Kevin Rose: Can You Digg It?

YouTube
@danluu Absolutely believable. Every good forum or good era of a now terrible forum was basically built on human curation. "Catchers in the Rye" in the sense Holden Caulfield imagined - terminally online folks standing at the edge of an abyss to keep people from falling into it, and just as critically, to keep any thing nasty from crawling up out of it.

@danluu

“Survivorship bias success porn.”

Damn, I need a cigarette! ♥️ 🚬

@josephby Was it good for you too?

THEN CLICK HERE NOW!!!

@danluu

Coincidentally, I've been going through Digg's history including v4 and their ea... | Hacker News

@danluu Are we sure the "one guy" wouldn't have scaled? I mean, not literally one guy, but if Digg got to where it did by just paying one person $10 / hour for 22 hours a day, it stands to reason that you could have just allocated a single engineer's salary to a team of editors and continued this more or less indefinitely.
@danluu haha! Feeds right into my “Most AI is underpaid workers” scenario
@danluu oh, this is fascinating. thank you very much for sharing it.