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> According to Borthwick, it would have cost “hundreds of thousands per month” to keep the site running on its old platform. Even though the site was state-of-the-art just a few years ago, most of the infrastructure would be considered legacy technology by a modern startup.

has anyone some details to expand on it?



I recall when Kevin Rose was interviewed prior to v4 launching, they were running the entire thing on Cassandra.

When it launched, they spent the majority of the time attempting to scale it in a quick fashion - a process which probably involved buying lots of resources and attempting to scale as fast as possible. It was badly designed from the start, and was never really fixed.


Wait, does this mean Cassandra == "outdated" by a "modern startup's" standards? I know its a couple of years old (4, says Wikipedia), but...really?


It's not necessarily that, but when v4 launched, they experienced a giant problem with their infrastructure. Likely the "fix" was to increase performance versus fix the problem programatically.

Hence their previous statements. Kevin's statement was in reference to them switching completely to NoSQL and not knowing how to scale it properly.


That was Techcrunch's characterization of it, not a direct quote from Borthwick or anyone at Betaworks.


Good point--I was just wondering if anyone had a comment on that thought. Sounds ridiculous to me...


Reddit, Netflix, and Facebook all use Cassandra. I think Techcrunch may have A) misunderstood or B) been referring to archaic PHP code.

EDIT: Actually, it looks like TC has a history of believing Cassandra = Bad for digg.com: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...


I was under the impression Facebook replaced Cassandra in their stack with HBase.

Yes, I forgot about Netflix! Not only do they use it, but they've provided tons of excellent tools for it (Astyanax, Priam) and blog about it very frequently.


Yes; Facebook has since abandoned Cassandra.


why does it even need to keep on running? Geez, just keep open the submission process, crank up the ads, and turn off everything! Digg has no clue what passive income means. They should take a page from spammers.


frankly I never cared about digg at all, but I'm always interested on the technological aspect. this bit got me curious.




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