Digg’s co-founder and former CEO talks about Reddit’s recent troubles

When it comes to Digg and its sudden, spectacular decline five years ago, Jay Adelson doesn’t sugarcoat. The cofounder and former CEO of Digg, who steered the company to Silicon Valley fame and tens of millions of active users, speaks freely on why it all came crashing down in mid-2010. Now the cofounder of a venture capital firm focused on the Internet of Things, Adelson is also happy to dole out lessons for Reddit, the community site that once benefited from Digg’s errors, but now faces a backlash of its own. In June, Reddit banned some of its user-created “subredit” groups on the grounds they were engaging in harassment, a move which resulted in their members flooding the Reddit homepage with angry posts. Then the company fired Victoria Taylor, a popular, public-facing employee. Taylor coordinated the site’s high-profile “Ask me Anything” interviews with celebrities, and her abrupt and unexplained departure became the last straw for a fed-up community. Moderators bemoaned a lack of communication from administrators and outdated management tools, and many of them temporarily shut down their sections to protest Taylor’s dismissal. Users petitioned for the resignation of interim CEO Ellen Pao, a wish that Reddit granted on Friday.