Ron Gorodetzky

Cofounder of Digg

• Born: Date unknown
• Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California

Primary Company/Organization: Digg

Introduction

Ron Gorodetzky was one of the first employees of Digg, hired by founder Kevin Rose to develop much of the code and architecture for the social news-sharing site for which Owen Byrne had written the PHP script. Gorodetzky was instrumental in developing many of the features and site changes that Digg adopted in its early years, as it became one of the most popular sites on the Internet—fifty-fifth in Alexa's global rankings—and was pursued by larger companies. He remained with the site as it declined (to 215th in Alexa's 2012 ratings) and as a new version was rolled out, before founding the Fflick movie recommendation site, which was purchased by Google, and the company GoodCTZN.

Early Life

Ron Gorodetzky grew up in Los Angeles and studied computer engineering at the University of California at San Diego. He became a computer consultant working in Silicon Valley. When cable network TechTV was bought by Comcast and merged with its network G4, relocating to Los Angeles, Gorodetzky took an internship, teaching new staff and crew members how to use various technologies. Through this internship, he met Kevin Rose, host of Tech TV/G4's The Screen Savers (which later became Attack of the Show). Rose hired him in late 2004 to help with the programming and administration of a site Rose and others were putting together called Digg.

Life's Work

Digg was one of two start-ups Rose founded with Jay Adelson, the chief executive officer (CEO) of data server and Internet business services provider Equinix, whom Rose had met while interviewing him for TechTV. The original ad-free version of Digg was designed by Dan Ries. Software engineer Owen Byrne was hired to write the site's PHP scripts, and Gorodetzky was hired to revamp and maintain the site, becoming principally responsible for the HTTP architecture as well as developing a search engine that remained in use for years. Digg formally organized as a company in early 2005, with Gorodetzky as one of its core employees, and the start-up soon became a full-time pursuit, with Adelson leaving Equinix and Rose leaving his hosting job at TechTV. A new staff was hired to augment, refine, and replace Byrne's code, and Gorodetzky remained on staff as essentially the lead operations architect. Ads were soon added to generate revenue, first using Google's service and later Microsoft's.

The second start-up, Revision3, was founded to produce Internet-distributed television shows for niche audiences. Godoretzky was cofounder and director of technology.

As a social news site, Digg was a contemporary of the similar (but then little-known) site Reddit and the elder dinosaur of the niche, Slashdot. Registered users could submit links (typically news items, though not necessarily from formal news sources), and other users voted on them, positively (a “digg”) or negatively (a “bury”). “Digg” was the term chosen to signify approval in reference to “I dig(g) that story you posted”; the double g was necessary because the domain name dig.com was already in use by Disney. The name Diggnation or Dignation had been proposed but rejected as too long and was instead used for a Revision3 show in which Rose and his cohost discussed popular stories from Digg. Digg was also featured on Rose's TechTV show The Screen Savers (predecessor to G4's Attack of the Show) before Rose left to work on Digg full time.

Digg combined elements of social networks and news sites. The ability for a user to create a “friends list” was soon added, making it easy to monitor the stories uploaded by other users the user knew or trusted as sources. Stories were also categorized, encouraging browsing, and users were able to flag a story as spam, notifying moderators to remove it, which countered the natural tendency for social media spammers and bots to target Digg as it became more popular. (Interestingly, the science category was the least frequently spammed category, by a considerable margin.) The community at Digg developed its own traditions, habits, and quirks, which influenced the nature of the stories that received the most votes, leading to a number of cases of fraudulent behavior as users accepted cash to “digg” stories and provide them with publicity. Essentially the same type of reward-for-endorsement exchange would survive in today's social media landscape, where users can “like” a business's Facebook page for above-board, noncash incentives.

At the height of its popularity, Digg was ranked fifty-fifth on Alexa's global traffic ratings. Although its revenue in 2008 was only about $8 million, numerous established companies attempted to purchase it. Offers from Google ($200 million) and Current (presumably comparable) are public knowledge; offers from Microsoft and Yahoo!, among others, were rumored but never official. Rather than entertain courters, the company, at Rose and Adelson's direction, opted to keep the firm privately held. Byrne left around this time, in late 2007, and later implied difficulties behind the scenes.

Adelson left in 2010 after a reported disagreement with Rose over the direction of the company. Gorodetzky worked on the site overhaul already in progress at the time of Adelson's departure, which changed not only the interface but also the site's underlying architecture, including switching to a new distributed database system. The redesign was greeted with hostility by a vocal contingent of the user base. That, along with the increased popularity of Reddit and the increasing tendency of social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to encourage link sharing and for sites to include buttons to enable that (alongside Digg's button), contributed to Digg's decline.

Gorodetzky too left both Digg and Revision3 in 2010, to cofound Fflick, of which he became chief technology officer, with three other former Digg employees: Dav Zimak, Kurt Wilms, and Marc Hemeon. Fflick was similar to a social news site but more focused than Digg: It aggregated tweets about movies, functioning as a crowd-sourced movie review site while allowing users to add movies to Netflix queues or purchase tickets. Rather than competing with existing social networks, the site was designed as, in essence, an overlay on top of them, while offering a more personalized and informal sort of movie review than those of Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic—one that could generate movie recommendations, much like the recommendation engines of Netflix, Amazon, or Goodreads. Fflick launched in August 2010 and the following year was acquired by YouTube, itself owned by Google. Gorodetzky and the rest of the Fflick team were folded into a team of engineers working to improve Google+, Google's social network, by emphasizing the aspects Facebook and other social networks could not hope to replicate—namely, Google's many other services. Gorodetzky became part of a team redesigning elements of YouTube in order to integrate them with Google+. Early elements of integration included the ability to start Google+ Hangouts in YouTube and live video streaming in Google+.

During the presidency of Barack Obama, Gorodetzky worked for the United States Digital Service. From there, he and Kavi Harshawat cofounded the company GoodCTZN to assist smaller businesses with their technology needs.

Personal Life

Gorodetzky had a cameo as “Robot Consultant” in the straight-to-video sequel American Pie: Band Camp. (His sister, Karen Gorodetzky, was a production supervisor on the film.) Gorodetzky is an aficionado of skydiving, a hobby he shares with former Digg colleague Rose.

Bibliography

"About Us." GoodCTZN, goodctzn.com/about. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print.

Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Sarno, David. “Digg Gets $28.7M Boost, Plans to Double Size, Go Global.” Los Angeles Times 23 Sept. 2008: n. pag. Print.