Digg v4 stripped the last vestiges of user-submission from the site entirely (which had already been manipulated by a handful of power-users) and turned it into a broken "publishers plug in an RSS feed and users will presumably 'digg' the good content" system. reddit live is a new submission type, like self-posts before it (at the time some did say it "doomed the site" but selfposts are a majority of the content on reddit) so I don't think it's really comparable. One thing (similar to how we rolled out user-created reddits) I did appreciate was how this new submission type was slowly rolled out for specific events (like ukrainian protests) and various communities (/r/nba, i think?) for testing on both the creator side + user side.

@rrhoover I think the biggest thing that we have done and continue to do, is let our users find problems and help them solve it. When we saw that threads were becoming too large and the EDIT 5:, EDIT 6: updates were no longer scaling, we knew that we needed a way to help encourage this and make it a better experience for everyone. In terms of community + user backlash, it's a tough one. reddit users are particularly fickle about change. That said, we have made it a huge point of putting users first, and everything else second. A feature like this can easily be ignored, or unused if users don't like it -- but we think they will. TL;DR -- Users first. Appreciate the kind words about reddit Live rivaling Twitter for real time reporting, I'll pass along to our devs!

@dhulser "delight users" is a recurring theme in my conversations with @alexisohanian and seems to be engrained in the culture of reddit. Sometimes founders focus on the wrong metrics (e.g. do page views accurately measure engagement and value-creation?) and lack empathy for the user. This might be easy to miss in the short term until people stop coming back.