Mixx

» see mixx.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

mixx was a digg clone for a digg-shaped problem i did not have. english-language social-news aggregation in 2007 was a us product category for english-speaking link readers (close enough). the people i knew who used digg in turkey were two or three forum admins on donanimhaber chasing the same headlines, not a general audience. mixx never had a turkish-language version and the press around it ran almost entirely on techcrunch and gigaom. i learned about it years later from a wikipedia category page on defunct social-news sites.

chris mcgill launched mixx in private beta on september 20 2007. mcgill had been head of yahoo news before that, and the pitch he made to techcrunch was that digg's vote-everything-once model treated all users like one undifferentiated mob. mixx would let users personalize the front page, vote inside topical groups instead of a single global feed, and follow people whose curation they actually wanted (more or less). for whatever reason, that pitch landed with reviewers who were already getting tired of digg's homepage being the same tech-bro keywords every week.

mixx made it to general public launch in october 2007 and ran as an independent property for three years. by 2010 the social-news category had started losing oxygen to reddit, which was growing fast on the back of the digg v4 disaster (in those days). ubermedia, the twitter-client holding company behind ubertwitter and twidroyd, bought mixx assets on january 24 2011. the announcement said ubermedia would use the personalization tech in a twitter context, which everyone reading the announcement understood as the death notice for the social-news side.

ubermedia rolled the mixx assets into chime.in on december 6 2011, a personalized social-news-meets-twitter hybrid that nobody had asked for. chime.in shipped without the original mixx community attached and was an ubermedia property end to end. it limped along for three years and ceased operations on july 30 2014, redirecting users to ubermedia's twitter client lineup. the original mixx.com domain came back online briefly under unrelated ownership in 2015 and is parked in 2026.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it tried ~

the personalization pitch was the only real differentiator mixx had against digg in 2007. mixx users could subscribe to topical groups (called communities) and the homepage would weight stories from those groups higher than the global feed. that was a smart 2007 idea, the same idea reddit eventually shipped at scale as subreddits a few years later. mixx never got the scale to make personalization useful, because personalization only works when there is enough content per category to filter down to. mixx's traffic was small enough that the same dozen stories showed up everywhere.

the smarter feature was the reputation system, anyway. mixx tracked which users consistently surfaced stories that other users found valuable, and weighted those users' future submissions higher in the algorithm. it was a baby version of what hacker news would later codify with karma decay. on a site the size of mixx the system worked in principle but did not have enough users to throw off bad actors at scale. by 2010 the same dozen power-submitters dominated the front page that any digg refugee had been complaining about in the first place.

~ the long tail ~

the only thing that survived mixx as a recognized brand was the domain name, which is now an unrelated dating app and a 2024 web3 wallet startup neither of which has anything to do with the original. ubermedia itself sold the chime.in assets to weather underground in 2013 and renamed to mobotap. by 2014 the entire ubermedia stack had been disassembled and chime.in was the last piece to fall. the mixx community that built the site in 2007 had left for reddit by 2010 and never came back to any successor product. chris mcgill went on to product roles at the new york times and the washington post.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »