The only way to consistently get stuff on the home page was to work at it like a job. And so, some people began to work at it like a job, and then it became their jobs. While some really thought of themselves as an important part of the journalistic enterprise, many others contracted out their services to entities of all kinds. Stripped of any institutional sense of editorial ethics, many Digg power users ended up promoting all kinds of crap along with good stories from legitimate writers and sites.

Meanwhile, everyday users were realizing that nothing they submitted ever even had a chance in hell of going to the front page. They weren't empowered netizens visiting from the future, but chumps who were being played by Digg and a bunch of "social-media consultants."

In short, the community broke. And the community, remember, is also the content machine. Without that, Digg was revealed to be just a bunch of computers waiting for people to add value to the thin offering of a social network. The site still gets a substantial amount of traffic, but that Myspace/Friendster smell of death hangs in the pixels.

There is one clear lesson from Digg's sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000. All the rest of the value derives from the people that use it. Though scaling is tough, any developer in the world can build some profiles and let people connect up. It's an act of genius -- or an act of God, by which I mean luck -- to design a site constitution that makes people want to build their online lives at your URL (or in your app). Social networking companies are not technology companies as much as they are community companies.

To be honest, I don't know why anyone tries to start these things. No one has much of a competitive advantage, the space is crowded, you can't compete on price, and no one wants to join a Reddit for hermit crabs. Then I remember how social networks function: users produce the product and they *are* the product. Now that's some kind of good hustle.