frenchst

The part about the diggbar is actually untrue. Kevin conceived and championed the feature internally. During it's development people working on it definitely had varying levels of excitement about it; some were all for it, some were completely against it, and some of us were questioning wether the internet really needed another url shortener at all.

One of my personal concerns was around allowing users to opt-out as easily as possible. When we launched, I was satisfied, since clicking the x in the top corner would set a cookie for logged out users, and would change the preference for logged in ones. That is one lesson I carry with me... sometimes even a single click is too much.

Fun fact, the format of the diggbar short urls were as follows: d|u[0-4][a-zA-Z0-9]{1,6}, changing the first digit in the shortcode would actually change the behavior d0xxxxx was "never show the diggbar, 301 to the source always". I believe d2xxxxx was "respect the user's preferences, but show the diggbar if there are no preferences set".

Another fun fact: there was a easter egg where mario would run across the bar, knock the digg button for a mushroom, and collect some coins. It was so well hidden that I don't think anyone ever noticed it.

**I wrote some of the backend functionality around the diggbar

Don't root for me, I wrote the thing!

All kidding aside, it's just a minor correction to a much longer story. The real point is that the feature was hated and we took too long to nuke it.