In a Diggnation video today, CEO Kevin Rose explained some of the technical issues the site is dealing with and why it can’t simply roll back to the previous architecture. The new version of Digg, v4, is based on a distributed database called Cassandra, which replaced the MySQL database the site ran on before. Cassandra is very advanced, but still too experimental. It is supposed to be faster and scale better, but it is still not battle-tested for a site the size of Digg. Every engineer at Digg is currently just trying to keep the site up and running.

Quinn was the main champion of moving over to Cassandra, say our sources. Now the site is taking a huge hit because of that decision, at least in the short term, and Quinn is paying for it with his job. But it is not clear what else Digg should have done. Digg was originally built on the tried-and-true LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) of open-source technologies, but it was straining under the load of Digg’s traffic. Replacing MySQL with Cassandra was supposed to help fix that. It came with its own set of larger problems instead.

Quinn joined Digg nearly three years ago. Before that, he was VP of engineering at SquareTrade and a software engineer at Oracle. It is not clear who will replace him at Digg.

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Authors: Erick Schonfeld

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