Presumably you're talking about this - https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ - "Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity"

Did you read the title of that post and not the actual content? Because it's a fantastic insider's war story about one of the most infamous product launches in our industry's history.

Here's the conclusion, which you can count as justification if you like but seems like a very interesting piece of insight to me:

> Digg V4 is sometimes referenced as an example of a catastrophic launch, with an implied lesson that we shouldn’t have launched it. At one point, I used to agree, but these days I think we made the right decision to launch. Our traffic was significantly down, we were losing a bunch of money each month, we had recently raised money and knew we couldn’t easily raise more. If we’d had the choice between launching something great and something awful, we’d have preferred to launch something great, but instead we had the choice of taking one last swing or turning in our bat quietly.

> I’m glad we took the last swing; proud we survived the rough launch.

> On the other hand, I’m still shocked that we were so reckless in the launch itself. I remember the meeting where we decided to go ahead with the launch, with Mike vigorously protesting. To the best of my recollection, I remained silent. I hope that I grew from the experience, because even now I’m uncertain how such a talented group put on that display of fuckery.

I can't imagine how reading that could make you think they were less rather than more credible as a source of information on engineering management!