Digg failed because they weren't listening to what the users wanted. Reddit has been doing the same thing for a long time, and there's a large number of people looking for somewhere to migrate to. It'd be hilarious if New Digg becomes that, but I'm feeling pretty skeptical that New Digg is going to be any better. What little I've seen about New Digg talks about crypto, AI, and "Gems" you can earn which is far from a good sign.
Gems is deceptively named but it's essentially just for posting interesting things that gets discussions or Diggs, or being early to post something. It has nothing to do with crypto etc.
Source: I've been using the app since the alpha started.
What are Gems good for? Bragging rights? If you earn enough of them do they grant you special privileges? Can you spend them on anything? Can you buy them with real money? Are gems their current/future monetization strategy? They're already charging $5 for usernames (https://www.androidpolice.com/digg-returning-wants-you-to-pa...)
Interestingly, I can still log in and post (and get replies) on Old Reddit with my 15-year old username and pw (no email or other form of auth needed). I remember trying to log in using that acc via New Reddit and it said that user didn't exist! I wonder if Old Reddit-era accounts are on a separate DB.
I’m not sure that Reddit doing the same thing is a big a problem as random acts of admin overreach and the looming threat of old Reddit going away. The moment that happens, I’m done with the service. New Reddit is a prime example of enshittification.
Yeah, reddit spread the changes out over years, just Decades of slow incremental changes. Even the new UI started off as optional, and the old UI is still (mostly) supported after 7 years.
Digg always rolled out its changes in one big update, which replaced the old version of the site overnight. So not only did users get to see all the changes in one big slap to the fact, but they couldn't switch back to Digg v3 if they didn't like Digg v4.
In fact, Digg itself couldn't roll back the entire site to v3 even if they had wanted to, as the v4 rollout required a database migration, and there was no reverse migration path.
As one of those users who migrated away around the time of the "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" incident, that's not what happened at all.
Digg never had much in the way gray/illicit content; The AACS key was only posted because it was newsworthy (and can a 128bit number even be considered illicit?)
There were a bunch of other issues at the time centering around digg power users (like MrBabyMan), and a perceived lack of action/communication from the digg staff. The disconnect had been boiling away under the surface for years.
The much bigger issue that the front page of digg at that time was increasingly just links that hit the front page of reddit 12-24 hours earlier. Users increasingly choosing to cut out the middle man and get their content directly from reddit. And at the same time, many fell in love with reddit's much better commenting system.
The censorship was just the catalyst for it all to finally boil to the surface, and the only news-worthy event to happen around that time. It might have been the final straw for some people, but for most it was tangentially related, at best.
When Slashdot was falling apart, RSS was becoming a thing. I just started paying attention to where the articles I liked were coming from, and started pulling their feeds. Yeah, sometimes I would go find the conversation and participate, sometimes I'd even read the article a few hours earlier and had time to ruminate on it. Once in a while I even scooped the usual posters.
I spent less time being dumb with other dumb people on the internet, which was nice. Nicer, at least. That kinda feels like something we lost.
As someone who was very active on Digg, it failed because of a massive all-at-once redesign (Digg v4) that made it unrecognizable to those who considered it home. It’s basically the go-to case study in how not to do an overhaul.
The worst of the changes on the redesign had been telegraphed to users ahead of time and the overwhelming consensus was "we don't want this". In other words, "Digg failed because they weren't listening to what the users wanted".
At this point I think I’m giving up on the migration. The critical window is over. Most of the curious people who made reddit what it was 15 years ago are probably too bogged down with life to make the next replacement good today. Younger people have been brought up on ad based social media and have no concept of what a healthy forum environment ought to be like and therefore lack the cultural context to be good contributors that we took for granted in the 2000s and early 2010s. Instead many want to be useful mouth pieces for a brand endorsement. It is just such a different internet today than just 10 years ago.
I think this is basically misguided. Digg failed because their commenter UX was clunky. It tried to split the baby between linear and tree comments and just ended up being a mess. Reddit had been slowly stealing traffic from Digg for years by the time of the "rebellion".
In the end, Reddit became many times larger than Digg ever was. The biggest problem with displacing Reddit as such is that currently most of the users hate most of the users; consequently there is no reason that people leaving Reddit would want to converge on a single alternative.
In some ways, Reddit has already survived its own replacement. The workflow for getting involved with a video game community is to ask on Reddit which Discord you should join. In this case Discord plays the role of a parasitoid wasp.
It hangs on as a less reactionary NextDoor and a gathering place for semi-serious discussion of niche topics (/r/MedicalPhysics, for example). It also hosts some political stuff, but nobody wants to invite Reddit's political elements to their new community.
> Digg failed because their commenter UX was clunky
Is this why it failed? I recall they started doing pay-for-placement, gaming their own voting system at a time when they were neck-at-neck with Reddit, which wasn't. I do remember Digg's UX getting shittier and shittier though; every time I checked back on it to see if it was worth visiting again it was always mind-blowingly worse.
The UX was only part of the problem with Digg. There were also problems with what was/wasn't making it to the front page, pushing ads, the removal of customization features and killing off of third party tools which gave users more control over how they used the site, etc.
I think Reddit right now sits in some weird space between Discord/Nextdoor/Quora, with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
But overall it is just a gateway to other platforms where the really interesting conversations are happening and content is being created.
> with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
I've read plenty of garbage on Reddit, but what percentage of Reddit content since 2018 do you think you've seen? How many zeros after that decimal point?
Okay, "LGBTQ loving" just makes you sound incredibly hateful
I agree with the general overall point, certain views get banned, they took down nonewnormal while allowing bots in r/coronavirus to flourish, and other examples I can think of
But you... just sound like you're not valid at all, when you lead off like that
Yet, you are the one attacking people because they observe a trend/propaganda. I never called anyone mentally unstable. You straight-up attack personally. Shame on you, go meditate and self-reflect.
Yeah but see, I don't agree with that side of things either
This idea that because a) you lean one way means you support all these other things and b) that those things are even wrong all the time
Given what's come out about (say) the covid vaccine (which isn't a real vaccine), I am an anti-vaxxer. (And someone like Kennedy isn't so much anti-vaccine as he's concerned about the lack of liability of the manufacturers, with clear historical examples of how it went wrong)
This kind of attitude (especially because many of you are technologists) is what leads to censorship on Youtube and people like Susan Wojcicki
It has nothing to do with reddit being 'hardcore-leftist' as you put it, and more to do with the sad state of the US nowadays. Also, try saying anything remotely moderate on any right-leaning sub and see how that works. Really depends on the sub you're browsing.
Also, my anecdotal experience is very different than yours: not a day goes by without me reading some imbecilic comment about american exceptionalism, and where other idiots (I think you'd call them "patriots") gather to upvote/outbid said comment, particularly on large subs.
Funny thing only yesterday I saw a great thread on reddit where people shared stories of their older relatives becoming obsessed about trans people (not in a healthy way) alike to how some became obsessed with the qanon conspiracy before.
I actually have a neighbor who now has a trans girl at 13 years old, since about 10. I knew the child from infancy. So as conspiratorial as it could be, I am literally watching a neighbor destroy their child month by month. It's not a conspiracy.
I have a trans kid at 15. Living their best life. Knew the kid from day one (today’s their 15th birthday).
Guess what? It’s all their choice, suggestion, etc. While I’d prefer their original name (I mean, I chose that for a reason), everything else is obvious and right in retrospect.
Instead of just /watching/ a neighbor, you could /be/ a neighbor and get to know them. You might feel differently about your preconceptions when you actually know the human.
No, my thing is free internet. Not bigot-loving or hardcore leftist sites. On Reddit, if you say anything that is not leftist, you will get banned or deleted these days. I am a liberal, not left or right wing.
I think that social media has been a massive experiment where we asked, what if we let capital interests subvert our desire for community to get us to watch ads? And we have learned that it’s just not a good idea. I think perhaps Digg was one of the better ones but I solemnly wish social media was mostly illegal, especially advertising based, for profit sites.
I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
This doesn't make sense, since it's advertisers who are the ones putting pressure on sites like Twitter to stop spreading extremist content.
The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Wrong take. The social or political positions that advertisers take are all strategically calculated to maximize sales and they take those position regardless of the advertising platform.
Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow if they convince you to be thirsty too.
Like I said: any system that optimizes for engagement has this problem. Advertising revenue scales with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Advertisers are not picking and choosing particular policy positions to place ads on. They're targeting certain demographics, and want to make sure their ads are not next to trash content. So ironically, ads both cause companies to optimize for engagement but they also force moderation.
If you fixate on dropping ads but still optimize for engagement, you get the worst of both worlds.
People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown.
They are not impartial nor are the benevolent. They have a vested interest in influencing the content people are exposed to. They can hide behind the “social” components and say “we’re innocent here we just show the content people engage with” meanwhile they directly influence what content gets a chance to be interacted with.
it doesn't even matter. I've run a small community at a loss, for "fun", for the better part of a decade and people just go elsewhere when the winds change and they find themselves no longer in an echo chamber they agree with. everyone just wants to shout into the void and be validated and it doesn't even matter who the audience is
I am trying to build a Wikipedia for golf course architecture. Free shared info, genuinely about showing pride in your home club, printable yardage books if people make them…
The biggest response I get is “yea but the info on my course is blank, this sucks.”
I suspect there are only like 10% of folks who are remotely altruistic, and maybe 0.1% that would bother to even quickly edit Wikipedia if they found an error.
The vast majority of social media is carried by a few folks who genuinely want to connect and share things they love. After that the follow along is people critiquing, which is fine (I’m doing it now) but it doesn’t actually build anything.
> if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly.
Agree completely
> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.
> pressure to moderate content
We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.
That has nothing to do with ads, that has to do with monetization. Every site needs to be monetized somehow. Ads scale with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Any monetization scheme that scales with engagement will have this issue.
The problem is not ads per se, it's that in order to be effective, ads need to be intrusive. And as a site becomes more successful, it attracts more advertiser competition, which in turn forces ads to become more intrusive to cut through the noise. And that's the start of the enshitification we all know and love. :)
Im not sure that advertising specifically is the issue.
I think a lot of the ills of social media are ills of the medium itself... once it reaches "everyone scale," game theory maturity and whatnot.
Anyway the way past it is probably to go past it... and onto the next medium. Back is rarely an available option.
On that note... its curious that Digg now describes itself as a "community platform," not a social network. Ironic, considering they bought the name "digg."
Hackernews remains mostly ok by focusing on a niche that’s always been easy on the Internet for obvious reasons: tech. Once it strays even one step away, like the intersection of tech and policy, or the intersections of science and humanities, guaranteed you will get some totally ridiculous takes.
And, HN can only not-rely on advertising because it exists as a sort of funny pseudo-advertisement thing for some startup incubator.
You are definitely right there, reddit has become more annoying because even old reddit now has chat pinging me all the time. And every single time I post a comment on my iPhone reddit I get reminded to subscribe to notifications for comment replies.
Hackernews mostly survives because it's the Y Combinator sponsored boardwalk over the incessantly sucking carp of tech bro daydreamers hoping for success by osmosis.
I've thought about how I'd build one and I keep landing on content based ads, give me ads that target page content. You are already interested in the content you see, so why not. Generic "show everyone you can" ads should also be fine, and slightly discounted. But I do wonder if it would even be enough to keep the lights on.
The trouble is that ad-based business models incentivize maximizing engagement, because more engagement gives you more places to put ads. It turns out maximizing engagement is the primary driver of all of the bad things about social media, and honestly the modern internet as a whole. Regardless of how the ads are chosen, ad-based models will always end up at the same place: pushing extremist content in order to maximize engagement.
you'd think Reddit could handle this, since subreddits are very narrow and coupled to interests. but I guess you'd also think a PC review site would be able to do the same thing and not show car ads or etc
The old internet used to be like this, you'd pick the type of ads you wanted on your site, so a lot of sites had ads that looked like the content on the site.
Not remotely the same thing. HN's ads are text-only job postings for companies in YC's portfolio. "Online ads" on the other hand are an unregulated wasteland of scams, dropship brands, misinformation, titillation, and culture war ragebait.
True, but how many sites allow users to down-vote or flag the advertisements? A lot of the blatant ad posts wind up flag-killed and only people who have "show dead" enabled ever see them.
Digg was more of a news aggregator than “social media” which I see as user generated posts + profile interactions. As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.
I do think you are right about the rest as it applies to Twitter and Facebook.
Digg rather famously did have both followers and "influencers", though not in quite the same sense that those creatures are known today. Arguably its failure to limit the impact of both are what led to the forms we see today.
There's been an awful lot written about all of this over the years, much of it overly simplistic and some of it just straight-up wrong; we all want to believe that we're just plain smarter than the ancients, even when those ancients were us.
If you're interested in (ahem) digging into this, start by searching for things like "Digg voting network".
Social Media and News aggregation are not entirely different things, right? I mean, in the sense that News (and other link) Aggregation was one of the things that grew into Social Media. I think you are right to say it is more of an aggregation site, but also it’s worth nothing that in Digg’s heyday, Social Media was barely a thing.
Social networking was a thing. Social networking, link aggregation, discussion boards—it’s like pouring milk, hot sauce, and vodka into a vat to get Social Media.
> As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.
Yep, some personalities on Digg had their groupies and if they posted something, all their followers would vote it up the listing, in effect the post was influenced.
That's when I bailed because genuinely interesting stuff not posted by the 'right' people had no chance of exposure.
> I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
It's also worth considering that you could just be part of the right demographic that finds it palatable. I know in certain circles the HN groupthink on women's issues for example are seen as a meme.
Hacker news is not an app for cheap entertainment. Social media is. Hacker news is predominantly used by professionals, entrepreneurs, and/or tech interested/adjacent people. Social media isn't. Internet access and historical self selecting of people who sought out online spaces for interaction/community (it was not the norm, nor as acceptable, in fact often considered weird) acted as a gatekeeper that previously skewed early social media to have a different user base than today.
I think algorithmically curated social media feeds should be regulated the way we do tobacco. Massive education campaigns and obnoxious labeling laws so that everyone and their dog knows it's toxic. Maybe take away their safe harbor while we're at it. The algorithm is a form of editorial control after all, so it can no longer be argued that these sites simply function as a "public square".
I'm cautiously optimistic. I was active on Reddit for ages (thanks for letting me in on the IPO!) but nuked my account the summer when they killed all the 3rd party clients. I miss having something like Reddit, even if that site itself is dead to me.
I was a refugee of the Great Digg Migration to reddit some 14 or so years ago. old.reddit and adblockers as well as very aggressive curation of subreddits have kept it to an overall positive experience over the decade.
I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet; everytime I come back from a week or two of backpacking without internet connection I realize how overstimulated with inane bullshit we all are.
I was an early refugee from Digg, been on reddit for 17 years now.
Aggressive curation of subreddits did help, but I fear the decent subreddits are slowly dying out. The modern iteration of site (It's more of an app these days) appears to attract the wrong type of users for the healthy conversations that I enjoy.
I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.
I was thinking about this as an approach for a side project to build in order to (speed up) learn elixir/phoenix for work. While the old-school forums dedicated to specific topics work (why re-invent them?) I was thinking of a "tribal" social network.
You as a person decide you want to create a space with a combination of reddit-like features, maybe video, etc. Only people you invite can discover it (or you can allow them to invite people) It could work for neighborhood groups (similar to nextdoor but with a limited crowd that you like/trust), school groups, family, or specific interests -- although specific interests are the idea's weakest selling point since it lacks easy discoverability.
Yeah, there are forums, discord, etc. etc., but I thought it could potentially be interesting. And yeah, people would abuse it (i.e., share pirated and illegal content), so maybe not really viable.
> Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
This is true of all social media platforms. People who have all day to post/reply and figure out how to game the system will always dominate the discussion. This is also why online propaganda works so well, it is literally their day job. People who have a life will always be at a major disadvantage. In some ways Reddit is worse off because those people also become moderators. The only thing that saves it is the ability for users to flee a subreddit if the moderator becomes a tyrant and start a parallel subreddit with hopefully more sane moderation.
The default subreddits are mostly a writeoff at this point. Terminally online people latched on to them and are never letting go. Or they were useless from the start like AITA.
Same here. I (proudly) had my account there banned for posting the AACS key.
Went to reddit and was not unhappy there for many years, but, aside from some targeted subreddits (/r/beagle!) I rarely spend any time on reddit anymore. The new reddit changes just feel user-hostile and they are aggressively pushing users away from old.reddit.com, it feels like a matter of time before they announce that they are killing old reddit.
Perhaps we are getting old but I also find happiness is inversely proportional to my time spent on social media.
> I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet...
Some of that is a function of age I am sure. When you are young, sites like reddit and digg hold promises of some new and interesting unknown unknown. As you get older, the amount of unknown unknowns fall off a cliff and you are just left with the known knowns and known unknowns... occasionally you are once again interested in the known unknowns, but you certainly didn't need a website to remind you they existed. The novelty is gone.
Funny, it’s actually after I come back from a week of backpacking that my “internet quality time” is highest - there’s a bunch of new, meaningful content for me to go through.
After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.
I remember Reddit before Digg users invaded it. Reddit used to be good. Digg refugees fucked it up nearly overnight. The comment sections quickly became garbage. It was like a bunch of teenagers decided to take over Reddit.
Agreed. Throwaway account because I’m an internet nomad and I don’t have a long term account here (they get banned anyway).
Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
It’s amusing to see the usual HN flex with smug superiority but both Reddit and 4chan even to this today demolish HN in every (good and bad) criteria. Moderation here has stifled honest discussion in favor of safe-harbor, bullshit talking points.
"Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time."
It was even stupider than that. Digg didn't even have a real, working promotion system. It was literally one guy who personally curated the big stories. Google almost bought them but looked under the hood and immediately bailed. The upvotes were all smoke and mirrors.
Every time someone mentions reddit 14 years ago all I can think about are all the admins that allowed r/jailbait on the front page. I honestly wouldn't tell people you used it then
Some people probably used reddit like me, I never looked at the front page, I just went straight to a sub link directly. I remember always pulling up rage comics. I didn't care about comments, or any other communities.
It’s easy to forget but this is pretty on point IMO. There was so much overlap between HN and /r/programming, tons of industry people would just back to back scroll them and ignore the rest of Reddit.
If the only thing that comes to your mind when people talk about the digg migration is the underage jailbait subreddit, that speaks more about you than anyone else.
It was a significant shift in social media and internet history, regardless of what some fringe subreddits had.
Nobody here is defending Reddit’s choice to use a poor front page algorithm that allowed for surfacing obscene, fringe or even illegal content over a decade ago.
I did a Ctrl+F for "Patriots" and "ASCII" in this thread, and I didn't see any results, which was surprising because what killed Digg for me were two issues: the Digg Patriots who brigaded many discussions and all of the stupid ASCII art in the comments, such as "It's a trap!":
My ideal social media site would be a slight modification of the link aggregator model.
Instead of a centralized repository of links with comments, it would be a sort of overlay on top of every other website that would create a comment section that isn’t owned or moderated by the original host. It would encourage folks to actual read the original articles and visit those sites, but allow you to have discussions with a particular demographic cohort (e.g., have a discussion among HN crowd on a nytimes article)
Sounds kinda like StumbleUpon with comments. I'm not sure I'd like to host unmoderated content on my site, but I do miss the original StumbleUpon experience. Reading through the history of what happened to StumbleUpon in the 2010s is sad, and indicates that this idea may not actually be viable (or maybe was ahead of its time, or maybe wasn't done right).
It essentially needs to be a p2p/dht list of disconnected hosts who all provide communities that can be overlaid. You dont want one comment section. Then through filters you can enable or disable which communities you want to see.
It also should be a protocol that lets the client decide how to render the organization of comments and the editor.
I’ve been a user during the alpha/beta process and their response rate to bug fixes has been great imo. The frequent posters kickstarting the flywheel are pretty spammy but I think it’s to drive traffic to publishers who have consistent ad traffic. They will eventually have to monetize their traffic so I’m pretty convinced they’ve hired people to post content from trash sites like pc world and the like. That said, impressed with the pace of development.
It's where Reddit's userbase came from but it isn't exactly like reddit. It was more like HN until they ruined it to make the investors happy and instead investors got their investment killed in one day.
Nostalgic for the old Digg days. Invite-only communities not so much. But given the botting all over social media, guess I can't blame them.
I would not be surprised if there's a lot of brouhaha over how it's moderated, since moderation is considered way more controversial now than it used to be in the old days.
Nah it was all Obama, once he got elected they shut everything down. Same thing now, the new digg is all anti-maga. It doesn't matter to me either way, but politics polarizes people. That's why I rarely come here or post here.
It has baggage but also some value. Oldheads like me remember Digg positively, and it was certainly more upbeat (cool tech! movies! science!) that the current Reddit front page (6 angry articles about US politics and a school fight).
The original Digg was shut down around 2012 (though really it died in 2010). The domain was sold off and the new owners replaced it with something that might have looked like Digg at first glance, but it was entirely relying on editors to select posts... Basically, it was a curated blog themed to look like a social media site.
That version of Digg limped along for almost twice as long as the original Digg, until a few months back when the domain was sold to Keven Rose (one of the original Digg founders) and Alexis Ohanian (one of reddit's co-founders).
Back in the day I was mostly on slashdot, Reddit, digg, and metafilter.
Digg was the first site where I started seeing brainrot nonsense content on the front page every day, with orders of magnitude larger than usual upvotes of tech news, from the same small number of usernames (Mr BabyMan, I hate that I even remember your stupid username).
For me, Digg was the first time experiencing product managers experimenting with modern proto-influencer virality algorithms. It made the internet worse, and now every site does it.
You forgot Fark! Except that was unironic brainrot and everybody knew what it was. Unlike now, where critical thinking went out the window and everybody takes things at face value.
IMO Slashdot lost out due to being a fairly focused site and more generalist sites with little focused areas won out, and I'm not sure Slashdot's focus when it was popular would have that big an audience anyway.
No one's really asking for this. And anyone that's asking for it is just looking for another forum/site to surf amidst thousands of subreddits and discords and the main social posting networks (of which now include the fediverse, bluesky, whatever). This isn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage. Not to mention the inevitable mistelling of what happened with Digg v4 and the 'right place right time' that allowed Reddit to survive. Let sleeping dogs lie.
I mean, I love digg, I even worked there for years....but digg didn't make it for a reason. It wasn't the new release of digg that killed it, it was the fact that reddit was just better in every way. I don't know what digg can do that is worth the views it will need to survive. GenX nostalgia can only take you so far.
Digg failed because they weren't listening to what the users wanted. Reddit has been doing the same thing for a long time, and there's a large number of people looking for somewhere to migrate to. It'd be hilarious if New Digg becomes that, but I'm feeling pretty skeptical that New Digg is going to be any better. What little I've seen about New Digg talks about crypto, AI, and "Gems" you can earn which is far from a good sign.
Gems is deceptively named but it's essentially just for posting interesting things that gets discussions or Diggs, or being early to post something. It has nothing to do with crypto etc.
Source: I've been using the app since the alpha started.
What are Gems good for? Bragging rights? If you earn enough of them do they grant you special privileges? Can you spend them on anything? Can you buy them with real money? Are gems their current/future monetization strategy? They're already charging $5 for usernames (https://www.androidpolice.com/digg-returning-wants-you-to-pa...)
I'm on the old style Reddit and it hasn't really changed much for years. I imagine they are wary of mucking it up after knowing what it did to Digg.
Interestingly, I can still log in and post (and get replies) on Old Reddit with my 15-year old username and pw (no email or other form of auth needed). I remember trying to log in using that acc via New Reddit and it said that user didn't exist! I wonder if Old Reddit-era accounts are on a separate DB.
I’m not sure that Reddit doing the same thing is a big a problem as random acts of admin overreach and the looming threat of old Reddit going away. The moment that happens, I’m done with the service. New Reddit is a prime example of enshittification.
I took it as, “the same sorts of mistakes Digg made” which I would agree with. They’re boiling the frog pretty successfully though.
Yeah, reddit spread the changes out over years, just Decades of slow incremental changes. Even the new UI started off as optional, and the old UI is still (mostly) supported after 7 years.
Digg always rolled out its changes in one big update, which replaced the old version of the site overnight. So not only did users get to see all the changes in one big slap to the fact, but they couldn't switch back to Digg v3 if they didn't like Digg v4.
In fact, Digg itself couldn't roll back the entire site to v3 even if they had wanted to, as the v4 rollout required a database migration, and there was no reverse migration path.
the earlier Digg migration was due to censorship. not being allowed to post encryption keys.
pretty common playbook to allow gray and illicit and unattributed content only to clean up once youve hit critical mass.
As one of those users who migrated away around the time of the "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" incident, that's not what happened at all.
Digg never had much in the way gray/illicit content; The AACS key was only posted because it was newsworthy (and can a 128bit number even be considered illicit?)
There were a bunch of other issues at the time centering around digg power users (like MrBabyMan), and a perceived lack of action/communication from the digg staff. The disconnect had been boiling away under the surface for years.
The much bigger issue that the front page of digg at that time was increasingly just links that hit the front page of reddit 12-24 hours earlier. Users increasingly choosing to cut out the middle man and get their content directly from reddit. And at the same time, many fell in love with reddit's much better commenting system.
The censorship was just the catalyst for it all to finally boil to the surface, and the only news-worthy event to happen around that time. It might have been the final straw for some people, but for most it was tangentially related, at best.
When Slashdot was falling apart, RSS was becoming a thing. I just started paying attention to where the articles I liked were coming from, and started pulling their feeds. Yeah, sometimes I would go find the conversation and participate, sometimes I'd even read the article a few hours earlier and had time to ruminate on it. Once in a while I even scooped the usual posters.
I spent less time being dumb with other dumb people on the internet, which was nice. Nicer, at least. That kinda feels like something we lost.
Slashdot deserves a honorary mention under not doing what the users want.
Personally, I'd argue they also had a disastrous redesign. At a certain point they required JS to use the site and even reading comments got harder.
As someone who was very active on Digg, it failed because of a massive all-at-once redesign (Digg v4) that made it unrecognizable to those who considered it home. It’s basically the go-to case study in how not to do an overhaul.
The worst of the changes on the redesign had been telegraphed to users ahead of time and the overwhelming consensus was "we don't want this". In other words, "Digg failed because they weren't listening to what the users wanted".
At this point I think I’m giving up on the migration. The critical window is over. Most of the curious people who made reddit what it was 15 years ago are probably too bogged down with life to make the next replacement good today. Younger people have been brought up on ad based social media and have no concept of what a healthy forum environment ought to be like and therefore lack the cultural context to be good contributors that we took for granted in the 2000s and early 2010s. Instead many want to be useful mouth pieces for a brand endorsement. It is just such a different internet today than just 10 years ago.
Isn't this New New Digg? Or maybe New New New Digg?
I think this is basically misguided. Digg failed because their commenter UX was clunky. It tried to split the baby between linear and tree comments and just ended up being a mess. Reddit had been slowly stealing traffic from Digg for years by the time of the "rebellion".
In the end, Reddit became many times larger than Digg ever was. The biggest problem with displacing Reddit as such is that currently most of the users hate most of the users; consequently there is no reason that people leaving Reddit would want to converge on a single alternative.
In some ways, Reddit has already survived its own replacement. The workflow for getting involved with a video game community is to ask on Reddit which Discord you should join. In this case Discord plays the role of a parasitoid wasp.
It hangs on as a less reactionary NextDoor and a gathering place for semi-serious discussion of niche topics (/r/MedicalPhysics, for example). It also hosts some political stuff, but nobody wants to invite Reddit's political elements to their new community.
> Digg failed because their commenter UX was clunky
Is this why it failed? I recall they started doing pay-for-placement, gaming their own voting system at a time when they were neck-at-neck with Reddit, which wasn't. I do remember Digg's UX getting shittier and shittier though; every time I checked back on it to see if it was worth visiting again it was always mind-blowingly worse.
The UX was only part of the problem with Digg. There were also problems with what was/wasn't making it to the front page, pushing ads, the removal of customization features and killing off of third party tools which gave users more control over how they used the site, etc.
Fair assessment.
I think Reddit right now sits in some weird space between Discord/Nextdoor/Quora, with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
But overall it is just a gateway to other platforms where the really interesting conversations are happening and content is being created.
> with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
I've read plenty of garbage on Reddit, but what percentage of Reddit content since 2018 do you think you've seen? How many zeros after that decimal point?
> "Gems" you can earn
omg, here we go again
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You might want to subscribe to different subreddits.
Okay, "LGBTQ loving" just makes you sound incredibly hateful
I agree with the general overall point, certain views get banned, they took down nonewnormal while allowing bots in r/coronavirus to flourish, and other examples I can think of
But you... just sound like you're not valid at all, when you lead off like that
there is no way bro is mentally stable w a comment like that
prob one of the Q anon and anti-vaxxer types who keeps Alex Jones websites bookmarked and only gets their news from real-patriots-of-america-news.info
Yet, you are the one attacking people because they observe a trend/propaganda. I never called anyone mentally unstable. You straight-up attack personally. Shame on you, go meditate and self-reflect.
Yeah but see, I don't agree with that side of things either
This idea that because a) you lean one way means you support all these other things and b) that those things are even wrong all the time
Given what's come out about (say) the covid vaccine (which isn't a real vaccine), I am an anti-vaxxer. (And someone like Kennedy isn't so much anti-vaccine as he's concerned about the lack of liability of the manufacturers, with clear historical examples of how it went wrong)
This kind of attitude (especially because many of you are technologists) is what leads to censorship on Youtube and people like Susan Wojcicki
https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
https://rumble.com/v28x6zk-sasha-latypova-msc.-nsa-team-enig...
Yeah, downvote actual medical evidence, by experts
If you consider reddit to be hardcore-leftist, you'll find plenty of like-minded people on 4chan.
Try saying something patriotic on reddit and see how fast you will get downvoted to hell.
It has nothing to do with reddit being 'hardcore-leftist' as you put it, and more to do with the sad state of the US nowadays. Also, try saying anything remotely moderate on any right-leaning sub and see how that works. Really depends on the sub you're browsing.
Also, my anecdotal experience is very different than yours: not a day goes by without me reading some imbecilic comment about american exceptionalism, and where other idiots (I think you'd call them "patriots") gather to upvote/outbid said comment, particularly on large subs.
There are plenty of people saying something patriotic on reddit and getting a ton of upvotes
https://old.reddit.com/r/ColoradoSprings/comments/1irxcqx/
proud_of_my_fellow_patriots_who_showed_up_today/
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/7akgtw/proud_to_be_an...
https://old.reddit.com/r/starterpacks/comments/x3rz3w/the_am...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1kmvo69/bruce_spri...
https://old.reddit.com/r/50501/comments/1j3bla0/good_luck_to...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/1maf...
https://old.reddit.com/r/greenville/comments/1lbal71/proud_t...
https://old.reddit.com/r/orangecounty/comments/1k37ncw/proud...
you aren't a patriot tho if you hate gay people
you are actually the opposite of a patriot lol
Who said I hate gay people? I am saying what the trends and narratives are. I feel like HN users don't know how to read and understand comments.
When listing off your complaints, that it was "LGBTQ-loving" was one of them. Like what's wrong with a site being in favor of LGBTQ people?
I have known Reddit for the last 2 decades, and the LGBTQ community was never promoted like this before. I just see blatant propaganda, that's it.
Same thing would have happened to you 15 years ago on reddit
I've been on Reddit almost since day 1. It was not like this.
The best thing they ever did in those early days was remove /r/atheism from the default subs. Good lord what a cesspool (and I'm not a theist!).
Reddit always conflated patriotism to cringe and was always very liberal and progressive.
They’re are plenty of bigot-loving Reddit clones, if that’s your thing.
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It never ceases to amaze me how people will happily parrot the most vile blood libels about entire groups of people they don't know.
All because they're terrified that the next woman they leer at might not have been born with the genitals they expected.
Or possibly I think this is a terrible thing to do to children?
Are you talking about medical transition? Why'd you have to use scary euphemisms to refer to something?
My wording sounds way more accurate and less euphemism like than "medical transition".
Funny thing only yesterday I saw a great thread on reddit where people shared stories of their older relatives becoming obsessed about trans people (not in a healthy way) alike to how some became obsessed with the qanon conspiracy before.
I actually have a neighbor who now has a trans girl at 13 years old, since about 10. I knew the child from infancy. So as conspiratorial as it could be, I am literally watching a neighbor destroy their child month by month. It's not a conspiracy.
I have a trans kid at 15. Living their best life. Knew the kid from day one (today’s their 15th birthday). Guess what? It’s all their choice, suggestion, etc. While I’d prefer their original name (I mean, I chose that for a reason), everything else is obvious and right in retrospect.
Instead of just /watching/ a neighbor, you could /be/ a neighbor and get to know them. You might feel differently about your preconceptions when you actually know the human.
No, my thing is free internet. Not bigot-loving or hardcore leftist sites. On Reddit, if you say anything that is not leftist, you will get banned or deleted these days. I am a liberal, not left or right wing.
I loved Digg back in the day, and as such - I paid to be a Digg Groundbreaker.
I am still confused what the new Digg is (on the web)
When I login, I don't see any news/articles/content.
I only see the ability for me to post (and the meme image below)
https://i.imgur.com/kBOAlZS.gif
Note: this doesn't seem to be a problem in the app ... but why do I need to run an app when this could easily just be available on the web.
Request the desktop site, mobile version (non-app is WIP). Desktop version mostly works on mobile, some small issues with achievement display.
Not sure what you are seeing but it tells me it’s in invite only beta.
I barely remember the time before reddit - crazy how the redesign seemed to kill it the first time around!
predates the iphone!
I think that social media has been a massive experiment where we asked, what if we let capital interests subvert our desire for community to get us to watch ads? And we have learned that it’s just not a good idea. I think perhaps Digg was one of the better ones but I solemnly wish social media was mostly illegal, especially advertising based, for profit sites.
I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
This doesn't make sense, since it's advertisers who are the ones putting pressure on sites like Twitter to stop spreading extremist content.
The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Wrong take. The social or political positions that advertisers take are all strategically calculated to maximize sales and they take those position regardless of the advertising platform.
Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow if they convince you to be thirsty too.
Like I said: any system that optimizes for engagement has this problem. Advertising revenue scales with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Advertisers are not picking and choosing particular policy positions to place ads on. They're targeting certain demographics, and want to make sure their ads are not next to trash content. So ironically, ads both cause companies to optimize for engagement but they also force moderation.
If you fixate on dropping ads but still optimize for engagement, you get the worst of both worlds.
People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown.
They are not impartial nor are the benevolent. They have a vested interest in influencing the content people are exposed to. They can hide behind the “social” components and say “we’re innocent here we just show the content people engage with” meanwhile they directly influence what content gets a chance to be interacted with.
it doesn't even matter. I've run a small community at a loss, for "fun", for the better part of a decade and people just go elsewhere when the winds change and they find themselves no longer in an echo chamber they agree with. everyone just wants to shout into the void and be validated and it doesn't even matter who the audience is
it's extremely disheartening actually
I am trying to build a Wikipedia for golf course architecture. Free shared info, genuinely about showing pride in your home club, printable yardage books if people make them…
The biggest response I get is “yea but the info on my course is blank, this sucks.”
I suspect there are only like 10% of folks who are remotely altruistic, and maybe 0.1% that would bother to even quickly edit Wikipedia if they found an error.
The vast majority of social media is carried by a few folks who genuinely want to connect and share things they love. After that the follow along is people critiquing, which is fine (I’m doing it now) but it doesn’t actually build anything.
"People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown."
Yes, people do realize that.
Case in point, 4chan
Funnily enough it still has ads.
For sex toys, Ozempic and ED medication.
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> if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly.
Agree completely
> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.
> pressure to moderate content
We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.
That has nothing to do with ads, that has to do with monetization. Every site needs to be monetized somehow. Ads scale with engagement, so engagement becomes optimized. Any monetization scheme that scales with engagement will have this issue.
So, a flat-rate subscription would not have that issue.
Something Awful was ahead of the curve by charging $10 for access.
The problem is not ads per se, it's that in order to be effective, ads need to be intrusive. And as a site becomes more successful, it attracts more advertiser competition, which in turn forces ads to become more intrusive to cut through the noise. And that's the start of the enshitification we all know and love. :)
Im not sure that advertising specifically is the issue.
I think a lot of the ills of social media are ills of the medium itself... once it reaches "everyone scale," game theory maturity and whatnot.
Anyway the way past it is probably to go past it... and onto the next medium. Back is rarely an available option.
On that note... its curious that Digg now describes itself as a "community platform," not a social network. Ironic, considering they bought the name "digg."
Speaks to the "late stage social media" meme.
Hackernews remains mostly ok by focusing on a niche that’s always been easy on the Internet for obvious reasons: tech. Once it strays even one step away, like the intersection of tech and policy, or the intersections of science and humanities, guaranteed you will get some totally ridiculous takes.
And, HN can only not-rely on advertising because it exists as a sort of funny pseudo-advertisement thing for some startup incubator.
I think the lack of notifications is also a big factor. It's harder to get addicted and harder to start fights.
You are definitely right there, reddit has become more annoying because even old reddit now has chat pinging me all the time. And every single time I post a comment on my iPhone reddit I get reminded to subscribe to notifications for comment replies.
Hackernews mostly survives because it's the Y Combinator sponsored boardwalk over the incessantly sucking carp of tech bro daydreamers hoping for success by osmosis.
Let's just start shifting the overton window: let's make all paid advertisement illegal y'all.
Hard to get the political momentum to do that now that we've surrendered humanity's social fabric to the advertisement industry.
I've thought about how I'd build one and I keep landing on content based ads, give me ads that target page content. You are already interested in the content you see, so why not. Generic "show everyone you can" ads should also be fine, and slightly discounted. But I do wonder if it would even be enough to keep the lights on.
The trouble is that ad-based business models incentivize maximizing engagement, because more engagement gives you more places to put ads. It turns out maximizing engagement is the primary driver of all of the bad things about social media, and honestly the modern internet as a whole. Regardless of how the ads are chosen, ad-based models will always end up at the same place: pushing extremist content in order to maximize engagement.
you'd think Reddit could handle this, since subreddits are very narrow and coupled to interests. but I guess you'd also think a PC review site would be able to do the same thing and not show car ads or etc
The old internet used to be like this, you'd pick the type of ads you wanted on your site, so a lot of sites had ads that looked like the content on the site.
HN has advertising too. I don’t claim it’s the same, but let’s be accurate.
Not remotely the same thing. HN's ads are text-only job postings for companies in YC's portfolio. "Online ads" on the other hand are an unregulated wasteland of scams, dropship brands, misinformation, titillation, and culture war ragebait.
True, but how many sites allow users to down-vote or flag the advertisements? A lot of the blatant ad posts wind up flag-killed and only people who have "show dead" enabled ever see them.
Digg was more of a news aggregator than “social media” which I see as user generated posts + profile interactions. As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.
I do think you are right about the rest as it applies to Twitter and Facebook.
Digg rather famously did have both followers and "influencers", though not in quite the same sense that those creatures are known today. Arguably its failure to limit the impact of both are what led to the forms we see today.
There's been an awful lot written about all of this over the years, much of it overly simplistic and some of it just straight-up wrong; we all want to believe that we're just plain smarter than the ancients, even when those ancients were us.
If you're interested in (ahem) digging into this, start by searching for things like "Digg voting network".
Social Media and News aggregation are not entirely different things, right? I mean, in the sense that News (and other link) Aggregation was one of the things that grew into Social Media. I think you are right to say it is more of an aggregation site, but also it’s worth nothing that in Digg’s heyday, Social Media was barely a thing.
Social networking was a thing. Social networking, link aggregation, discussion boards—it’s like pouring milk, hot sauce, and vodka into a vat to get Social Media.
MrBabyMan was a pre-influencer influencer.
I'm convinced he was paid to post stories to drive traffic to sites.
Of course I don't have evidence to support this. It was over 20 years ago.
> As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.
Yep, some personalities on Digg had their groupies and if they posted something, all their followers would vote it up the listing, in effect the post was influenced.
That's when I bailed because genuinely interesting stuff not posted by the 'right' people had no chance of exposure.
> I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
It's also worth considering that you could just be part of the right demographic that finds it palatable. I know in certain circles the HN groupthink on women's issues for example are seen as a meme.
Hacker news is not an app for cheap entertainment. Social media is. Hacker news is predominantly used by professionals, entrepreneurs, and/or tech interested/adjacent people. Social media isn't. Internet access and historical self selecting of people who sought out online spaces for interaction/community (it was not the norm, nor as acceptable, in fact often considered weird) acted as a gatekeeper that previously skewed early social media to have a different user base than today.
I think algorithmically curated social media feeds should be regulated the way we do tobacco. Massive education campaigns and obnoxious labeling laws so that everyone and their dog knows it's toxic. Maybe take away their safe harbor while we're at it. The algorithm is a form of editorial control after all, so it can no longer be argued that these sites simply function as a "public square".
I'm cautiously optimistic. I was active on Reddit for ages (thanks for letting me in on the IPO!) but nuked my account the summer when they killed all the 3rd party clients. I miss having something like Reddit, even if that site itself is dead to me.
Everybody get ready for the new Digg effect!
I was a refugee of the Great Digg Migration to reddit some 14 or so years ago. old.reddit and adblockers as well as very aggressive curation of subreddits have kept it to an overall positive experience over the decade.
I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet; everytime I come back from a week or two of backpacking without internet connection I realize how overstimulated with inane bullshit we all are.
I was an early refugee from Digg, been on reddit for 17 years now.
Aggressive curation of subreddits did help, but I fear the decent subreddits are slowly dying out. The modern iteration of site (It's more of an app these days) appears to attract the wrong type of users for the healthy conversations that I enjoy.
I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.
>I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.
Agreed, the site feels like a ghost town these days whenever I lurk there.
Old school forums dedicated to specific topics are still my go to these days.
I was thinking about this as an approach for a side project to build in order to (speed up) learn elixir/phoenix for work. While the old-school forums dedicated to specific topics work (why re-invent them?) I was thinking of a "tribal" social network.
You as a person decide you want to create a space with a combination of reddit-like features, maybe video, etc. Only people you invite can discover it (or you can allow them to invite people) It could work for neighborhood groups (similar to nextdoor but with a limited crowd that you like/trust), school groups, family, or specific interests -- although specific interests are the idea's weakest selling point since it lacks easy discoverability.
Yeah, there are forums, discord, etc. etc., but I thought it could potentially be interesting. And yeah, people would abuse it (i.e., share pirated and illegal content), so maybe not really viable.
what are some of these forums? I am quite young so never experienced those.
Some that are ~20 years old and still kicking:
- Headphones and audio equipment: https://www.head-fi.org/forums/
- A/V equipment: https://www.avsforum.com/forums/
- Computers and Tech: https://hardforum.com/
- Music: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/
- General Entertainment and Discussion: https://forums.somethingawful.com/
RIP Notebookreview.net forums, IMDB forums, AbsolutePunk forums, Craigslist message board (still live, but mostly abandoned)
> Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
This is true of all social media platforms. People who have all day to post/reply and figure out how to game the system will always dominate the discussion. This is also why online propaganda works so well, it is literally their day job. People who have a life will always be at a major disadvantage. In some ways Reddit is worse off because those people also become moderators. The only thing that saves it is the ability for users to flee a subreddit if the moderator becomes a tyrant and start a parallel subreddit with hopefully more sane moderation.
The default subreddits are mostly a writeoff at this point. Terminally online people latched on to them and are never letting go. Or they were useless from the start like AITA.
Relevant HN link/discussion: Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600274
Same here. I (proudly) had my account there banned for posting the AACS key.
Went to reddit and was not unhappy there for many years, but, aside from some targeted subreddits (/r/beagle!) I rarely spend any time on reddit anymore. The new reddit changes just feel user-hostile and they are aggressively pushing users away from old.reddit.com, it feels like a matter of time before they announce that they are killing old reddit.
Perhaps we are getting old but I also find happiness is inversely proportional to my time spent on social media.
> I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet...
Some of that is a function of age I am sure. When you are young, sites like reddit and digg hold promises of some new and interesting unknown unknown. As you get older, the amount of unknown unknowns fall off a cliff and you are just left with the known knowns and known unknowns... occasionally you are once again interested in the known unknowns, but you certainly didn't need a website to remind you they existed. The novelty is gone.
Funny, it’s actually after I come back from a week of backpacking that my “internet quality time” is highest - there’s a bunch of new, meaningful content for me to go through.
After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.
I remember Reddit before Digg users invaded it. Reddit used to be good. Digg refugees fucked it up nearly overnight. The comment sections quickly became garbage. It was like a bunch of teenagers decided to take over Reddit.
This sounds like an Eternal September complaint.
Agreed. Throwaway account because I’m an internet nomad and I don’t have a long term account here (they get banned anyway).
Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
It’s amusing to see the usual HN flex with smug superiority but both Reddit and 4chan even to this today demolish HN in every (good and bad) criteria. Moderation here has stifled honest discussion in favor of safe-harbor, bullshit talking points.
But it’s all for lulz.
"Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time."
It was even stupider than that. Digg didn't even have a real, working promotion system. It was literally one guy who personally curated the big stories. Google almost bought them but looked under the hood and immediately bailed. The upvotes were all smoke and mirrors.
Every time someone mentions reddit 14 years ago all I can think about are all the admins that allowed r/jailbait on the front page. I honestly wouldn't tell people you used it then
Some people probably used reddit like me, I never looked at the front page, I just went straight to a sub link directly. I remember always pulling up rage comics. I didn't care about comments, or any other communities.
It’s easy to forget but this is pretty on point IMO. There was so much overlap between HN and /r/programming, tons of industry people would just back to back scroll them and ignore the rest of Reddit.
> jailbait on the front page
Have you ever been to such websites as Instagram or TikTok?
If the only thing that comes to your mind when people talk about the digg migration is the underage jailbait subreddit, that speaks more about you than anyone else.
It was a significant shift in social media and internet history, regardless of what some fringe subreddits had.
I think having near-CASM on your social medias home page is kinda an issue but maybe thats just me.
The term is CSAM not CASM.
Nobody here is defending Reddit’s choice to use a poor front page algorithm that allowed for surfacing obscene, fringe or even illegal content over a decade ago.
I did a Ctrl+F for "Patriots" and "ASCII" in this thread, and I didn't see any results, which was surprising because what killed Digg for me were two issues: the Digg Patriots who brigaded many discussions and all of the stupid ASCII art in the comments, such as "It's a trap!":
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/585451-alphabet-zoo/501...
Just in time for Ron Paul's 90th birthday.
its_happening.gif
My ideal social media site would be a slight modification of the link aggregator model.
Instead of a centralized repository of links with comments, it would be a sort of overlay on top of every other website that would create a comment section that isn’t owned or moderated by the original host. It would encourage folks to actual read the original articles and visit those sites, but allow you to have discussions with a particular demographic cohort (e.g., have a discussion among HN crowd on a nytimes article)
Sounds kinda like StumbleUpon with comments. I'm not sure I'd like to host unmoderated content on my site, but I do miss the original StumbleUpon experience. Reading through the history of what happened to StumbleUpon in the 2010s is sad, and indicates that this idea may not actually be viable (or maybe was ahead of its time, or maybe wasn't done right).
It essentially needs to be a p2p/dht list of disconnected hosts who all provide communities that can be overlaid. You dont want one comment section. Then through filters you can enable or disable which communities you want to see.
It also should be a protocol that lets the client decide how to render the organization of comments and the editor.
So Disqus? (I'm not dismissing you. I like Disqus)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus
I’ve been a user during the alpha/beta process and their response rate to bug fixes has been great imo. The frequent posters kickstarting the flywheel are pretty spammy but I think it’s to drive traffic to publishers who have consistent ad traffic. They will eventually have to monetize their traffic so I’m pretty convinced they’ve hired people to post content from trash sites like pc world and the like. That said, impressed with the pace of development.
That's what Reddit did originally too. I wouldn't be too surprised if they just use AI to do it now.
Ok for someone that came late to the party - what is digg?
"Humancentric technology at the edge" - love this in my sci-fi books but what does it do?
A community driven link aggregator site. Think of a cross between Reddit and a forum. It was one of the biggest sites/communities in the 2000s.
> Think of a cross between Reddit and a forum.
That's not quite right: Digg was closer to a pure link-sharing site, being able to comment and discuss was lackluster.
Digg <-> Reddit <-> Webforum
besides "It was one of the biggest sites/communities in the 2000s" you're describing HN
Kinda like HN but you could share political news without it getting flagged.
That's what it was but what will this reboot be?
It's where Reddit's userbase came from but it isn't exactly like reddit. It was more like HN until they ruined it to make the investors happy and instead investors got their investment killed in one day.
it's the missing link between slashdot and reddit.
The buzzwords are news aggregator, or social bookmarking.
Kind of HN for the masses. I don't remember if there were comments but one could vote links up or down.
Reddit before reddit.
It's del.ici.us after del.icio.us
don't forget /.
Nostalgic for the old Digg days. Invite-only communities not so much. But given the botting all over social media, guess I can't blame them.
I would not be surprised if there's a lot of brouhaha over how it's moderated, since moderation is considered way more controversial now than it used to be in the old days.
HN is moderated…
I really like the approach to moderation and algorithms in ATProto
tl;dr users get choice, anyone can make them, they plug-n-play into any of the atproto apps
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684027
Have a soft spot for digg
Download on the AppStore, get it on Google Play.
Conversation should be over here.
Is this an app only thing? No web option?
It's been so long. Can someone refresh my memory about the exodus from Digg a long time ago? I remember a lot of Ron Paul spam but that's about it.
Nah it was all Obama, once he got elected they shut everything down. Same thing now, the new digg is all anti-maga. It doesn't matter to me either way, but politics polarizes people. That's why I rarely come here or post here.
Remember Digg? It's back. In Pog form.
"Digg is currently invite only."
Pass.
I don't know what to say other than, ok.
Will be interesting to see if they manage to pull off a reboot of what is functionally a semi-tarnished brand.
The struggle isn't people remembering Digg badly, it's people not remembering Digg at all.
In which case why not go for branding that doesn't have baggage?
It has baggage but also some value. Oldheads like me remember Digg positively, and it was certainly more upbeat (cool tech! movies! science!) that the current Reddit front page (6 angry articles about US politics and a school fight).
new user signups disabled?
Beta users got 2 invites when it just went live. Not sure if they have a date planned for new users yet.
When did it leave? Was there a period of time where the site was offline? Looks like they just tore down the old site and put up a landing page?
The original Digg was shut down around 2012 (though really it died in 2010). The domain was sold off and the new owners replaced it with something that might have looked like Digg at first glance, but it was entirely relying on editors to select posts... Basically, it was a curated blog themed to look like a social media site.
That version of Digg limped along for almost twice as long as the original Digg, until a few months back when the domain was sold to Keven Rose (one of the original Digg founders) and Alexis Ohanian (one of reddit's co-founders).
Whoa Kevin Rose bought it back? Interesting.
Also... bring back TechTV lol
Hard pass. Digg already taught me once what happens when a platform betrays its community for short-term gain. Don’t need a sequel.
Back in the day I was mostly on slashdot, Reddit, digg, and metafilter.
Digg was the first site where I started seeing brainrot nonsense content on the front page every day, with orders of magnitude larger than usual upvotes of tech news, from the same small number of usernames (Mr BabyMan, I hate that I even remember your stupid username).
For me, Digg was the first time experiencing product managers experimenting with modern proto-influencer virality algorithms. It made the internet worse, and now every site does it.
You forgot Fark! Except that was unironic brainrot and everybody knew what it was. Unlike now, where critical thinking went out the window and everybody takes things at face value.
Fark was great. All hail Drew!
Wow, I was trying to remember his username, but I wasn't even getting close. Quite impressive haha.
Metafilter is still around and still great content!
> Digg.com is back
In Pog form?
When do we get Slashdot as it used to be?
IMO Slashdot lost out due to being a fairly focused site and more generalist sites with little focused areas won out, and I'm not sure Slashdot's focus when it was popular would have that big an audience anyway.
Okay can we get back delicio.us now ?!
No one's really asking for this. And anyone that's asking for it is just looking for another forum/site to surf amidst thousands of subreddits and discords and the main social posting networks (of which now include the fediverse, bluesky, whatever). This isn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage. Not to mention the inevitable mistelling of what happened with Digg v4 and the 'right place right time' that allowed Reddit to survive. Let sleeping dogs lie.
I mean, I love digg, I even worked there for years....but digg didn't make it for a reason. It wasn't the new release of digg that killed it, it was the fact that reddit was just better in every way. I don't know what digg can do that is worth the views it will need to survive. GenX nostalgia can only take you so far.
is digg.com is hackernews but for everything?
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