I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.
The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.
In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.
Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.
Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.
And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.
Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?
Every website that was driven by traffic is also dying. I have put nearly a decade of work into mine, and AI overviews and ChatGPT have reduced traffic by over 60%. At some point I will need to give up and find a job, and that corner of the internet will get no new original information, just rehashed slop.
With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.
150m page views a month is peanuts and very far away from the "social" networks numbers. I don't have those numbers, but I know how many page views we had 2011 while running a german browser game community.
I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.
Note that these topics often involve comments which you can predict very easily. Internet users are like that, agenda or no. Wasn’t it in the heyday of forums that you could recognize the most prolific/annoying members by their style and vocabulary? A model should have no problem pulling such things off.
The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that.
This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armies of cheap labour in Asia, and the worst case use bots.
The dead internet theory [1] is probably not just a theory anymore. HN recently made a policy to not allow AI posting and posters, but do you honestly think that's going to work? I would place a bet that a top HN poster within the next year is outed as using AI for posting on their behalf.
> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future.
Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cannot simply register a new account. This solves a bunch of problems – online abuse, spam, bots, etc. – without telling websites who you are or governments what you do.
I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another.
Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it."
Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
The future is human curated content. Provide the same experience people get today but without the noise. Give them just the good stuff and don't let just anyone make a post. A book has an author, a movie has a director, maybe websites can have webmasters again who filter through the garbage for you.
This means that only sites which verify identity will have any value in the future. And by verified, that means against government ID and verified as real.
No amount of sign up fee works as an alternative.
Note that a site can verify identity, prevent sock puppets, ban bad actors and prevent re-registration, all while keeping that ID private.
You still get a handle and publicly facing nick if you want it.
The company which handles this correctly will have a big B after it. Digg actually has a chance at this.
It has no users, so the outrage won't exist in the same capacity. Existing platforms will be pummeled in the market if they try to convert to this type of site, as their DAU will likely drop a thousandfold, just due to the eliminated bots.
But Digg could relaunch this way. And as exhibited, this is now the only way.
The age of the anonymous internet is over, it's done. People not realizing this are living in the past.
Note, I don't like this, but acknowledging reality is vital. Issues with leaked databases, users, hacking of Pii are all technical and legislative issues, and not relevant to whether or not this happens.
Because it will happen, and is happening.
It should be noted that falsifying ID is a crime. Fake ID coupled with
computer fraud laws will eventually result in hefty jail time. This is sensible, if people want a world where ecommerce, and discourse is online... and the general public does.
And has exhibited a complete lack of care about privacy regardless.
This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites.
The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.
> And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.
You just published good content knowing AI will slurp it up and not give you any traffic in return. I'm now replying to you with more content with the same expectations about AI and traffic. Why care about AI or traffic or recognition? Isn't the content the thing that matters?
It's like answering technical questions in an anonymous/pseudonymous chat or forum, which I'm sure you've done, too. We do it to help others. If an AI can take my answer and spread it around without paying me or mentioning one of my random usernames I change every month or so, I would be happy. And if the AI gives me credit like "coffeecup543 originally posted that on IRC channel X 5 years ago", I couldn't care less. It would be noise to the reader. Even if the AI uses my real name, so what?
The people who cared about traffic and money from their posts rarely made good content, anyway. Listicles and affiliate marketing BS and SEO optimizations and making a video that could be 1 minute into 10 minutes, or text that could've been 5 articles into a long book - all existed from before AI. With AI I actually get less of this crap - either skip it or condense it.
It's two different problems. People who run review sites and blogs and such care about traffic, and not getting attribution will kill their desire to participate. People who post here and on Reddit etc. care about talking with other human beings, and feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill *their* desire to participate.
> feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill their desire to participate.
The bots are not really that bad, they're (still) pretty easy to spot and not engage with. I'm more perplexed about the negativity filled comments sections, and I'm pretty sure most posters are real grass-fed certified humans.
I don't get why negative posts get so upvoted, get so popular on the front page, and people still debate with outdated arguments in them. People come in and fight other deamons, make straw-man arguments and in general promote negative stuff like there's no tomorrow. I think you can get so much more signal from posititve examples, from "hey I did a thing" type posts, and so on. Even overhyped stuff like the claw-mania can still be useful. Yet the "I did a thing" get so overwhelmed by negativity, nitpicking and "haha not perfect means doa" type of messages. That makes me want to participate less...
Oh that's just human nature: there's a reason why trashy tabloids continue to exist despite how public sentiment seems to universally agree that they're awful spreaders of rumour and insecurity. More people are Skankhunt42 than we'd like to admit.
In the most simple sense - Yes, it is the content that matters.
In the more practical sense - cognitive and emotional resources are limited and our brains are not content agnostic.
We have different behaviors, expectations and capacities for talking to machines and talking to humans.
For example, if I am engaging with a human I can expect to potentially change their minds.
For a machine? Why bother even responding. It’s of no utility to me to respond.
Furthermore, all human communication comes with a human emotional context. There are vast amounts of information implied through tone, through what we choose not to say. Sometimes people say things in one emotional state that is not what they would say on another occasion.
To move the conversation forward, addressing the emotional payload behind the words used, matters more than the words used themselves.
There are a myriad reasons why humans are practically poorer for these tools.
Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.
Curious how you came to that conclusion. Anecdotally, places where you can slur to your heart's content like /r/conservative seem far more inundated with bots than other areas of Reddit. I feel like that's really saying something too, because Reddit has a really bad bot problem overall.
This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch?
There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?
I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.
Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.
Kevin Rose didn't start Hodinkee, he started Watchville years after Hodinkee was already well established. Watchville merged with Hodinkee, at which point he became the CEO for 2 years.
From what I can tell Watchville was abandoned a few years ago.
You're right, and that is one of the lessons to be reminded of here.
My main point wasn't that, though. It's simply a bad and low-effort way to handle the situation, and like one of the other replies points out, there are better options. They could have just as well disabled posting and maybe even viewing of submissions and communities for the time being. Just shutting it all down immediately without notice leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I will not be among the people returning for their next relaunch. I am sure others feel the same way, and I don't think it is a wise decision to needlessly put off your early adopters if you're hoping for them to come back "next time".
I do have a lemmy account, but have not really returned to it in a while. Maybe I haven't found the right communities yet, but it had nothing about it that felt engaging. People upvoted, but nobody talked. No interaction. Digg felt more alive from day one. I replied to a post in a niche community with ~100 members and only afterwards realized it was @justin.
My experience with lemmy has not been nice. A majority of people there are just downright awful, and the mods are often power-hungry and overzealous in their actions. Many times entire servers are defederated from many others due to how a large percentage of their users behave.
Argh. Also quite irritated. I had 50/50 transitioned over to it despite the lower traffic because it was a calm oasis. The thing about bots is believable, though, because you could already see it happening. Dead Internet has been real for a while, and I'd love to seem Kevin and Alex do a followup on this.
Yeah. Sadly the default communities were flooded with blog spam, and that's just the part I noticed. A couple days ago a bunch of smaller communities also got a noticeable bump in members. That didn't change anything in my own community, but others apparently weren't so lucky.
I can see why the team got overwhelmed. I wouldn't want to have to deal with that.
The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.
> sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, “witty” one-liners [etc]
There are subreddits within Reddit such as https://www.reddit.com/r/neutralnews/ that have strict rules around sourcing, etc. However, I think that’s not what most users want, and may not be quite what you’re looking for either, apologies.
There are 3 horsemen of Internet forums, one of them is topics with a low barrier to entry.
At that point anyone can speak up, and their opinion takes up as much screen real estate and reading time (often less reading time) than a truly informed take.
By putting effort barriers in place, it forces a fitness test that most users (and bots) fail.
Another subreddit which has strong rules is r/badeconomics. I didn’t know about neutralnews, so thank you for giving me another example to add to the list.
The whole problem is trying to be a catchall where people with zero knowledge or skills can hang out. Twitter/X and Reddit especially suffer from it.
Topical forums tend to have a much higher SNR. My favorite forum of all time, johnbridge, had none of those issues. Sadly it died this year all the same, but many others still exist. When you have a forum dedicated to something that requires a minimum barrier to entry, the more useless folks get shunned away pretty early and easily.
- Users don't have to pay to post links/stories
- Users have to pay to comment on links/stories
- Users have to pay to "upvote" comments. Downvotes don't exist
- Each link "lives" a certain amount of time before it is locked.
- After lock time, users who posted the link get "paid" a % of the collected $ comments/upvotes. Comments that are upvoted also earn $ proportionally to the upvotes.
Hashcash was conceived to solve automated spam/email. Participating in a discussion must cost something, that's the only way bots and spam will get partially stopped. Or, if they start to optimize to get "the most votes", then so be it, their content will increase in quality.
Paying users for their posts is what killed YouTube, Twitter Facebook, Instagram... You will only get shitty ragebait comments. Not to mention that you have to link some bank account with your full name, etc.
This sounds like a platform that has no appeal to the average person, and an incredible appeal to people wishing to launder money or use money to run an influence campaign. Deliberately determining popularity proportionally to the amount of money spent is little different than advertising, but this would be under the false premise of "someone thought this was important/valuable enough to pay money to suggest I see it".
If this were to exist today, I know I would be incredibly critical of it.
It seems like that would lead to a proliferation of ragebait, deliberately controversial posts, and overly simplistic articles to attract the greatest amount of comments. I frequently see deeply technical high-value posts on HN with very few comments but each thread about politics ends up getting hundreds of comments.
You really gotta wonder how much value the "Digg" brand actually has, because the number of people that remember/care about the site from its original glory days is ever dwindling.
I stopped using Digg a long long time ago. It just felt too slow to get the news I care about.
I was an avid Slashdot user way back in the day, but the site was basically the same throughout the day, and I wanted faster updates. Digg did this perfectly for a time, but eventually I migrated entirely to Reddit (even before whatever that drama was that caused a big exodus from Digg).
I think Reddit right now is the sweet spot: up to date information, longer-term articles to read, and easy to catch up on things I missed. I was recently pressured to sign up for X (or Twitter or whatever), and I had to turn off all of the notifications since I was constantly spammed with "BREAKING: X RESPONDS TO Y ABOUT Z!!!!"
Right now having Reddit for scrolling and Hackernews for articles+discussion feels like it works for me.
Reddit is flooded with AI slop. r/all currently has AI-generated text posts and articles on the first page. Upvoted because they're the typical orange man bad stuff, but LLM slop nonetheless. Assuming the engagement is organic, it's depressing how much of the site has no eye for this stuff.
There are decent small communities I'm a part of but the trash feels like it is encroaching.
And the notifications you describe are exactly reddit's notifications? "your comment received 10/20/50/100 upvotes!" "x responds to y about z" "News is trending"
That didn't last long. I'm not sure I want to invest my time again if/when they relaunch.
I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.
Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.
To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.
Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.
Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.
Actions speak louder than words. They’ve added features that help spammers hide their behaviour, they are rejecting API keys when people apply for access to deal with the bot problem, they ignore subreddits with spam-friendly moderators, and they ignore reports on vote manipulation. There’s a tonne of low-hanging fruit for tackling the bot problem on Reddit that they aren’t doing anything about, and often it seems like people outside of Reddit do a better job without access to the raw data than people inside Reddit do with the raw data.
I know they claim to care about the bot problem, but they appear at absolute best incredibly complacent about it, if not complicit. All those OnlyFans spammers, AI spam bots, etc. are engagement. They are ruining the platform for people, but engagement figures don’t distinguish between fake engagement and real people. The outcome of their current behaviour is for engagement to steadily rise while the value to real people steadily falls. It’s like they want to be the poster child for Dead Internet Theory.
The Reddit CEO mentioned that the community thrives when humans talk to humans - and not with AI slop. He also said they are working on efforts to identify automated accounts.
Reddit can't even manage to regularly identify and ban bots that copy previously popular posts/comments verbatim, and that's a much easier problem than modern LLM-based bots.
For a short time I was a part of a small site that banned politics.
It was fine, people talked about work, personal stuff, travel, until one person posted about their disappointment that their state was limiting various services or rights to gay people. For them this meant their rights were in question and they were understandably upset.
Immediately some folks cried politics and that they shouldn’t post about that sort of thing.
To the user posting it it was about their life…
I don’t think “no politics” rules really make much sense. For someone it’s more than politics, and IMO because a topic is touched by politicians or government shouldn’t make it disallowed.
I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read.
I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.
The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.
One of the things I always disliked about the original Digg was their threading. The slashdot like feed where the oldest comments were at the top and there was only one level of replies tended to encourage the "first" comments and harmed the quality of the discussion. I was glad to see it use a reddit-like comment thread for the new site, but it also meant there wasn't much reason to use it over reddit.
I'm a bit surprised with Alexis' involvement they didn't anticipate the bot problem. Alexis left reddit several years ago but I'm sure he's still in touch with the folks who run the place. It would've been worth it to talk to them about the threats they currently face and how they deal with them.
It's a shame, the intention is still there, if they decide to come back I'll give it another shot.
Btw, why are we publishing simple static pages at ~2.84 MB compressed.
The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem.
We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.
> We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.
I don't believe there is any practical way to do it.
Sure, there are ways to verify a human linked to a specific account exists in a one-off fashion, but for individual interactions you'll never know that it isn't an LLM reading and posting if they put even a small amount of effort to make it seem humanish.
facebook and twitter became broken for me, but not because of bots, rather because of the "smart feed" ("the algorithm"), which is hiding all posts of my friends and promotes incendiary garbage.
In other words, I am seeing enshittification full-scale, but not the bots.
> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. The loyalty users have to the communities they've already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely.
Community /books helped me track down a book I've been dying to reread for almost ten years now. Reddit failed the task, so did all other places I turned to. Cheers for that, and rip.
There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.
They introduced user-created communities a few months ago. They had problems with squatting and splintering, which might have played a role in their annoucement.
More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.
I wonder if the old forum model would work. Instead of these mega-forum-platfroms, there are just small communities with a niche focus at their own URL.
I suppose bots could find forums that use the most popular software and still make accounts and spam, but it would be much more obvious and less fruitful for someone to spam deck builders in Vancouver (something I saw often on Digg) on a forum that is focused on aquariums owners in the midwest.
Is that the whole story? Why isn't reddit overrun by bots then (or are they?), and why wouldn't basic proof-of-work techniques fence against bots? Since they started out just in January, isn't it plausible to assume they didn't meet their target user figures and investors jumped ship?
Damn. I still have faith that what a lot of us that migrated to new Digg envision is possible. Post pandemic Internet has choppier waters than before, but I'm going to try and keep a positive outlook and I look forward to their followup emails.
Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.
Hmm...
> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.
What does this even mean? How many metaphors can it mix up in one paragraph? Can't they write a blog post the old fashioned way, with feeling? Imagine reading a corporate blog post about being laid off which the founder couldn't even be bothered to write.
Amazing how close to corporate newspeak chatgpt can get (prompt was the headings of this blog post), it has the same sort of blank say-nothing feeling of this blog post:
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b4890e54ac819193f221351ea900a7
> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.
Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.
>> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.
> Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.
This… seems like regular prose to me. What makes you say so confidently it was written by AI?
I think you're spot on. It feels like parts were edited with AI and parts were left alone.
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.
The statement this is making is presumably the crux of the problem (Digg cannot survive without trust!) but it's worded so poorly that it's hard to imagine someone sat down and figured these three sentences were the best way to make the point.
"Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall." is a VERY ChatGPT way to write. It's not proof, but the parent is right that this smells a bit of AI writing.
Not to the same extent at all. If you use ChatGPT for a while, you'll see it writes like that very frequently. Humans do write like that sometimes, but not with anywhere the frequency that ChatGPT does it. That's weak evidence for it being ChatGPT.
Suppose ChatGPT uses a semicolon more often than an individual person. On a pageful of comments from many random people, someone using a semicolon doesn't mean they're a bot even if 100% of their comments on that page includes one.
"We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall."
It's a mixed metaphor which doesn't make any sense. There are really very few ways in which this can be considered good writing - I guess the grammar is ok even if it is nonsense.
So let's break it down - underestimated the gravitational effects - ok, this is nice, like where it's going talking about these big competitors sucking in users, but then we have the metaphor extended to breaking point:
Network effects are a moat, but not just a moat, they're a wall (which is really not anything like a moat). So which of these 3 things are they, and why are we mixing the metaphors of gravity (pulling in customers), moats (competitive moat) and walls (walled gardens).
It's just all a bit nonsensical and the kind of fuzzy prose that seems superficially impressive without actually saying anything meaningful in which LLMs excel. Go try generating an article from just the heads in this article, and see how similarly it reads.
In a castle for defence, yes similar in function but not form and often used together not one or the other.
In business metaphors no they are used for different things and also when you create a metaphor you should stick with it, that’s what makes this jarring and weird.
The rule of three is a basic writing structure taught to 12 year olds. I know people have given up on even the basics (capitalisation) in recent years but let's not just banish structured writing to "AI".
Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.
Really annoying, I was starting to use it for a few niche communities instead of Reddit.
If they relaunch, I hope they develop something integrated with the fediverse. I believe the time to build walled gardens is over, plugging with the fediverse might give them a running start to build something g together with the wide fediverse community, maybe something easier to use for non-techies and well moderated.
Digg may have a bot problem but Reddit isn't far behind. So many subreddits are full of slop that they've become useless and/ or completely unreliable.
What's an actual viable solution to this kind of thing?
CATPCHAs aren't it. Maybe micro-fees to actually post things would discourage bot posting? I really don't know.
Seems like it's just dead internet all over the place these days.
So as predicted it wasn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage 6 months ago.
And I will continue to die on the will die on the hill that Reddit only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. Alexis Ohanian still doesn't seem to have any clue that it was right-place-right-time and Kevin Rose seems to have not learned much either. Can we stop giving either anymore credibility? As with any social site it's the user base/community that helps pull thru darkness. And no one was really asking for this.
I think the [dupe] is a false alarm in the sense that they just put up a banner saying it is shut down and I think they were starting it up again back then.
I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.
The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.
As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.
In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.
Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
Why? Genuinely curious.
I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.
Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.
Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.
And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.
Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?
Every website that was driven by traffic is also dying. I have put nearly a decade of work into mine, and AI overviews and ChatGPT have reduced traffic by over 60%. At some point I will need to give up and find a job, and that corner of the internet will get no new original information, just rehashed slop.
With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.
Dang told me in 2019 that HN gets 150M page views a month, so it's not that obscure actually:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201120
150m page views a month is peanuts and very far away from the "social" networks numbers. I don't have those numbers, but I know how many page views we had 2011 while running a german browser game community.
> After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.
Which would be totally fine with me TBH.
Rather amusingly, invite-only torrent sites might be the only semi-public authentically human hangouts left on the internet!
Eternal AI september.
Eternal LLMber
I've asked ChatGPT a question about something I read in a thread here and it responded with a comment from that thread, even though the thread was less than an hour old. HN is well known in the tech community and there are certain subjects, especially anything involving Israel or India, that nearly instantly result in a flood of comments from bad actors. HN isn't Reddit but it's also a shadow of what it once was, which is driving away more of the productive participation in favor of agenda-based posting.
Note that these topics often involve comments which you can predict very easily. Internet users are like that, agenda or no. Wasn’t it in the heyday of forums that you could recognize the most prolific/annoying members by their style and vocabulary? A model should have no problem pulling such things off.
The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that.
This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armies of cheap labour in Asia, and the worst case use bots.
The dead internet theory [1] is probably not just a theory anymore. HN recently made a policy to not allow AI posting and posters, but do you honestly think that's going to work? I would place a bet that a top HN poster within the next year is outed as using AI for posting on their behalf.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
> people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future.
Verifiable credentials; services can get persistent pseudonymous identifiers that are linked to a real-world identity. Ban them once and they stay banned. It doesn’t matter if a person lets a bot post inauthentic content using their identity if, when they are caught, that person cannot simply register a new account. This solves a bunch of problems – online abuse, spam, bots, etc. – without telling websites who you are or governments what you do.
I'd rather have a system where there's a small investment cost to making an account, but you could always make another.
Imagine A system where there's a vending machine outside City Hall, you spend $X on a charity for choice, and you get a one-time, anonymous token. You can "spend" it with a forum to indicate "this is probably a person or close enough to it."
Misuse of the system could be curbed by making it so that the status of a token cannot be tested non-destructively.
Do you think there is a price point that locks out spammers without locking out poor people?
The future is human curated content. Provide the same experience people get today but without the noise. Give them just the good stuff and don't let just anyone make a post. A book has an author, a movie has a director, maybe websites can have webmasters again who filter through the garbage for you.
human curated -> human moderated. I, for one, don't care if it's ai, or human-written. I care if it's interesting/useful.
It’s what I’m trying to accomplish with my website(link is in my profile). Just trying to crank up the signal to noise ratio.
Yes, precisely.
This means that only sites which verify identity will have any value in the future. And by verified, that means against government ID and verified as real.
No amount of sign up fee works as an alternative.
Note that a site can verify identity, prevent sock puppets, ban bad actors and prevent re-registration, all while keeping that ID private.
You still get a handle and publicly facing nick if you want it.
The company which handles this correctly will have a big B after it. Digg actually has a chance at this.
It has no users, so the outrage won't exist in the same capacity. Existing platforms will be pummeled in the market if they try to convert to this type of site, as their DAU will likely drop a thousandfold, just due to the eliminated bots.
But Digg could relaunch this way. And as exhibited, this is now the only way.
The age of the anonymous internet is over, it's done. People not realizing this are living in the past.
Note, I don't like this, but acknowledging reality is vital. Issues with leaked databases, users, hacking of Pii are all technical and legislative issues, and not relevant to whether or not this happens.
Because it will happen, and is happening.
It should be noted that falsifying ID is a crime. Fake ID coupled with computer fraud laws will eventually result in hefty jail time. This is sensible, if people want a world where ecommerce, and discourse is online... and the general public does.
And has exhibited a complete lack of care about privacy regardless.
This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites. The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.
> And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.
You just published good content knowing AI will slurp it up and not give you any traffic in return. I'm now replying to you with more content with the same expectations about AI and traffic. Why care about AI or traffic or recognition? Isn't the content the thing that matters?
It's like answering technical questions in an anonymous/pseudonymous chat or forum, which I'm sure you've done, too. We do it to help others. If an AI can take my answer and spread it around without paying me or mentioning one of my random usernames I change every month or so, I would be happy. And if the AI gives me credit like "coffeecup543 originally posted that on IRC channel X 5 years ago", I couldn't care less. It would be noise to the reader. Even if the AI uses my real name, so what?
The people who cared about traffic and money from their posts rarely made good content, anyway. Listicles and affiliate marketing BS and SEO optimizations and making a video that could be 1 minute into 10 minutes, or text that could've been 5 articles into a long book - all existed from before AI. With AI I actually get less of this crap - either skip it or condense it.
It's two different problems. People who run review sites and blogs and such care about traffic, and not getting attribution will kill their desire to participate. People who post here and on Reddit etc. care about talking with other human beings, and feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill *their* desire to participate.
> feeling ignored in a sea of botspam will kill their desire to participate.
The bots are not really that bad, they're (still) pretty easy to spot and not engage with. I'm more perplexed about the negativity filled comments sections, and I'm pretty sure most posters are real grass-fed certified humans.
I don't get why negative posts get so upvoted, get so popular on the front page, and people still debate with outdated arguments in them. People come in and fight other deamons, make straw-man arguments and in general promote negative stuff like there's no tomorrow. I think you can get so much more signal from posititve examples, from "hey I did a thing" type posts, and so on. Even overhyped stuff like the claw-mania can still be useful. Yet the "I did a thing" get so overwhelmed by negativity, nitpicking and "haha not perfect means doa" type of messages. That makes me want to participate less...
Oh that's just human nature: there's a reason why trashy tabloids continue to exist despite how public sentiment seems to universally agree that they're awful spreaders of rumour and insecurity. More people are Skankhunt42 than we'd like to admit.
That's a little bit apples to oranges, because I'm not monetizing this content, or paying to host it, or trying to make a personal brand, etc.
Yes and no.
In the most simple sense - Yes, it is the content that matters.
In the more practical sense - cognitive and emotional resources are limited and our brains are not content agnostic.
We have different behaviors, expectations and capacities for talking to machines and talking to humans.
For example, if I am engaging with a human I can expect to potentially change their minds.
For a machine? Why bother even responding. It’s of no utility to me to respond.
Furthermore, all human communication comes with a human emotional context. There are vast amounts of information implied through tone, through what we choose not to say. Sometimes people say things in one emotional state that is not what they would say on another occasion.
To move the conversation forward, addressing the emotional payload behind the words used, matters more than the words used themselves.
There are a myriad reasons why humans are practically poorer for these tools.
That and most of the news being behind a paywall, which they can scrape anyway.
The internet archive is my safe haven these days, i can go back and remember the old internet.
Ha yeah, I quite like the 2003 vintage.
Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.
4chan has bots too.
Curious how you came to that conclusion. Anecdotally, places where you can slur to your heart's content like /r/conservative seem far more inundated with bots than other areas of Reddit. I feel like that's really saying something too, because Reddit has a really bad bot problem overall.
This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch?
There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?
I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.
Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.
Cutting staff does in no way mandate a un-notified and abrupt "hard-reset".
They could at least put it in read-only mode for a short time and allow downloading of extant community content prior to a scheduled "reset day".
This smacks of flailing leadership and zero respect for their target user demographic.
> Digg's founder who started the company back in 2004
Their plan is to make the internet what is was 22 years ago.
I wonder how much it's possible to recreate some of the old magic.
I'm sure it's impossible, but what if it's not?
They say trust is their product, well,I guess they're sold out
In Digg's non-defense, Kevin Rose has been a serial-rug-puller for his entire career. See also Pownce, Milk, and Moonbirds.
The only sustained business I'm aware of is Hodinkee.
Kevin Rose didn't start Hodinkee, he started Watchville years after Hodinkee was already well established. Watchville merged with Hodinkee, at which point he became the CEO for 2 years.
From what I can tell Watchville was abandoned a few years ago.
You chose to put your effort into building something that someone else owns.
Next time try doing it in a way that you control it.
You're right, and that is one of the lessons to be reminded of here.
My main point wasn't that, though. It's simply a bad and low-effort way to handle the situation, and like one of the other replies points out, there are better options. They could have just as well disabled posting and maybe even viewing of submissions and communities for the time being. Just shutting it all down immediately without notice leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I will not be among the people returning for their next relaunch. I am sure others feel the same way, and I don't think it is a wise decision to needlessly put off your early adopters if you're hoping for them to come back "next time".
If you're looking for a new platform lemmy is probably your best bet, at least if a server goes down everything is still saved on federated servers.
I do have a lemmy account, but have not really returned to it in a while. Maybe I haven't found the right communities yet, but it had nothing about it that felt engaging. People upvoted, but nobody talked. No interaction. Digg felt more alive from day one. I replied to a post in a niche community with ~100 members and only afterwards realized it was @justin.
My experience with lemmy has not been nice. A majority of people there are just downright awful, and the mods are often power-hungry and overzealous in their actions. Many times entire servers are defederated from many others due to how a large percentage of their users behave.
Example: https://0x0.st/8RmU.png
Despite its flaws, X seems to have a better balance between what's allowed and what's not than other non-niche social networks.
Lemmy has the same energy as ice: a bunch of rejects from other mod communities showing up to render their version of justice upon federated folks
> A majority of people there are just downright awful, and the mods are often power-hungry and overzealous in their actions.
If you're telling me it's _worse_ than reddit in this regard, I can only imagine how terrible it is.
Yeah, the primary instance (lemmy.ml) isn't the best.
I use mander.xyz, it's science focused, but they also have a policy of only de-federating instances that host CSAM.
Where is that policy located? I could not find it.
Their /instances page also only shows a single blocked instance, whereas something like programming.dev shows lots of questionable instances blocked.
Will we never learn to stop. Building. On. Platforms.
Argh. Also quite irritated. I had 50/50 transitioned over to it despite the lower traffic because it was a calm oasis. The thing about bots is believable, though, because you could already see it happening. Dead Internet has been real for a while, and I'd love to seem Kevin and Alex do a followup on this.
Yeah. Sadly the default communities were flooded with blog spam, and that's just the part I noticed. A couple days ago a bunch of smaller communities also got a noticeable bump in members. That didn't change anything in my own community, but others apparently weren't so lucky.
I can see why the team got overwhelmed. I wouldn't want to have to deal with that.
Related - others?
Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments)
Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments)
Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments)
Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments)
Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)
Kevin Rose (original digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (a.k.a. kn0thing, original reddit founder) did an AMA recently about restarting digg
(context so people don't have to click links)
> Digg.com Is Back - Jan 2026
Damn, that didn't take long at all...
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem.
Am I completely off base or did they use AI to write the post complaining about AI?
> Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.
Digg isn't just here again. It's gone again.
The LLM style is like nails down a blackboard, are people blind to it or do they just not even read the stuff they're posting?
The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.
> sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, “witty” one-liners [etc]
There are subreddits within Reddit such as https://www.reddit.com/r/neutralnews/ that have strict rules around sourcing, etc. However, I think that’s not what most users want, and may not be quite what you’re looking for either, apologies.
Eh - it IS what most users want.
In the same way people want to be fit.
There are 3 horsemen of Internet forums, one of them is topics with a low barrier to entry.
At that point anyone can speak up, and their opinion takes up as much screen real estate and reading time (often less reading time) than a truly informed take.
By putting effort barriers in place, it forces a fitness test that most users (and bots) fail.
Another subreddit which has strong rules is r/badeconomics. I didn’t know about neutralnews, so thank you for giving me another example to add to the list.
The whole problem is trying to be a catchall where people with zero knowledge or skills can hang out. Twitter/X and Reddit especially suffer from it.
Topical forums tend to have a much higher SNR. My favorite forum of all time, johnbridge, had none of those issues. Sadly it died this year all the same, but many others still exist. When you have a forum dedicated to something that requires a minimum barrier to entry, the more useless folks get shunned away pretty early and easily.
I want a "reddit" like discussion board where:
- Users don't have to pay to post links/stories - Users have to pay to comment on links/stories - Users have to pay to "upvote" comments. Downvotes don't exist - Each link "lives" a certain amount of time before it is locked. - After lock time, users who posted the link get "paid" a % of the collected $ comments/upvotes. Comments that are upvoted also earn $ proportionally to the upvotes.
Hashcash was conceived to solve automated spam/email. Participating in a discussion must cost something, that's the only way bots and spam will get partially stopped. Or, if they start to optimize to get "the most votes", then so be it, their content will increase in quality.
Paying users for their posts is what killed YouTube, Twitter Facebook, Instagram... You will only get shitty ragebait comments. Not to mention that you have to link some bank account with your full name, etc.
This sounds like a platform that has no appeal to the average person, and an incredible appeal to people wishing to launder money or use money to run an influence campaign. Deliberately determining popularity proportionally to the amount of money spent is little different than advertising, but this would be under the false premise of "someone thought this was important/valuable enough to pay money to suggest I see it".
If this were to exist today, I know I would be incredibly critical of it.
I’m missing something. What’s the incentive for people to pay to upvote or comment?
+1 let's make this
It seems like that would lead to a proliferation of ragebait, deliberately controversial posts, and overly simplistic articles to attract the greatest amount of comments. I frequently see deeply technical high-value posts on HN with very few comments but each thread about politics ends up getting hundreds of comments.
You could build this on ATProto.
What's stopping you from building it yourself?
You really gotta wonder how much value the "Digg" brand actually has, because the number of people that remember/care about the site from its original glory days is ever dwindling.
I stopped using Digg a long long time ago. It just felt too slow to get the news I care about.
I was an avid Slashdot user way back in the day, but the site was basically the same throughout the day, and I wanted faster updates. Digg did this perfectly for a time, but eventually I migrated entirely to Reddit (even before whatever that drama was that caused a big exodus from Digg).
I think Reddit right now is the sweet spot: up to date information, longer-term articles to read, and easy to catch up on things I missed. I was recently pressured to sign up for X (or Twitter or whatever), and I had to turn off all of the notifications since I was constantly spammed with "BREAKING: X RESPONDS TO Y ABOUT Z!!!!"
Right now having Reddit for scrolling and Hackernews for articles+discussion feels like it works for me.
Reddit is flooded with AI slop. r/all currently has AI-generated text posts and articles on the first page. Upvoted because they're the typical orange man bad stuff, but LLM slop nonetheless. Assuming the engagement is organic, it's depressing how much of the site has no eye for this stuff.
There are decent small communities I'm a part of but the trash feels like it is encroaching.
And the notifications you describe are exactly reddit's notifications? "your comment received 10/20/50/100 upvotes!" "x responds to y about z" "News is trending"
If you use the old. site you don't get notifications.
Who wants to join me in writing an AGPL "antisocial network", which would be basically a convenient interface over rss-bridge, gnus, and deltachat?
That didn't last long. I'm not sure I want to invest my time again if/when they relaunch.
I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.
Subreply.com is working just fine, no AI agents. Spam accounts get deleted.
Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.
To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.
Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.
Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.
Actions speak louder than words. They’ve added features that help spammers hide their behaviour, they are rejecting API keys when people apply for access to deal with the bot problem, they ignore subreddits with spam-friendly moderators, and they ignore reports on vote manipulation. There’s a tonne of low-hanging fruit for tackling the bot problem on Reddit that they aren’t doing anything about, and often it seems like people outside of Reddit do a better job without access to the raw data than people inside Reddit do with the raw data.
I know they claim to care about the bot problem, but they appear at absolute best incredibly complacent about it, if not complicit. All those OnlyFans spammers, AI spam bots, etc. are engagement. They are ruining the platform for people, but engagement figures don’t distinguish between fake engagement and real people. The outcome of their current behaviour is for engagement to steadily rise while the value to real people steadily falls. It’s like they want to be the poster child for Dead Internet Theory.
The Reddit CEO mentioned that the community thrives when humans talk to humans - and not with AI slop. He also said they are working on efforts to identify automated accounts.
https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-hum...
The used car salesman mentioned that the car was in perfect working condition.
Reddit can't even manage to regularly identify and ban bots that copy previously popular posts/comments verbatim, and that's a much easier problem than modern LLM-based bots.
Actions speak more than words, especially true for CEOs.
I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.
For a short time I was a part of a small site that banned politics.
It was fine, people talked about work, personal stuff, travel, until one person posted about their disappointment that their state was limiting various services or rights to gay people. For them this meant their rights were in question and they were understandably upset.
Immediately some folks cried politics and that they shouldn’t post about that sort of thing.
To the user posting it it was about their life…
I don’t think “no politics” rules really make much sense. For someone it’s more than politics, and IMO because a topic is touched by politicians or government shouldn’t make it disallowed.
Wouldn't that be almost impossible?. Politics affects our lives every day. Your comment suggests that you believe it doesn't affect yours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
Why do you think people will stop at politics?
Erm, Brexit, anyone?
You thinking that astroturfing only happens for US politics is dangerously naive.
I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read.
I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.
The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.
One of the things I always disliked about the original Digg was their threading. The slashdot like feed where the oldest comments were at the top and there was only one level of replies tended to encourage the "first" comments and harmed the quality of the discussion. I was glad to see it use a reddit-like comment thread for the new site, but it also meant there wasn't much reason to use it over reddit.
I'm a bit surprised with Alexis' involvement they didn't anticipate the bot problem. Alexis left reddit several years ago but I'm sure he's still in touch with the folks who run the place. It would've been worth it to talk to them about the threats they currently face and how they deal with them.
Why didn’t it make sense to you?
It was 4chan lite...
It's a shame, the intention is still there, if they decide to come back I'll give it another shot. Btw, why are we publishing simple static pages at ~2.84 MB compressed.
Those 100 npm packages won't load themselves.
The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem.
We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.
> We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.
I don't believe there is any practical way to do it.
Sure, there are ways to verify a human linked to a specific account exists in a one-off fashion, but for individual interactions you'll never know that it isn't an LLM reading and posting if they put even a small amount of effort to make it seem humanish.
I am very curious where people who complain about the bots really get to see them.
The only website which became totally useless for me after the general availability of LLMs is OkCupid. It's indeed dead. The rest are fine.
What am I doing differently compared to everyone else?
I'm regularly using: telegram, whatsapp, wechat, hackernews, lobsters, reddit, opennet.ru, vk.com, pornhub, youtube, odysee, libera.chat, arxiv, gmail, github, gitlab, sourcehut, codeberg, thepiratebay, rutracker, Anna's archive, xda-developers.
facebook and twitter became broken for me, but not because of bots, rather because of the "smart feed" ("the algorithm"), which is hiding all posts of my friends and promotes incendiary garbage.
In other words, I am seeing enshittification full-scale, but not the bots.
Cheapest four letter domain on Earth at this point, given the negative value of the business and brand.
> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. The loyalty users have to the communities they've already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely.
This. So much This.
Community /books helped me track down a book I've been dying to reread for almost ten years now. Reddit failed the task, so did all other places I turned to. Cheers for that, and rip.
https://flipso.com might be an alternative.
There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.
They introduced user-created communities a few months ago. They had problems with squatting and splintering, which might have played a role in their annoucement.
More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.
I wonder if the old forum model would work. Instead of these mega-forum-platfroms, there are just small communities with a niche focus at their own URL.
I suppose bots could find forums that use the most popular software and still make accounts and spam, but it would be much more obvious and less fruitful for someone to spam deck builders in Vancouver (something I saw often on Digg) on a forum that is focused on aquariums owners in the midwest.
Is that the whole story? Why isn't reddit overrun by bots then (or are they?), and why wouldn't basic proof-of-work techniques fence against bots? Since they started out just in January, isn't it plausible to assume they didn't meet their target user figures and investors jumped ship?
Go to any career subreddit and it's almost entirely LLM- generated rage bait. Never mention political subreddits, those have been gamed for years.
Reddit very much is.
Damn. I still have faith that what a lot of us that migrated to new Digg envision is possible. Post pandemic Internet has choppier waters than before, but I'm going to try and keep a positive outlook and I look forward to their followup emails.
Thanks for the fun this past year Digg.
They literally just went public in Jan. Building it back up was going to take years
I don’t understand what kind of shenanigans transpired. But it seems there’s more to in than “bots”
If it truly is bots, maybe a private invite only social network is the way to go.
Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.
> We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away.
I think the HN title needs adjusted
"Digg is Just Resting"
Digg has gone to live on a farm in the countryside where it can run around and play with aol, myspace and all the other websites.
No you can't visit.
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.
Hmm...
> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.
What does this even mean? How many metaphors can it mix up in one paragraph? Can't they write a blog post the old fashioned way, with feeling? Imagine reading a corporate blog post about being laid off which the founder couldn't even be bothered to write.
Amazing how close to corporate newspeak chatgpt can get (prompt was the headings of this blog post), it has the same sort of blank say-nothing feeling of this blog post: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b4890e54ac819193f221351ea900a7
Registration by snail mail coming soon to most of the Internet?
> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.
Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.
>> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.
> Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.
This… seems like regular prose to me. What makes you say so confidently it was written by AI?
There are more tells. Rule of three, short cliche sentences.
> We know how frustrating this is, and we hope you'll give us another look once we have something to show, we’ll save your usernames!
I think it's partly human. But ex:
> Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.
isn't a natural sentence.
I think you're spot on. It feels like parts were edited with AI and parts were left alone.
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.
The statement this is making is presumably the crux of the problem (Digg cannot survive without trust!) but it's worded so poorly that it's hard to imagine someone sat down and figured these three sentences were the best way to make the point.
How is that not a natural sentence? I think people are reading into stuff. That's just good writing.
Could it be generated? Sure. But there aren't the obvious tells you act like there are.
"Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall." is a VERY ChatGPT way to write. It's not proof, but the parent is right that this smells a bit of AI writing.
It's also a VERY HUMAN way to write.
I don't care so much about Digg, but the endless "haha, I caught you!" comments annoy me more than the rare actual AI-written content they label.
Not to the same extent at all. If you use ChatGPT for a while, you'll see it writes like that very frequently. Humans do write like that sometimes, but not with anywhere the frequency that ChatGPT does it. That's weak evidence for it being ChatGPT.
Suppose ChatGPT uses a semicolon more often than an individual person. On a pageful of comments from many random people, someone using a semicolon doesn't mean they're a bot even if 100% of their comments on that page includes one.
Would now be a good time to point out that I said that "It's not proof" and "weak evidence"? Because that is what I said.
Here's the context:
"We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall."
It's a mixed metaphor which doesn't make any sense. There are really very few ways in which this can be considered good writing - I guess the grammar is ok even if it is nonsense.
So let's break it down - underestimated the gravitational effects - ok, this is nice, like where it's going talking about these big competitors sucking in users, but then we have the metaphor extended to breaking point:
Network effects are a moat, but not just a moat, they're a wall (which is really not anything like a moat). So which of these 3 things are they, and why are we mixing the metaphors of gravity (pulling in customers), moats (competitive moat) and walls (walled gardens).
It's just all a bit nonsensical and the kind of fuzzy prose that seems superficially impressive without actually saying anything meaningful in which LLMs excel. Go try generating an article from just the heads in this article, and see how similarly it reads.
Isnt a moat and a wall pretty similar in function? They both keep people in or out of an area.
Also werent all "moats" commonly paired with a wall in real life? As in a moat around a castle wall?
In a castle for defence, yes similar in function but not form and often used together not one or the other.
In business metaphors no they are used for different things and also when you create a metaphor you should stick with it, that’s what makes this jarring and weird.
The rule of three is a basic writing structure taught to 12 year olds. I know people have given up on even the basics (capitalisation) in recent years but let's not just banish structured writing to "AI".
"This is not...this is" is a tell
I think we'll have to disagree on that. Humans write that way, too, and they've written that way for far longer than AI.
(Where do you think AI picked up its writing habits from?)
There isn't any "this is" in that sentence.
"Morbius" of social news aggregators
Didn't Kevin Rose re-acquire Digg in the last year or so?
He and Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit) went in on it together.
Yes, he did. Now he's gonna be the full-time CEO according to this.
Did they have a working business plan?
Step 1: Copy Reddit
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!
That was fast.
Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.
Really annoying, I was starting to use it for a few niche communities instead of Reddit.
If they relaunch, I hope they develop something integrated with the fediverse. I believe the time to build walled gardens is over, plugging with the fediverse might give them a running start to build something g together with the wide fediverse community, maybe something easier to use for non-techies and well moderated.
We will see I guess…
Digg may have a bot problem but Reddit isn't far behind. So many subreddits are full of slop that they've become useless and/ or completely unreliable.
What's an actual viable solution to this kind of thing?
CATPCHAs aren't it. Maybe micro-fees to actually post things would discourage bot posting? I really don't know.
Seems like it's just dead internet all over the place these days.
Did you know it was back? They are blaming bots.
Sure.. Digg.com is back (118 points, 6 months ago, 209 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430
"This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem."
Yes.
Whatever happened to MrBabyMan?
So as predicted it wasn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage 6 months ago.
And I will continue to die on the will die on the hill that Reddit only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. Alexis Ohanian still doesn't seem to have any clue that it was right-place-right-time and Kevin Rose seems to have not learned much either. Can we stop giving either anymore credibility? As with any social site it's the user base/community that helps pull thru darkness. And no one was really asking for this.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
I think the [dupe] is a false alarm in the sense that they just put up a banner saying it is shut down and I think they were starting it up again back then.
Ok, unduped now. Thanks!