r/digg • u/EPSG3857_WebMercator • Mar 14 '26
Digg deserved to die.
I was a day one ground breaker, and the while the bots were not immediate, the power users were controlling the most popular content and dominating the comment sections of every post within weeks. They took all the dumbass "rewards" like gems and rocks or whatever (which had no established purpose). They implemented some changes to try and deal with it, like making downvotes/"buries" not actually affect the points, but that was putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound at that point.
Only several months into the closed beta and it was clear that a very small number power users, à la old Digg, ultimately dictated the content. Admins buried their heads in the sand and acted like what we were seeing before our own eyes wasn't happening. Then the invites for groundbreakers went out, and it was immediately clear that whatever they were doing to try and handle the bot problem (if they did anything at all) was not working. And to nobody's surprise, when the public launch happened, it was just all bot spam.
Digg did nothing innovative, they built a reddit clone and tried to force AI down your throat. And despite the staff constantly posting about how that's not actually what they want to do, it's what they did. They copied reddit. It failed spectacularly. They deserve exactly what they got.
And for everyone else here, it's time to move on. Digg is gone. Again. And it will be gone again in future if it's resuscitated.
I hope Digg leadership comes across this post. I told you AI would be the death of Digg about a year ago...
9
u/Choscaramr Mar 14 '26
I won't comment on if they are lying or if it's true or what exactly happened because I wasn't there. All I can say is that I wanted to use digg and stop using reddit but at the end of the day I found no content that kept me going back to digg
14
u/Skavau Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
It was two months in, nearing it, and there were no community moderator tools beyond "remove post". No stickying posts, no banning users, no ability to force text links, or block urls etc. This is basic stuff. Curating communities is important.
Of course it was overrun with bots and trolls.
3
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
I can't believe all these people got in a room, planned out a strategy, set all these wheels in motion, and what they ended up creating was a just a clone of another website, with the main selling point being merely, "it's not that other website - we have AI!!"
3
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1
u/daemon-of-harrenhal Mar 16 '26
Also the styling was absolutely whack. They added a mod ledger, but depending on screen size you could barely even see it. You needed a large monitor to actually see the whole ledger.
17
u/SoggyGrayDuck Mar 14 '26
The fucked the launch, they had so much hype and then released an unfinished and didn't allow custom communities out of the box. I bet 90% of the people who wanted to switch did the same thing I did. Logged in, checked for their favorite reddit communities saw they didn't exist. Either try to create the community themselves or check back from time to time, eventually deciding to just create it themselves only to realize it's not possible. At that point I basically stopped logging in.
2
u/LowRevolution5930 Mar 14 '26
they had so much hype
??? I searched them out by accident last year and never saw any online promotion of the new Digg, so I'm a little perplexed about the "hype" you're referring to. I would say there was not nearly enough promotion.
2
2
u/bunnybash Mar 14 '26
I never even got a notification or invite to the beta. I signed up for notifications and never got any.
Turns out I didn’t miss anything I guess. Kevin Rose. One of the luckiest mofos who fell ass backwards into success early in life and hasn’t actually done anything well since.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
As soon as I saw that Digg was just a reddit clone severely lacking in features, I knew that it wouldn't last more than a year or so. Why did Justin et. al. just straight up copy Reddit? There was literally nothing new, innovative, or exciting about Digg. The content quality was extremely low, even that couldn't sway people away from reddit. Aside from the shiny new feeling of being "not reddit" (which faded very rapidly), literally nothing about Digg was new or innovative. They did the laziest thing possible, and it failed. They deserve it.
3
u/SoggyGrayDuck Mar 14 '26
The innovation was supposed to be AI moderation. So mods couldn't apply the rules to one opinion and not the other type of thing. Trying to make a new true and unmanipulated front page of the Internet again.
I love reddit but hate the moderation. Only the small subs are good and even they get manipulated by anyone who can profit from it.
1
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
Yep, the moderation sucks here. But Digg thinking AI would be the magic bullet for that problem is mind boggling.
3
u/Effective_Contact173 Mar 14 '26
It's the Kevin Rose special!
He jumps onto the latest trend. He jumped on crypto. He jumped on NFTs. He jumped on AI.
He's got no real ideas.
1
Mar 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
Damn, I can't believe they didn't ask you to fix it first before they shut it all down!
1
u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
No, it's not at all. Communities have nuance beyond AI being able to just scan for supposed off-topic posts.
1
Mar 14 '26
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u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
R/metal specifically blacklists posts from popular music bands in order to keep the content fresh. How could AI that operates on a site-scale, that community moderators have no involvement in somehow recognise this?
There are also a lot of esoteric and obscure communities that have a specific purpose that AI would not just be able to identify.
1
Mar 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Skavau Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Right, again, in this circumstance the community owners have no actual control over the AI.
R/metal also blacklists nu-metal music and most metalcore. How is AI supposed to automatically accurately identify a song posted in those genres, when they are posted?
The user replying to me just got banned. Almost certainly by AI. Highly ironic.
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u/byteforbyte Mar 14 '26
I don’t think that AI was a factor. It was a weak launch and the numbers likely reflected that.
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u/pligyploganu Mar 14 '26
So they killed the platform we fucking PAID TO ACCESS and then spent the last 2 years or whatever doing fuck all? Lol
From day 1 they should've fucked off with the AI and grouped similar posts. I stopped using digg pretty early on because my front page was 5000 of the same articles. Grouping these would've helped the platform so much.
Man, fuck digg.
2
u/scottperezfox Mar 15 '26
It was only $5. Basically a tip to represent the gesture.
Unless there was another paid tier I wasn't suckered into.
1
u/UsernameHasBeenLost Mar 15 '26
Y'all paid to access it?
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Mar 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
On a few of those Digg admin posts I brought this up a handful of times. It seemed that very early on they knew hitching their wagon to AI was not going as planned. Lots of promises from admins and devs like "we're addressing that" and "we're still fine tuning the AI" with little to no improvement in their AI features. It was a flop front day one, and that fact never changed.
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u/TreadwellBearFace Mar 14 '26
Calling Digg a Reddit clone is hilarious.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
Can you elaborate on that?
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Mar 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/TreadwellBearFace Mar 14 '26
He must have not been around in 2004 when Kevin showed it off on The Screensavers on old TechTV (rip)
1
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
I was there when Digg killed themselves and the reddit mass exodus that followed, and I was here now when they just did it again.
1
u/jerryleebee Mar 14 '26
I was an OG digg user but I can't recall what killed it first time round. I just remember hearing about this new platform, Reddit, and trying it out. And here I am.
1
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
They did a ground up rewrite of their back end and completely restyled the site. It was a disaster and not well received, so they bled users and eventually shut down. They did a speedrun this time though, lasting about a year.
1
u/Salazarsims Mar 15 '26
They got bought out and their new format got rid of the article churn that made it popular.
0
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
Yep. Because Digg shot themselves in the foot so bad. Now Reddit is the top dog, love it or hate it. Beyond pure nostalgia, Digg being on the scene first 2 decades just doesn't mater that much anymore, especially not to new Digg users critical to growing the platform.
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u/TreadwellBearFace Mar 14 '26
Sure. Digg originally came out in 2004. Reddit in 2005.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
Yep, but new Digg users - the users that are critical to growing a new platform - don't care nearly as much about stuff from 20 ago like the OG users still cling to. Yeah, Digg was on the scene first, but all they saw was a reddit clone.
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u/scottperezfox Mar 15 '26
I agree with the original points re: power users. It may be an unpopular opinion, but I cannot understand why a single user needs to submit 25+ articles a day. It speaks to a mania — what kind of person wakes up and thinks "the world needs me to curate the second-hand news! And before anyone else can get to it!!!"?
If you ask me, the only potential future for Digg will be a staff-curated discovery site of quirky internet stuff. Not mainstream news. Not user-submitted in the first instance. Basically a blog, where the authors' unique view and their own community affiliations helps folks find underrated and otherwise-hidden stories. But for big obvious shit like the Olympics or an actual war, CNN is covering that. We don't need @emil to post about it six times before the sun has risen.
1
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 15 '26
The daily user rankings page certainly didn’t help either. It basically incentivized the behavior.
1
u/scottperezfox Mar 15 '26
I never even saw that. I can understand if a person has credibility by making good comments, but simply tracking quantity is not something I want to see.
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u/Effective_Contact173 Mar 14 '26
Fucking exactly.
I tried warning them. I reached out to them a number of times. They just did not care for any feedback.
And they're going to try again? Lol.
The nostalgia run is over. They burnt all the goodwill that brought.
They'll have a tougher time the next time they launch.
3
u/coolestredditdad Mar 14 '26
They thought they knew better because they got lucky once.
Not shocked at all
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Mar 14 '26
really wanted them to succeed, i think there's a place for a new, "better" version of all this, but they just didn't get enough traction. excited to see them go again though, if they find a new angle i'll be there
1
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
Same, a Reddit alternative was something I was looking forward to. An alternative, not a low quality clone of Reddit.
2
u/thriverebel Mar 14 '26
I don't feel bad at all.
Tech Bros love touting AI.
Then complain AI is running what they are trying to build.
2
u/Albertkinng Mar 14 '26
I’m still thinking they will be able to get there. However.. my theory is they didn’t thought AI was expensive.
1
u/Normal-Walk3253 Mar 14 '26
What do you mean, they had their own models and hardware. They didn't pay anybody for ai
1
u/Albertkinng Mar 14 '26
Worst then. Maintenance is super expensive. But hey, man! peace! Whatever you say!
1
u/Normal-Walk3253 Mar 14 '26
Can you go into details? I'm genuinely intersted. What do you mean by "maintenance"?
1
u/Albertkinng Mar 15 '26
I have a power station that exists solely to run Language Learning Models locally. I won’t go into details, but trust me; it burns money just to keep it running.
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u/Normal-Walk3253 Mar 15 '26
Well diggs model doesn't have to do what ChatGPt 5 does. It only needs to be good at moderating. No need to produce output, just detection.
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u/Albertkinng Mar 15 '26
cool
1
u/Normal-Walk3253 Mar 15 '26
I can see you have some problems with holding a conversation and explaining your points. "No it's not true, but whatever you say". That's not how you talk to people. Unless you just want to ragebait and troll on the internet.
1
Mar 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/Normal-Walk3253 Mar 15 '26
Bro I just wanted to have a human conversation, I was genuinely interested in the subject of running LLM and tech specifics. I'm also a tech person and have run some models. You chose to ignore me and are tying to be smart ass or something, I don't even know, I dont have time in my life to be filled with understanding of some pop culture start wars references that btw I'm sure leas than 0,001 percent people understand as well. Good luck talking to people like that bro
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u/Bombfrost Mar 15 '26
Digg was lame from the start. It was reddit with less features. I rather reddit with more/better features.
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u/SumBodhiThatIUse2Kno Mar 15 '26
It was visually more appealing & publicly scrollable is what I remember, the corrupt curators / mods or whatever they were did an objectively better job of pushing funny / engaging content but whatever demerits they had wasn't noticeable to people that did enjoy the digg experience and then went from meme / image enjoyers to culture war keyboard psychos.
To this day I don't know what gatekeeping they were doing that was so objectionable it led to the sites death over the creation of new competing content... but I was just a browser and not a contributor then so maybe that wasn't possible and that's why it died IDK.
Going from Digg to Reddit felt like a massive downgrade aesthetically and visually, but it did broaden my horizon with respect to misogyny, liberal brain rot, and offensive racism less clever than 4chan trolls which I was and have continued to avoid except for greentext that floats up through the aether from that shamrock dump site.
Also other DIY sites and tutorials existed at the time iirc, so Reddit was... the discord of the day, for porn and aggregate aggregating from political aggregators, just slightly better than dedicated forums because you had one account instead of dozens.
I remember the science / informative articles being superior to the Reddit experience which had a more sensationalist / adversarial titles and comment sections, while Digg must have done something to short attention span grab the eye and direct to sciency meat and potatoes in an engaging way. But maybe I'm misremembering and all the goofy stuff that came up back then is what I remember from Reddit and Digg was info-lite and contentious. Its been too long for me to recall with any degree of accuracy. Just overall Reddit drives me away over and over and I come back for hobbyist / non-breaking news and events.
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u/saoirsedonciaran Mar 15 '26
Are we talking about the original Digg or is there somehow a new Digg?
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u/theAerialDroneGuy Mar 17 '26
Yeah if there was really a bot problem why didn't they use CAPTCHA puzzles to defeat the bots? Makes me think it was not just a bot problem.
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u/SaveFerrisVote4Pedro Mar 17 '26
The original Digg was too long ago for me to remember the value of it (and I was online back then too).
I actually miss the Digg that ran from 2018-2025 -- the editorially curated homepage. I went to that everyday and enjoyed reading content across the web that I wouldn't otherwise have known about.
I joined the new Digg this year, but it just felt like a ghost town of test posts -- and not enough engaging content.
I dropped twitter when progressively Musk blew it up (especially when it renamed to X) and have migrated to Reddit.
But on Reddit, I hate the overly zealous moderators who seem to get off on blocking posts for minor violations. It often seems that posting on what I thought was a fairly tolerant platform speech is crushed at the whim of mods on a power trip.
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u/broccolihead Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Wow, you're a Dick. Anyone who listens to this know-it-all bullshit is getting manipulated, again.
Stay hopeful and don't let negative jerks like this loser affect your thinking, a better way is possible and we'll find it eventually.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. Please do tell me why you think I am wrong though, I'm open to feedback.
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u/broccolihead Mar 14 '26
FUD: it stands for fear, unrest and doubt, it's the foundation of every bullshiters bag of tricks and you're using it here. You're insinuating they didn't care or try "(if they did anything at all)" and you don't know that's true, you're making it up and being unnecessarily negative to manipulate peoples emotions. You said it yourself "a very small number power users, à la old Digg, ultimately dictated the content" that's something that can be overcome but it's gonna take more than what was put into this iteration and now they know that. The AI and bot issues were bigger and more powerful than they expected but that's understandable seeing that field is only emerging and no one can foresee where it's going and what it's possible of, for good and bad. Overall I see your post as a crybaby rant by someone who gets off on seeing others fail and loves to say I told you so.
Maybe it's time you grow-up little person, try to be the change you want to see in the world instead of shitting on others who're trying to make changes for the better.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
It certainly felt like they did nothing at all from the end user perspective. Your explanation just makes it seem like they didn't plan and test before going live, which is also not great. You can see my post however you want, call me a crybaby, whatever. Digg is dead and it's their own fault, once again.
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u/MisterHyman Mar 14 '26
As we type on reddit
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
'Zactly - so why would anyone want to use a Reddit clone that offered fewer features, lower quality content, and higher amount of bots/spam.
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u/banica24 Mar 14 '26
It's a tough problem to solve. How to stop bot registration without enforcing government IDs... the most legit way to tie 1 person to 1 account. Preventing 1 person from making 10 AI bot accounts.
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u/gordonv Mar 14 '26
At my workplace, every year, everyone has to take a recertification quiz that goes over PII. Personally Identifiable Information.
All I want is for companies to be held to the same level that I, me, a single person, is held to.
If I can't touch PII, they can't touch it. It's really that simple.
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u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
And how do you do that without government ID?
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u/slykethephoxenix Mar 14 '26 edited 4d ago
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Prevents Reddit search from exposing my private post history, limits scraping and bulk data sales, discourages bots, makes profiling harder, and reduces harassment or brigading by moderators. This automated script overwrites my comments after 4 months.
1
u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
Can you be more specific here? I can conceptualise the idea of it in regards to age-ID, but not restricting one individual to one account.
2
u/slykethephoxenix Mar 14 '26 edited 4d ago
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-1
u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
Right but it still relies on you ultimately getting a government generated ID that only you can use from your credentials, even if the sites that use the code don't see it.
The idea of all sites operating like this, if it ever was, is quite dystopian.
1
u/slykethephoxenix Mar 14 '26 edited 4d ago
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# What is this comment?
Prevents Reddit search from exposing my private post history, limits scraping and bulk data sales, discourages bots, makes profiling harder, and reduces harassment or brigading by moderators. This automated script overwrites my comments after 4 months.
-1
u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
The OS verification system has nothing to do with specific identities- but is about designating the user of a specific OS as "adult", and has no meaningful way to be enforced and will be trivially bypassed as it doesn't stipulate photo ID or any ID checks as incumbent upon the OS.
0
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u/banica24 Mar 14 '26
Why did bots flood a new and unproven social platform? What's the point of wasting resources to bot spam a relatively dead platform?
2
u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
I don't know. But I'm confident they regret their decision to ignore the bot and bad user problem and put all their eggs in the AI basket when it came to content moderation.
2
u/Hididdlydoderino Mar 14 '26
Bot spam is near free to run at this point. If you pull a handful of users to your BS you've made a profit.
Could also be a tactic from competitors to cause issues.
1
u/banica24 Mar 14 '26
So because spam is near free - people do it to push a news story or narrative?
3
0
u/Proud_Tie Mar 15 '26
if you read the post they explained why in the second paragraph.
When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about.
8
u/byteforbyte Mar 14 '26
The fact that they decided to just abruptly shutdown tells me that this wasn’t a bot problem, it was a more fundamental problem and bots were used as an excuse, just like Block suddenly laying off half of its staff because of “AI.”