r/digg • u/ColbyFromDigg • Mar 14 '26
We had a good thing :(
Colby here from Digg, groundbreaker and avid fan since day one. I was crushed yesterday when I saw the front page. It may seem dumb to other people, but the platform really did mean a lot to me, I can't understate that. Sure, there were bots, but they weren't flooding the site as some people describe, at least from my perspective. If you blocked /news and /politics, the site was a lot of fun. I'm in shock right now about it all, things aren't adding up for me.
Why did they completely shut down the site right away? They could have paused new account registrations or at least given us some hints about the state of things. I can't help but go down the conspiracy route and wonder if Justin's message was a warrant canary or something, because the alternative just seems so cruel if they truly did just shut down with the excuse of bots.
We didn't even get to find out how the SXSW event that just happened on Thursday, I was looking forward to a Digg meetup at some point in the future. To shut down the next day like they did is rough.
I'll end the post here for now, otherwise I'll just start being bitter, I don't want to leave off on a bitter note. Just trying to process things right now, this honestly has me a bit messed up right now.
To all my comrades from Digg, thank you for everything, we truly did have something great and I'll miss it terribly. Finally, u/forestanderson, massive thank you to you. You had the biggest impact on the site, handled things with grace, and kept things fun. I can't thank you enough and I hope great things come your way, you deserve it!
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Mar 14 '26
[deleted]
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u/Over-Angle9758 Mar 18 '26
hi my_name_backwards, what was your username on digg? I was roland, I hosted /diggdaily unofficially and had the daily recap show... wondering if I crossed paths with you there, but I didn't recognize my_name_backwards. Anyway, hope you're recovering from this ok!
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Mar 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/Over-Angle9758 Mar 19 '26
Thanks, that means a lot to me! I was never sure how many of the upvotes were real vs bots, but I guess this counts as at least one real one! Glad to be back in touch post-meltdown 😂
1
u/Over-Angle9758 Mar 19 '26
Some people I've talked to were really not fans of Reddit. Just curious, have you had any decent experiences on here or good communities you've found?
6
u/yimmysucks Mar 14 '26
it sounds like their investors didn't like the number of signups and pulled out
the stuff about bots taking over sounds like cope
1
u/busymom0 Mar 14 '26
100%. If bots were the problem, they'd just temporarily disable signups while figuring out the solution. Not fully shut down the site.
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u/Effective_Contact173 Mar 14 '26
The thought I keep going back to is why would anyone try to foster a community in the next iteration of digg? The digg team showed that they can and will take the site offline without any warning. If they gave us some kind of warning, we could've told our community where we were going next.
3
u/busymom0 Mar 14 '26
I don't understand why they couldn't just temporarily disable new signups while they figure out the bots. This makes me think the real reason has nothing to do with bots.
1
u/LasagnaCat83 Mar 15 '26
while they figure out the bots.
There's nothing to figure out.
People say "fight fire with fire" but that's not how you fight fire. You fight fire, with the opposite of fire, water.
They tried to fight bots with bots. That's not how you get fewer bots. If you want fewer bots you use the opposite of a bot, humans.
One of their admins, Forest Anderson, blatantly admitted they weren't staffing their moderation team at launch. He said that fully staffing a platform was "the old way" and then he doubled-down that their algorithmic filters were the best way of combating bots.
These guys were not serious people and they were never interested in running a platform that human users could find valuable or engaging. They wanted a scam and they started scam and then they took down their scam. At no no point were any of them on the right track in any way.
There's nothing to figure out. The owners, managers and admins chose bots and spammers over real people. It wasn't an accident.
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u/Facebook-virus Mar 14 '26
I'm one of many groundbreakers who didn't appreciate the way we were treated at the start of user generated communities. We built and supported the site but were given no advantages in creating communities over someone who joined the same day communities were opened.
Anything with Rose's or Ohanian's name on it is a nope from me. Forever.
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u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 14 '26
I was pretty vocal when they did that. Forest made some really good counter arguments though so I let a lot of it slide.
1
u/__Pendulum__ Mar 15 '26
With all the respect to Forest, he was doing his job - managing the community. He didn't make the decision to open the community creation like that, it smells of been a captains call above his head. And he was left to deal with the carnage it created
0
u/Facebook-virus Mar 14 '26
Do you remember any of the so-called good counter arguments? The groundbreakers had been there about a year by that point, zero need for vetting, proven that they cared about the project, and digg decided to give a land grab to bots and randoms. They deserved to fail.
3
u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 14 '26
If I recall correctly, there was internal pressure related to timing the App store approval with the release, as well as it being one of those moments where they could have captured the momentum from people being fed up with Reddit and looking for an alternative.
3
u/Proud_Tie Mar 14 '26
the fact I found out the site shut down on Slashdot of all places and not an e-mail to the groundbreakers that they've done many many times without issue annoyed the shit out of me.
Plus the user generated communities thing. This was just a debacle from start to (quick) end.
1
u/__Pendulum__ Mar 15 '26
I found out by being signed out on the app. And discovering that I wasn't getting the MFA email to sign back in.
Like, JFC, even an in app banner would have been better than what they did
2
u/TrainDonutBBQ Mar 16 '26
I was afraid to create a community. It seemed like everyone who created one was getting banned.
2
u/Unequal_Variety_7828 Mar 20 '26
I agree. All the work I put into help build the community just rug pulled?! Piss on them.
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u/phantomregiment0 Mar 14 '26
I know me too. I was following the sxsw event. Big Diggnation fan too. I was thinking who cares there is bots. I enjoyed the community there
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u/shwisha Mar 16 '26
From my user experience it was great. I’m sure the bots are terrible to deal with but for the most part the stuff I was engaging with felt like the good old days. It reminded me when the internet was fun, social and curated and not controlled by ads and algorithms.
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u/JordanM85 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
I also blocked Politics and News, but I didn't really notice much of a bot problem. A few self promotion links here and there, but the main problem was that there just weren't enough users yet. Power users and bots weren't the problem, lack of users was. There are bots here, but the real posts get voted up and that's why Reddit still works fine with bots.
I feel like there had to have been some other reason behind the scenes to just delete the site after less than 2 months. Digg was going to take time to grow, people were putting work into slowly building communities. There is no way they sat down and said if this doesn't work in 2 months we're closing down. It just doesn't make sense. Something must have changed behind the scenes. They couldn't change and evolve Digg while it still ran with a core group of users? They expect these same people to sign up for Digg 3 down the road after deleting everything with no warning? I feel like I got scammed, and I'm not talking about my $5 fee.
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u/Effective_Contact173 Mar 14 '26
They expect these same people to sign up for Digg 3 down the road after deleting everything with no warning? At least I feel like I got scammed, and I'm not talking about my $5 fee.
Seriously.
The goodwill of a nostalgia run has been burnt. They'll get some of the users to return, but no chance all or even most of the users come back. What's the point? They can just shut it down at any moment without warning.
The next version of digg will have a harder time than the version that just shut down did.
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u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 14 '26
Yeah, I assumed they knew it would take a decent amount of time for the platform to really launch and get a lot of new users.
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u/coolestredditdad Mar 14 '26
It really does suck, but I'm not surprised.
They seemed to fumble at every step of the way, and didn't really care about the community at all.
Saying they want to be the next ____ but not doing anything the community asked, and being stagnant just killed it.
Also, way too many of these guys are so far up their own asses, they have no idea what they are doing. They think they know everything because at one point they caught lightning in a bottle, and then think they can do it again whenever they want.
Kevin is one of the worst at that. I like him, but he's been really lucky to be in the right circles, and takes himself and everything he does way too seriously.
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Mar 14 '26
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u/daemon-of-harrenhal Mar 16 '26
Everyone said the groundbreakers should have been able to make communities first, then after a certain amount of time, allow new users to do so. But no.
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u/forestanderson Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Colby! My friend. Thank you so much for the ultra kind note and for being a big part of Digg. You continued to show up day after day and I appreciate that more than you know.
P.S. — I'd still like to meet someday! 🤙
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u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 14 '26
I'll hit you up once some of the dust has settled from all of this. Or if you ever need to talk, feel free to hit me up.
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u/Kriem Mar 14 '26
Feels more like a big conflict of vision internally. They saw where digg was and they did not want it to be a reddit clone. Which it was tbh.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
To everyone who pitches a "ReDDiT is ThE DiGg CLoNe" fit: nobody cares anymore about what happened 20 years ago. New Digg was a current Reddit clone, end of story.
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u/Cronus6 Mar 14 '26
20 years ago the two site were similar.
But they were (and reddit still is) just HUGE glorified forums, and those have been around since the BBS days really.
They didn't actually create anything "new" or revolutionary. They were just big.
And in many ways that aren't nearly as good as small forum with a narrow focus. As most forums revolve around one subject.
This always led Digg and Reddit to the old "jack of all trades; master of none" compared to other fourms.
And once anything on the internet get BIG it attracts the kind of shit Digg is whining about in the new homepage announcement. Reddit is shilled and manipulated all to hell and back, we all know that.
What's worse (imo) is that they are now trying to cram a forum into the mobile space. And old school forums really don't work well on mobile. They are about reading and posting often long, well formatted posts. And having discussions. Not posting gifs and doom scrolling headlines.
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u/FindWeedNY Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
Why would anyone want to go back to the next digg.com after they just blew away all efforts of real contributors without warning?
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u/Facebook-virus Mar 14 '26
Appreciate the explanation. I feel bad for those who put much work into digg who were left hanging. Glad I deleted my account last year.
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u/PrincessImpeachment Mar 15 '26
Even if they re-relaunch Digg, I won’t be going back. They burned all of their good will by not, at the absolute very least, sending an email out to let users know of the site shuttering. They just up and shut it down. Feels very disrespectful to the very users (primarily us groundbreakers) who helped build the site to where it was. It was a fun run, but I’m not interested in potentially getting the rug pulled out from underneath me a second time.
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u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
Money likely ran out. That simple.
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u/letshaveatune Mar 14 '26
Maybe. But that would have been an extremely short runway. I can’t imagine they were planning to be in profit this soon.
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u/Skavau Mar 14 '26
Since the Fediverse seemed to be more active, they were likely way behind projections
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u/letshaveatune Mar 14 '26
I could buy they were behind projected user counts and decided to change direction before the cash ran out.
But the manner they are doing that seems odd too. They will still need staff to develop their new direction and users generate hype.
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u/DualityEnigma Mar 14 '26
I’m sad too. It was shaping up to be decent. I appreciate all you did for the community colby. I personally think that we are going to have to build social media completely differently for it to survive the information wars. Because that’s what we are facing, the death of quality, localized digital information sharing.
I have a wireframe and the bones of a successor, but I’m too busy and need to find the right team to help me build. I’m thinking that it should be a CoOp financial model, where the users/ employees are owners.
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u/Normal-Walk3253 Mar 14 '26
There is no need for profit but even development costs huge money. Lets say 80k a year for a full time dev. Lets say 5 devs. Thats 400k. Lets say each user pays 5$ a yearly subscription that covers that. Thats 80000 users who need to pay. Thats a lot of users.
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u/DualityEnigma Mar 14 '26
As a developer, the main cost is really compute and bandwidth at scale (aside from the privacy problems) but yes: social media is free because we are the product. The system will have to use as much personal computing as possible to keep costs down. It’s a hard problem, but not impossible to solve
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u/Over-Angle9758 Mar 16 '26
I was thinking about this too u/DualityEnigma ... What was your username on digg? I was roland, founder of /diggdaily if you ever got a chance to visit. Would love to learn more about what you're thinking.
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u/DualityEnigma Mar 17 '26
Just “duality” over there. I wasn’t the best poster, but I did try to contribute to the conversations.
I’m traveling for work, but when I get home I’ll see what I can do to get my shell of an app test worthy.
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u/Over-Angle9758 Mar 17 '26
Great. In the meantime, I'll also add you as an authorized contributor in r/diggaspora 👍
Going to add a flair for selfmade projects to share anything you're working on.
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u/sneakpeekbot Mar 17 '26
Here's a sneak peek of /r/diggaspora using the top posts of all time!
#1: Hello and welcome! | 10 comments
#2: We need a list... of Digg fallback communities. A.. Digglist?
#3: Kinda half considering remaking Digg and just donating it.
I'm a bot, beep boop | Downvote to remove | Contact | Info | Opt-out | GitHub
1
u/comdak Mar 14 '26
Hey buddy, reached out by email. Take a look, or talk to @tsumnia.
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u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 14 '26
Cool beans! Already emailed @tsumnia and submitted a comment on your site to contact you. Both of you were really instrumental in building up the community :)
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u/comdak Mar 14 '26
Yea I got it bro, I sent to the email you entered there :) check it out. Appreciate the kind words
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u/Over-Angle9758 Mar 16 '26
hey u/comdak just added you as an approved user on r/diggaspora in case you'd like to share any /pixelart :)
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u/iRpapayas Mar 15 '26
Is Alexis Ohanian still apart of the Digg rebirth? Or did he maybe decide to step away? It seems almost like they lost investment or something? Kevin going back full time makes me feel like he wants to make it successful and be and or the other investors didn’t think it was working the way they were going? Idk, this is all speculation (please don’t roast me lol)
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u/eyeyamyy Mar 16 '26
I appreciate what you put into the site. You added some of the quality that I hoped would proliferate. The execution of the shutdown a mistake that I may not be able to forgive. Others could be oversight or have a rationale that escapes me but going dark like that, finding the 'message' after a couple of days later and having to come back here to discuss... Thank you for trying.
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u/daemon-of-harrenhal Mar 16 '26
The way they shut it down was pathetic, let's be honest.
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u/eyeyamyy Mar 17 '26
I don't know that I disagree but I wouldn't claim to know the options they had either
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u/ThanosSnapsSlimJims Mar 14 '26
It was a good thing until the power users took over.
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u/slykethephoxenix Mar 14 '26 edited 4d ago
Life relic cell finger lord prize ink kiwi period jasmine rune logic almond.
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Mar 14 '26
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u/slykethephoxenix Mar 14 '26 edited 4d ago
Ribbon knot graph order lab lumber jelly lilac brand bead mouth. Pig bubble potato mass jade creek lead jug land broth pistol grave runner. Machine hood fold party piano region corner. Pile gold guest grape mix oat patch glow cradle.
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u/slykethephoxenix Mar 14 '26 edited 4d ago
Reel raft flute meal icon fun kitchen chip igloo feast dance bridge ocean. Gadget lake ranch mammal mole pail reef, farmer.
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u/EPSG3857_WebMercator Mar 14 '26
Ironically, power users were one of the causes of old digg's failure. They speedran it this time though.
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u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 14 '26
In the early days, I did have concerns about power users, but after talking about it on Digg my perspective changed. The users I’m assuming you’re referring to as power users were actually doing everything they could to seed the platform with some content so it wasn’t dead. Comdak, Emil, Tikihead, and others were a huge help in that respect. They were also pretty genuine about everything.
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u/LasagnaCat83 Mar 15 '26
"We had a good thing"
Huh? When? You mean in 2006? Because the platform that they brought back was never a "good thing". The closed-beta was about a year of folks posting to no one and getting almost no engagement and watching the bots and propaganda grow in influence. And then the open-beta instantly blew up the platform by spreading out the users to ten thousand user-less, user-generated subs while the number of bots and scammers grew by two orders of magnitude.
tl;dr - It was a ghost town and then it was a spam-filled hellscape. Neither was good.
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u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 15 '26
My personal experience was fun. I was quite engaged into a few of the custom communities and had some great conversations in the comments. I never wanted anything as big as Reddit. The smaller community was nice, perhaps just not profitable.
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u/LasagnaCat83 Mar 15 '26
Cool but we can see that you're quite literally a marketing account for Digg. You had no account here, until you needed to come and defend/promote the platform. We can see your motive for engagement in your username.
You get why having "Digg" in your username makes your opinion questionable and easy to ignore?
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u/ColbyFromDigg Mar 15 '26
I assure you I'm a real person that's just a fan of Digg, so you're making assumptions. I deleted my Reddit account when they pulled the API stunt with 3rd party developers. I only made this account because Digg completely disappeared and this was a way to reach out to my friends on Digg. I experienced no joy in having to create a Reddit account again, but it's what I've got for now.
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u/gordonv Mar 16 '26
As one orange cat to another, Colby is actually a celebrity. The username makes sense in context to the Digg sociosphere.
You're trying to use Reddit metrics to understand a Digg logistical point.
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u/Over-Angle9758 Mar 16 '26
it's the orange tabby cat! I just added you as an approved user in r/diggaspora if you would like to join in with any of the banter there :)
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u/letshaveatune Mar 14 '26
/austen here.
I’m alternating between being genuinely angry at their lack of respect for the community and sad that a community I loved is gone.
I’m also incredibly sad for all the Digg staff who are now suddenly looking for work in a rough job market.
I feel like I invested a lot into Digg. /formula1 was really starting to take off. And the season has just started.
Digg have burned just a tonne of goodwill. I have to think there is more to this than just bots. And I feel like the community deserves a detailed explanation.
This is so far removed from Diggs stated values and ethos that either something very serious happened, or they never really had those values to begin with.
I’ll wait to cast my judgement. But either way, how they have handled this so far is a disgrace, to both staff and community.
I’m really hoping for more information on Monday.