Digg is about to be rebooted. Thoughts?
Digg Reboot
Not much info yet, but I grew up on Digg, so I’m cautiously optimistic. Probably no Fediverse support, but honestly, any Reddit alternative is a win. Really hoping for real API access and third-party apps.
I'm rooting for them simply because I want to see Reddit and them fight. I'm not going to be switching, because I'm basically done with centralized ultracapitalist bullshit for personal use.
100% this. Why would I go back to another centralized corpo line must go up service that will inevitably enshittify when we got lemmy right here?
I could like Digg if it was federated. But I bet it won't.
Preach!
Its being recorded by Reddit cofounder Alexis ohanian. I don’t think they’ll fight lol
He has nothing to lose by competing. He owns a stake in Reddit, and he's rebooting a competitor. He wins either way, and striking out on his own has a better chance of making him more money than relying on his stake.
If he fails and Reddit "wins," he still has his stake to fall back upon.
Yeah the chasing profit is what ultimately dooms public forums.
And pretty much everything else as well.
US americans trying to cash in on discontent with buzzwords like AI and trying to steal the thunder of actual worthy alternatives like lemmy. The fact Ohanian is part of the founders immediately places it into the shit tier bucket for me.
Why would you expect an aggregator-and-comment site bought and rebranded by reddit-cofounder O'Hanian to end up significantly different than his other aggregator-and-comment site?
They're probably skint and need a loan.
Problem is, they created it? Oops
AI for moderation worry me
Yeah, isn't that what everyone wants?
A website where you talk to people and a robot with no oversight shows up and changes what you say, or silences you, or prevents you from talking to certain people.
At the same time though, I don't care if billionaires play rock and sock em robots with companies. It just kind of sucks for the people that work at those companies, being tools of a game for rich people to play.
I knew I recognized this number...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
I was there that day. In the before time
They say they'll use AI, so fuck them.
Yeah, the mention of AI is pretty ominous. It makes me wonder if AI would be used to fill in the gaps when the user base is too low.
It absolutely will be. It's what's happening to twitter right now. Loads and loads of bots/ai posting "content."
The original Digg was an important site for me personally between 2005-2009, but only in that early era and mostly as a bridge between my Fark and Reddit eras. I honestly can't see it competing with Reddit's established user base or being as no-nonsense and free as Lemmy. I don't think it will gain traction and the AI aspect will turn a lot of people off from it.
Oh neat! I used to use Fark, too. I just checked and it's still around, just looks a bit dead compared to how I remember it from back in the day.
I started using it in the late 90's or early 2000's, but I stopped sometime in that date range you mentioned. For me, it was the fact that I got multiple back to temporary suspensions (with no warnings). It was like I couldn't do anything right and to some extent, it felt targeted and personal.
I don't even remember them all, but two of the suspensions stick out to me. I got banned for posting the picture of the officially unofficial fark squirrel (i.e. Big Balls). Up until that time, it was basically a Fark meme posted openly and frequently by large numbers of users. I guess advertisers didn't like it and I didn't get the memo. Another suspension came when I responded to a homophobic bigot who was arguing against legalizing gay marriage in the USA by telling him "if you believe that, you are an idiot". Apparently that's name calling, but using cocksucker as a pejorative against another man was still considered A-Okay.
Didn't use dig but not going back to centralized link aggerators after what I saw happen with reddit over the years. CEOs can't be trusted.
Digg lost its popularity for the same reason Reddit is. It started taking investment money and began to please only the share holders. Yeah it's private owned again, but they will just repeat the cycle because the temptation is there.
I've only been using Lemmy for a few months, but it seems to me that taking any instance public will not be a feasible business model. i don't recommend anyone go back to digg unless you just like watching enshitification happen. Should they reboot Ebaulmsworld while they're at it? I know that last statement struck a nerve!
Yeah sure, this time the giant company won't enshittify.
I am not optimistic. Kevin Rose spent the last few years doing crypto/NFT nonsense, and is now on the AI train. Plus, link aggregators have tried to double down on AI with mixed results. See the example of Artifact, which crashed and burned just last year. There is no business model for this, and if there were, I wouldn't trust Kevin Rose to deliver it. I say this as someone who was a massive Digg/Revision3/Diggnation fan as a teenager but grew disillusioned.
Meh, I've moved on. I was addicted to digg back in the day, but they'll have to earn viewership back from me. Not impossible, but content, moderation, and monitization are going to be hard to perfect these days.
Digg killed digg IMO. They either learned a lesson, or it's more of the same.
You shouldn't expect a lot from a zombie.
In 2025, that's like saying "Hey, we should go back to Myspace!" Myspace did a complete makeover, too. Does anybody care? No.
With any luck, they'll take some of the users bailing out of Reddit on the nostalgia factor, become mediocre, and die. Again.
Gods no. Why bounce between corpo sellouts?
I'm not going to go back to a closed-source centralized platform
But maybe this time the hot stove won’t burn me if I touched it?
Really hoping for real API access and third-party apps.
I mean that's the only way it will have any success. I don't expect it to happen, but that's historically how any of these sites have grown and flourished.
It would be funny if Digg was able to successfully reboot and take users away from Reddit, however I don't expect it to actually happen.
Also, stating the obvious, time would be better spent improving Lemmy.
they should call it dugg.com
80% chance is going to be a crypto scam. 20% chance it's going to be a right wing cespool
Rose not listening to users is what killed he platform before, I seriously doubt he has gotten over that ego.
It would be hilarious to see Digg restart as a Lemmy instance.
Just start a Lemmy instance and call it Digg ;-))
Dunno. It wasn't really hilarious seeing trumpth social built on Mastodon.
Not really the same thing though, since Trump's thingy wasn't one of the things that popularised that type of site.
Sounds great in theory but proprietary/corpo owned websites don't matter one bit to me anymore.
It sucked so bad it died once and it's still a corpo owned platform. IDK why they want to suck twice 🤷🏻♂️
$$$
I'm fine right here, thanks. Although I'd been using Reddit for some time at that point, I permanently left Digg as part of the Great Exodus. I don't see any particular appeal to going back to a centralized service, especially in the current climate.
Digg was absolutely amazing when it was new, but it didn't take long to turn to shit for some reason, and reddit was way better during the old reddit/Digg war.
Fun thing is that reddit now does many of the same things Digg did before Digg turned completely away from its original concept.
I must admit my hopes for Digg becoming relevant for me again is near zero, like VERY near zero.
Dig long ago dug its grave. Then Reddit jumped in too. Long live Lemmy.
Some of us already left Lemmy or never joined, for the likes of Mbin or PieFed (or eventually Sublinks?).
Long live the Fediverse.
I used to be on digg. Fuck digg, let's ddos these cunts. Then cook some reddit datacenters.
I was looking forward to it, but then I got here, and find that it suits me.
I don't digg it.
If they federate then its good otherwise its just gonna be the same thing as reddit all over again
If they put a lot of focused on having a good UX and some marketing I could see it outgrow Lemmy the same way Bluesky outgrew Mastodon
This is why I support it.
I don't want Reddit on Lemmy. Way too many fascists on the hellsite.
I love Lemmy but this is exactly my take.
I still remember the mass migration to reddit. Digg had an old website that didn't scale to their userbase. They deployed a new site, and everyone hated the design. They couldn't continue on the old website because it would crash and burn.
The important part is that Kevin, Alex and all of Digg were quite open and honest about the situation. At no point were they being jerks. They just couldn't keep manage the technical hurdles.
My god, what's next, the most triumphant return of Geocities, replete with blinking text, construction signs and visitor counter?
That's... a lot better than I thought.
Bought and revived by Alexis Ohanian? It can only turn out into a dumpster fire. It's probably just to diversify their data collection in case there's an actual massive Reddit exodus and the brand name becomes too toxic.
Lemmy exists now. We don't need another corporation.
If their best angle is to recycle a 20 year old brand ...well I can't imagine that will go very far
I don’t trust it.
I haven’t thought about digg in 20 years. And I don’t intend to start now.
They can fuck off, I remember why I quit that site in the first place
I can't, but I think it was due to a shitty site redesign?
Why would I care about a site that killed itself some 15 years ago being rebooted, especially taking into account that were on Lemmy, a federated system? I don't care
Reddit's seeing membership outflows resulting from their more draconian policies. Reddit boss restarts a competitor platform so that he can try and recapture users by owning his own competition, while trying to pretend like there's no conflict.
idk. Seems pretty suspect to me. Lemmy seems 'ok' for news aggregation, and it has a more community / local vibe to it. For example, I can have more confidence that the feeds I see on Lemmy.ca are more controlled / accountable to Canadians, rather than the heavily Americanized subs that exist in Reddit. And I can pick and choose which other subs to see, with better understanding of the likely biases that I'll encounter. This sort of end user transparency is really refreshing, especially given the burbling propaganda war being waged by the Americans at present against Canada.
Nah, it's gonna be ass, they haven't even launched and they are talking about AI. Totally tone deaf.
I don’t have high hopes. Kevin and Alexis had an opportunity to succeed with Digg and Reddit already. The enshittification of Digg was complete, there’s no going back. And Reddit, well, it’s Reddit.
We need something new and innovative, and I don’t see resurrecting a dead horse as adding any value to the current ecosystem of social and news apps.
Not interested. Ohanian wants to moderate it with AI which is an absolute nope from me. I also have mbin and that's fine for me. I guess the edge case that might make me visit it would be the handful of reddit communities I still use for Japan tax/legal/biz/etc. that won't move to the fediverse decided to move there. I guess that's preferable to occasionally using reddit.
I care enough to say i don't give a shit about it.
Too late now...
Fedi4life
This digg is set up is to catch the normies exiting reddit so they don't end up here IMHO
Just another corpo set up
Any alternative is not a win. Fediverse only moving forward.
I'm maxed out on social media. Lemmy is my main one. Then, there's Facebook so my old relatives can see baby pics. I'd rather not, but they're old and set in their ways. I have Discord strictly as a chat platform with my brother and a couple college buddies for gaming. I have LinkedIn for work, and never look at it. And finally, I watch YouTube (Revanced). That's it. There's no room for Digg anymore.
Leave Facebook. Nobody will notice. If anyone does notice, text them the pics.
I wouldnt consider them all social media. Discord is ass, its such an odd platform it never eoccured to me that people use it for in real life friends. Youtube is basically low budget netflix for me, no need to socialise on it - probably best to avoid it tbh.
I started getting incredible sales job offers that im not qualified for in my email recently. It turns out at some point 7 years ago I updated it to say I sold cars and never changed it. Thus these companies think I have years slinging cars when IRL it was a year. Im not salesperson with a massive capacity to take abuse so those gigs arent for me.
No real info, so I am not hopeful and cynical.
My guess the new superpower is AI stuff or a shop to give them money for the memes.
I'm glad Kevin Rose is back on board. However AI Moderation concerns me. Greatly.
Its gonna be linked to reddit and theyll pretend its federated to take steam away from federated stuff like bluesky did to mastodon
There seems to be this possessive myth that Mastodon would have been more popular if only it hadn't been for Bluesky. Nah. It would have been exactly as popular as it currently is. The techies like us would have found it, just like we did, but everyone else would haven't have used it. Everyone would just still be on Twitter.
I get everyone's beef with Bluesky, but let's not pretend that Mastodon isn't responsible for its own problems.
What I find ironic is that misskey, akkoma and gotosocial all offer more features (reactions, server-defined post length limit, markdown support, more media per post) and a general better user experience than mastodon, but the elephant gets all the attention
Never tried it but I’m worried that they (too) will use AI for moderating and all that. AI as moderator for deleting, flagging and stuff is a bad idea.
Just look at Pinterest’s mess with AI that removes pins and ban accounts for no reason.
I’ll probably wait when Digg is rebooted and see how the early-adopters write about their experiences.
It would be neat if they could get activityhub Integration. Then we can have Tumblr/digg pop up.
Instances admins would start to advocate to defederate from them just like with Meta's Threads IMO.
Good
And I'd move to one of those instances. Don't need or want any corporations involved in my Lemmy.