The Return of Digg, a Star of an Earlier Internet Era
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I find it fascinating that tech has gotten to a point where user hostile moves don't have as much of an impact anymore. Reddit pushing new Reddit layout and killing 3rd party apps is what did it for me. But it seems like nobody really cares.
I don't know what it means, but it means something.
Quoting Cory Doctorow: "I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
there are smaller spaces that are thriving just like the old days.
My city's subreddit when from "here's what's cool, going on, or new" to constant political posts. I'm Canadian and it's all but been determined that political forces are using AI posting to complain and point all problems at the current government (it's not clear who is doing it, whether far-right, foreign, or the opposition itself) on all Canadian focused subreddits.
There's also some curious stories about how a lot of the very good moderators of some of the larger ones like r/Canada, their provincial/city/regional counterparts, etc were all pushed out via various means.
Saccharined killed. You used to be able to make some really vitriolic comments on most subs just for the lulz and only get downvoted to hell and back. But nowadays if you're not following the doxa you get perma-banned from some sub first then next day perma-banned from reddit itself. And if you comment on one of the main subs you go directly to reddit permaban.
Sure, most of them are still downvoted to shit, and it's not clear how many are trolls vs true believers, but I do think it encourages the true believers that their views are more widespread.
The API change went into effect soon after and that was it for me. It was time to go anyway. Had been on the site for 12 years, never a ban or anything, but in the last year received 5-6 other sub level bans.
Should Israel carpet bomb Palestine and everyone in it? No.
Should the world still tolerate states built on a foundation of homophobia, misogyny, and brain washing? Also no.
If it was up to me I'd disperse the entire population of Israel/Palestine, and then sink the whole land mass into the Mediterranean. Religious zealots fucking everything up for everyone because they genuinely think that their Santa Clause is real.
Reddit normal is 2008-2013. This kind of normal still exists on usenet, if you seek it.
And then of course that period basically ended with gamergate, for whom reddit was one of the central venues to choose targets and organize harassment campaigns from. Also not against the rules at the time, since the harassment happened elsewhere and was only coordinated on reddit.
Reddit has always sucked.
¹ Both explicitly intended for sharing sexual & sexualized photos of minors
Remember, once considered a conspiracy theory, Ghlisane Maxwell was a powermod.
I know about wikia/fandom, discords (both as user hostile as reddit), or some ancient topical forums (neither small not thriving).
I don’t recall any user hostile practices, though I was just a passive user back in the day. I remember a few redesigns that people weren’t entirely pleased with, but nothing on the scale of the “new” Digg.
IMO, people who liked the user generated aspect of slashdot also liked the higher velocity of digg, reddit, and even HN better as those came along. People who liked the editorial curation angle that distinguished slashdot from these newer takes came to prefer more curation and professional editorial commentary, leaving slashdot in an odd in-between space.
I was a heavy USENET user for several years before finding Slashdot. With /. I found myself rarely going to the source link and almost never reading the editorial commentary. I'd go straight to the comments and start reading what people had to say. All these decades later and what I love about sites like HN and Reddit is immediately wading in and embracing the zeitgeist. I *loved* Twitter for a long time for the same reason.
But you're right. There are others I knew who were the exact opposite. And those people today have very different internet habits than I do.
And often any comment I made was in relation to the ongoing discussion and not necessarily the article itself.
I still do that here and elsewhere too.
In my golden era of message boards the worst you had to deal with were trolls or bad actors but today you simply don’t know who is an LLM bot
What’s the point in reading or replying to machines. It’s like a sand trap just wasting your time in the worst possible way
The original authors executed an exit strategy. They sold the site, got a bunch of money, and left to work on new things.
The various new owners (of which there have been a few) have never been ambitious about expanding Slashdot, either in technical or social scope.
Digg had a similar issue, but was more "active" for awhile. Reddit really "solved" the problem by having subreddits so you could curate what you were interested in.
Also, the people who were using /. grew up, and there wasn't really replacement people.
This is a big thing. The internet users of the late 90s just don't exist any more. The internet isn't for nerds any more, it's as ubiquitous an infrastructure as electricity or roads, everyone uses it.
The generation before slashdot from the 80s upto Eternal September were another group
You can't recreate slashdot today, because the people don't exist.
We still exist, we're just a very small slice of a much larger pie. Also, we are likely a less profitable target for advertisers so aren't an important demographic for ad-driven companies.
The other thing you mention is huge, too, of course. All the "famous" things from the 90s were basically labours of love by individual hackers who then looked for ways to fund it. Now everything is all about ad-revenue dollars.
Historically, advertisers have really loved late teens and early 20-somethings. They're starting to earn money, but don't have a lot of obligations or expenses yet, so they have a lot of discretionary income.
I also disagree that being into computers is a "common subject" these days. Everyone uses computers (some of which have keyboards), but most people aren't "into" them any more than the average commuter is into cars.
Everyone uses computers, so computer nerds are like car nerds or sport nerds.
In the 90s very few people used computers, and even fewer used networked computers outside of an office environment. Computers were new and unique.
You still get car nerds and computer nerds, but it's not the same thing when they're nerdy about a common thing.
That! Hit me hard. May be perhaps why the internet felt so different. Sigh.
It's still around, but there's one simple DAU measure we can look at: it used to be that stories would get 100-500 comments, and now they usually get 5-30.
But I don't think it's a good example of what the parent is complaining about. Slashdot didn't change to be more hostile, it was fairly hostile from the get go. It had a snarky commenting culture, fairly brutal moderation, etc. You'd be downvoted into oblivion for the most minor transgressions - like not hating Microsoft enough.
It just happened to be the only game in town for geek news. But then, a number of alternatives popped up - tech-related subreddits, HN, etc. I stopped using Slashdot not because of any redesign or policy change, but simply because I could get the same news elsewhere, with a lower entry bar to participate.
That vicious circle destroyed the community. IMHO.
Over time, the civility and intelligence in the comments dropped. It didn't feel like a community anymore - or at least a community the original readers wanted to be a part of, anyway. So more and more of the original readers left until the comment sections looked like 4chan.
Slashdot had its scandals and drama, but I really believe it was the readership change that killed it.
Right now, it looks like lemmy might have just enough momentum, but I'm not sure yet.
It’s a chat system. It’s a very nice IRC but how are you supposed to get up to speed? I’m also feeling super out of touch with folk who use telegram as social media.
No way I’m staying connected all the time to be a regular. Too many chats and the quality of the content is not very high to be engaging
Reddit doesn't know it yet but they're already very deep in the twilight phase of their site and it's going to start accelerating.
The open searchable internet is dead for people trying to find community, imo.
There are some good tech communities there.
It’s because the small dozens of us that care about the freedom that the small internet afforded vs algorithmic content discovery is now the minority and no big platform cares about us.
In the early days of the internet, they had to care. They had to convince people to leave their beloved forums and IRCs and move to Facebook or Reddit.
Internet users were fairly niche and fickle. Now everyone uses the internet and most people don’t care about their own freedoms wrt how they interact with technology.
This. I see people whine all the time about being subjugated to The Algorithm on these sites. On many sites there are easy workarounds to avoid The Algorithm altogether. But when this is pointed out they come up with some reason why they hate interacting with things that way.
In other words most people very much do want An Algorithm. They just might not want The Algorithm.
(*) YouTube creators, though, have to have a firm knowledge of it because at this point for many of them less than 10% of their views come through subscriptions.
Unless I'm using search functionality, if I don't have a mechanism to view only accounts I already predesignated *and* the ability to sort chronologically: I almost never use that site. As much as people whine about algorithmic content, people don't seem to agree with my methodologies either.
Newer channels need to have their channel page crawled once to get the actual URL for the RSS feed but older channels do not.
Honestly, you can leave it right there. No need to add " wrt how they interact with technology".
I'd add that most people aren't even aware of their own freedoms or the value of those freedoms. Civics education is probably at its lowest point (globally). A lot of people are only aware of the heavily "interpreted" version of those specific rights that they are constantly beaten over the head about by vested interests via old and new media.
In practice it’s, apparently, hard to notice when they’re under attack.
Most people aren’t on the lookout for every reduction in freedom and, at least in the US, we have surprisingly few institutional and/or powerful guards against the erosion of freedoms.
I also assume they are smart enough to realize that some people will simply never use the app. In which case they're not realizing as much benefit from forcing the new UI on them. Sure, there's a cost to maintain the old one. But as long as things aren't breaking it's easier to keep it.
The new mobile website is at least an order of magnitude heavier than the old one
There are some old screenshots of it, I've got one of them in my blog here: https://pdx.su/blog/2023-04-06-rip-reddit-compact/
As long as these 2 things work I'll likely still continue using it.
So I care to the point that if I can get them to work then I will stick around, but when I can't then I'll leave.
The end of RedditIsFun (https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/) was the end of my Reddit era - I'm still on r/askHistorians, r/askScience and a couple of niche leftovers, but I stopped moderating - the interests of the platform and its users have obviously diverged.
I'm sure there are tools I'm not even aware of as a mod, because I'm not interested in digging into two additional interfaces, when most of what I need to do is "remove post", and "ban user from subreddit".
So maybe that makes a difference. I think it forces the old interface. Like my URL isn't even old.reddit, but all I see is the old interface. Or maybe I don't use subs with newer posts types that are not compatible with old?
Reddit is referred to by most of it's users as an app.
That should tell you everything you need to know.
My memory of the event was that they just launched a redesign that was half baked and everyone bailed overnight.
I've always thought that was why old.reddit.com still exists, paranoia about the same thing happening
- they removed downvoting ("burying")
- they took down the various "Upcoming" pages that allowed users to vet and weigh in on rising stories before they hit the front page
- they replaced the unified home page with algorithmic recommendations (and the algo was garbo)
- they introduced automated publisher accounts that circulated posts from official sources, crowding out organic submissions
- they deleted users' previously saved posts
- they largely deleted all posts, comments, vote counts older than a few months
- they broke the RSS feeds and third-party tools
All the above pissed off power users, and the rest were repelled by the nosedive in quality, the constant bugginess, and some terrible design choices (tiny light-blue-on-white text boxes, all usernames converted to lower case, impossible to view all comments, etc.)
> Protesting at the removal of the upcoming news page, the default setting of "My News", deleted favourites, the apparent front page domination of a handful of publishers, and the removal of the "bury" button (for voting down stories), Digg users flooded the front page with links to rival aggregators and pleaded with chief executive Kevin Rose to turn back the clock.
The quality of the content itself dropped off a cliff because of systemic changes. By contrast, Reddit's redesign was a reskin. Lots of people hate it, but Reddit is fundamentally still the same.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...
Meanwhile, moderation has gone insane - I've had an account banned for saying 'Hamas must be destroyed' and another banned for merely explaining JK Rowlings position on transgender matters - not even offering my own. Reddit is very, very far left of the mainstream whose advertisers it is seeking to woo.
I’ve had accounts banned along the the entire ecosystem of libertarians solely for the audacity of asserting that there were people who described themselves as socialist libertarians, and not declaring that there were five lights and that the philosophy did not exist.
The admins don’t care unless it hurts advertising dollars. Reddits leadership has been very consistent on this practice ever since the early days like with u/violentacrez and the jailbait subreddit
It is absolutely just the left. The right-leaning spaces, even /r/conservative, do not ban for "wrongthink" unless it is accompanied with obvious contempt or hostility. Conversely, you'll be banned from a number of subreddits simply for posting in /r/conservative or other labeled-right-leaning subreddits.
I don't have any recent information on pre-emptive bans, but years ago /r/conservative had a particular mod (I won't name) who did just that.
Do the same on Twitter (or call someone cisgender) and see how long until you're banned.
(Spoiler alert - I have done both and have been banned as a result)
If you(the general you, not you in particular /nailer)disagree with me, then please explain how any casual observation of the subreddit r/conservative lets someone state that the subreddit does not engage in censorship or banning for wrong think, and with the critical caveat that I will not accept the moderators of r/conservatives statement’s that they don’t engage in censorship as proof on its own
And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they have a huge brigading problem, again it’s not limited to /r/conservative, but /r/conservative is a laughable example. /r/Republican and /r/Trump are better examples even.
Reddit has a large amount of video based subreddits. Videos, if you haven’t seen them before, are a mix of moving pictures and audio. When the audio doesn’t work, it does in fact make many videos unusable.
Reddit as a whole has been bought and paid for, and the majority of subs have also individually been bought and paid for. And if you don't stick to the moderate positions or a major media supported political zeitgeist you are going to run into bans.
No. Someone that targets civilians to create political change is a terrorist.
Speaking for myself it's because old.reddit is still available. I loathe the new reddit after all this time. If they nuke old reddit my usage would go down quite a bit.
Fuck Beta
Here we are on HN, which is not, itself, user hostile. And there's Metafilter, which is still hanging in there, a bastion of the old internet.
But I get the sense that many have retreated off the open internet, into private communities. I've been running one for 7 years or so. Safer there, and you can actually have conversations with people. In a way, this is the digital equivalent of how the real world works: the thing which isn't natural is trying to talk to people across a massive crowd, while other people shout advertisements at you, and still others record everything you say.
These bigger link aggregators like Reddit have become a way to see new links, grab them in a net, and run back to the private community to discuss them.
We may have reached the point where there is a critical mass of paid professional content creators rather than amateur creators who will be more likely to leave for new platforms. The professionals stick around on platforms because they have fans/viewers who are profitable.
And as a larger portion of the online audience became "non-IT-related" people, Slashdot mattered less and less.
Although, I've always liked Slashdot's moderation system. Users who have been well moderated in the past were randomly selected to moderate pages. And scores were capped so you didn't have snowball effects where if something started getting negative traction, it would get buried.
It was harder to game because populism didn't work and there were no moderators to complain to. I never had to worry if marking something a "Troll" would cause me to get bombed with messages. The user would never know who did it.
I think enough people cared. I end up back on reddit from time to time but it's nothing like it was before the big 3rd party app debacle.
It's not that users don't care, it's that the money dried up.
It used to be that when a site suffered enshittification, a new batch of VCs would show up to fund some clean and functional competitor. Then after the IPO or sale, the former "upstart" quickly becomes the incumbent and shitifies itself.
Nobody's investing in a de-shittified reddit or most social media companies.
The only exception seems to be bsky, right now a VC funded deshittified twitter with massive growth. But they got a huge boost from Jack Dorsey early on - I doubt they would've gotten off the ground without the tech and financial resources he brought in day one. This Digg play seems to sort of be in that same vein, despite the old brand.
People do care; just look at the non-trivial number of users on Mastodon, Discord, Bluesky, etc.
People did jump from reddit, they just don't realise that they're jumping from the frying pan into the fire...
> Digg founder Kevin Rose has teamed up with former rival Alexis Ohanian to buy the once-popular content aggregator as they bet on an artificial intelligence-powered revival of the platform that once drew around 40 million monthly visitors.
Sounds way worse.
Edit: And, "Current Digg" is apparently down now.
They won't go all-in on the idea and expect that we'll all be super excited by it. Just shows how out of touch VCs can get.
At the time, Reddit was extremely small and looked a lot like Hacker News does now, except that the content was about 1/3 nerd-related, 1/3 mainstream news, and 1/3 was people's experiences and questions about recreational drugs. (Which I was not and am not into.) I'm not sure if there were even subreddits at that point.
> The new Digg has little in common with the old site: it has big photos instead of tiny text, does not allow for comments, and most importantly, it depends on human editors in addition to an algorithm that weighs user voting. So far, people seem to like it. A new survey, this time with 2,600 users, showed that 81 percent would recommend the new Digg to a friend.
One thing I remember about this phase was how good the headlines were, they must have paid a decent sum for human editors.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/4/3950596/diggs-traffic-rebo...
Once they got themselves called out they stopped sharing that content and, consequently, the quality of the site went back down. Until yesterday they lived off Reddit polls, advice columns, and Twitter controversies.
Source: I check the website about once a week.
Anyone else remember?
The future of online content sharing and discussion is decentralized, open source, and based on free protocols. We absolutely don't need another Reddit riding off of past Digg vibes. We need a fast ejection out of corporate silos and proprietary platforms!
At the end of the video they mention del.icio.us, another blast from the past.
This whole approach seems tone deaf:
> A.I. will also play a larger part in making Digg more accessible to users, Mr. Rose said. For instance, he said, a community of science-fiction enthusiasts could have their discussions translated into Klingon, the language used by the “Star Trek” alien race of the same name. A.I. tools can also help reduce spam, misinformation and harassment, he said."
Like nearly everything these days, this sounds like they raised money based almost solely on the premise that "AI will fix everything." They don't seem to understand that humans doing things is what makes all of this interesting to humans. I remember a BBS door that translated english to klingon. It was cool then because someone built it, but the fun was always doing it ourselves.
And is there any precedent for AI moderation at scale? It's another example of a LLM wrapper with no moat.
Finally, the attention to moderators seems like a swing at Reddit. But are there people dumb enough to fall for that trick again (don't answer that lol)?
At some point we need to realize that these VC driven "ideas" are all just content honeypots for AI training and do our own thing.
It definitely feels like the internet peaked like 5-10 years ago. Reddit was good, Stackoverflow was tolerable, I didn't use Twitter but I guess that was better too.
The history is often overlooked: when digg fumbled/shot itself in the foot, Reddit was in the right-place-at-the-right-time and got lucky by the mass exodus looking for somewhere to go. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and rather than being visionaries in any way really they got lucky hosting everyone with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features. It is/was nothing special. It has been riding the wave ever since (and also why I see no reason to give people like Alexis Ohanian any praise or credibility when he's out there talking about all kinds of nonsense, but I digress). And as with any social site, it's the userbase/community that pulls it thru darkness to the where it is now.
Prior to the Diggv4 debacle, there was already a sense that reddit was "better" than digg in important areas. Digg had problems with power users, and reddit was able to pitch itself as being immune to them (lol). Comment sections on reddit in this period tended to have better content than digg, and subreddits were a meaningful way to curate your content, something digg lacked.
A common feeling of the era was that digg looked better, but reddit had better content. Less, but better
Now it's got a very large team, all the investor pandering and user hostile activity, and instead it's making a large loss, which of course for investors means it's more valuable.
Unrelated but they removed the <subreddit>.reddit.com shortcut some months ago.
I also tried some years ago to install Discourse but you need all kinds of server setup for that, too complicated to be an alternative to "old fashioned" PHP forum software. And that's before going into the UX, which is more webapp than old fashioned forums. I'm glad I didn't push through with that migration.
Thank the gods.
Gotta Digg. “Did you hear that awful sound. Oh! Another Server’s Down.”
New Digg does not want the old Digg audience that pirates MP3s, torrents TV shows and hates advertising.
Of course only paid subscribers can comment. Maybe that's the root of difference.
1) have a solution for spam (both blatant and subtle)
2) actively support their moderators
3) have well thought out and consistently enforced policies.
Reddit lost all of my goodwill years ago because of this.