Digg is coming back, with founder Kevin Rose and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian | Hacker News Reader

Digg is coming back, with founder Kevin Rose and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian

theverge.com

24 pointsgoplayoutside10 comments

The article misses that this stems from a Diggnation reunion.

It was originally a onetime show but they had such a good time they picked it back up. Then they started talking about how they should try to get Digg back.

Wow, I absolutely hate this. We do not need "a new, better social platform" with founders from Reddit and Powered by AI!!!!™

Maybe we should consider, you know, new social media platforms that are build and designed by communities of people that need them and will use them. This top down approach by tech oligarchs with insatiable dollar signs in their eyes over providing anything of actual value will just lead to more misery and worthlessness.

The social media business model of harvesting data and forcing engagement over user experience has proven to be broken and not sustainable. I hope they fail.

> The social media business model of harvesting data and forcing engagement over user experience has proven to be broken and not sustainable.

I totally agree. And modern research shows how unhealthy it is for people to use such exploratory social media pages.

You literally paying with your health, not only data, when using such things.

Everyone mentioned in the article knows how to run a large social media site. The concrete ideas they have for AI are specific tasks that they have done by hand before. They're not just slapping AI on and optimizing for engagement.

And the future ideas are more like crazy art projects, which I think is a great use for AI.

> They're not just slapping AI on and optimizing for engagement.

Citation needed

> And its new founding team thinks AI could be the secret to pulling it off.

Here's the sentence I went in looking for, really all I wanted to know. I feel so weary.

Echoes of 2021 when we were just doing "[insert saturated category here] but it's decentralized/web3" aka has NFTs/tokens shoehorned into it

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265521

I used to genuinely admire Alexis Ohanian, but when I followed him on Twitter there was a period of time where he would just keep spamming NFT grifter trash and it really soured my view of him. You have effectively unlimited money and contacts to try and pursue any project that could help make the world a better place, and instead you focus your time and energy on being a grifter. And now that the NFT scene has died down, they pivot to AI because it's the next big thing.

We've already seen how big locked-down social media companies can be co-opted by bad faith actors, and instead of trying to solve that they just want to rebuild Digg with a sprinkling of AI? Immensely disappointing. I wonder if these people have anyone in their real life circle that calls them out or ever challenges them on their ideas, or if the people who are critical all end up replaced by ass-kissers and blowhards.

digg pls go

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