In the end, Reddit became many times larger than Digg ever was. The biggest problem with displacing Reddit as such is that currently most of the users hate most of the users; consequently there is no reason that people leaving Reddit would want to converge on a single alternative.
In some ways, Reddit has already survived its own replacement. The workflow for getting involved with a video game community is to ask on Reddit which Discord you should join. In this case Discord plays the role of a parasitoid wasp.
It hangs on as a less reactionary NextDoor and a gathering place for semi-serious discussion of niche topics (/r/MedicalPhysics, for example). It also hosts some political stuff, but nobody wants to invite Reddit's political elements to their new community.
Is this why it failed? I recall they started doing pay-for-placement, gaming their own voting system at a time when they were neck-at-neck with Reddit, which wasn't. I do remember Digg's UX getting shittier and shittier though; every time I checked back on it to see if it was worth visiting again it was always mind-blowingly worse.
I think Reddit right now sits in some weird space between Discord/Nextdoor/Quora, with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
But overall it is just a gateway to other platforms where the really interesting conversations are happening and content is being created.
Source: I've been using the app since the alpha started.
I just can't figure out where people are turning next.
omg, here we go again
I am still confused what the new Digg is (on the web)
When I login, I don't see any news/articles/content.
I only see the ability for me to post (and the meme image below)
https://i.imgur.com/kBOAlZS.gif
Note: this doesn't seem to be a problem in the app ... but why do I need to run an app when this could easily just be available on the web.
I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow if they convince you to be thirsty too.
They are not impartial nor are the benevolent. They have a vested interest in influencing the content people are exposed to. They can hide behind the “social” components and say “we’re innocent here we just show the content people engage with” meanwhile they directly influence what content gets a chance to be interacted with.
and the walls of the echo chambers are built of addicting infinite feed algorithms, that's the core of it, outrage exchanging outrage amongst people who agree on one thing - THIS OUTRAGES ME
Agree completely
> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.
> pressure to moderate content
We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.
I think a lot of the ills of social media are ills of the medium itself... once it reaches "everyone scale," game theory maturity and whatnot.
Anyway the way past it is probably to go past it... and onto the next medium. Back is rarely an available option.
On that note... its curious that Digg now describes itself as a "community platform," not a social network. Ironic, considering they bought the name "digg."
Speaks to the "late stage social media" meme.
And, HN can only not-rely on advertising because it exists as a sort of funny pseudo-advertisement thing for some startup incubator.
I do think you are right about the rest as it applies to Twitter and Facebook.
There's been an awful lot written about all of this over the years, much of it overly simplistic and some of it just straight-up wrong; we all want to believe that we're just plain smarter than the ancients, even when those ancients were us.
If you're interested in (ahem) digging into this, start by searching for things like "Digg voting network".
Social networking was a thing. Social networking, link aggregation, discussion boards—it’s like pouring milk, hot sauce, and vodka into a vat to get Social Media.
I'm convinced he was paid to post stories to drive traffic to sites.
Of course I don't have evidence to support this. It was over 20 years ago.
Yep, some personalities on Digg had their groupies and if they posted something, all their followers would vote it up the listing, in effect the post was influenced.
That's when I bailed because genuinely interesting stuff not posted by the 'right' people had no chance of exposure.
It's also worth considering that you could just be part of the right demographic that finds it palatable. I know in certain circles the HN groupthink on women's issues for example are seen as a meme.
I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet; everytime I come back from a week or two of backpacking without internet connection I realize how overstimulated with inane bullshit we all are.
Aggressive curation of subreddits did help, but I fear the decent subreddits are slowly dying out. The modern iteration of site (It's more of an app these days) appears to attract the wrong type of users for the healthy conversations that I enjoy.
I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.
Agreed, the site feels like a ghost town these days whenever I lurk there.
This is true of all social media platforms. People who have all day to post/reply and figure out how to game the system will always dominate the discussion. This is also why online propaganda works so well, it is literally their day job. People who have a life will always be at a major disadvantage. In some ways Reddit is worse off because those people also become moderators. The only thing that saves it is the ability for users to flee a subreddit if the moderator becomes a tyrant and start a parallel subreddit with hopefully more sane moderation.
The default subreddits are mostly a writeoff at this point. Terminally online people latched on to them and are never letting go. Or they were useless from the start like AITA.
Went to reddit and was not unhappy there for many years, but, aside from some targeted subreddits (/r/beagle!) I rarely spend any time on reddit anymore. The new reddit changes just feel user-hostile and they are aggressively pushing users away from old.reddit.com, it feels like a matter of time before they announce that they are killing old reddit.
Perhaps we are getting old but I also find happiness is inversely proportional to my time spent on social media.
Some of that is a function of age I am sure. When you are young, sites like reddit and digg hold promises of some new and interesting unknown unknown. As you get older, the amount of unknown unknowns fall off a cliff and you are just left with the known knowns and known unknowns... occasionally you are once again interested in the known unknowns, but you certainly didn't need a website to remind you they existed. The novelty is gone.
After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.
Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
It’s amusing to see the usual HN flex with smug superiority but both Reddit and 4chan even to this today demolish HN in every (good and bad) criteria. Moderation here has stifled honest discussion in favor of safe-harbor, bullshit talking points.
But it’s all for lulz.
It was even stupider than that. Digg didn't even have a real, working promotion system. It was literally one guy who personally curated the big stories. Google almost bought them but looked under the hood and immediately bailed. The upvotes were all smoke and mirrors.
It was a significant shift in social media and internet history, regardless of what some fringe subreddits had.
Have you ever been to such websites as Instagram or TikTok?
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/585451-alphabet-zoo/501...
Instead of a centralized repository of links with comments, it would be a sort of overlay on top of every other website that would create a comment section that isn’t owned or moderated by the original host. It would encourage folks to actual read the original articles and visit those sites, but allow you to have discussions with a particular demographic cohort (e.g., have a discussion among HN crowd on a nytimes article)
It also should be a protocol that lets the client decide how to render the organization of comments and the editor.
That version of Digg limped along for almost twice as long as the original Digg, until a few months back when the domain was sold to Keven Rose (one of the original Digg founders) and Alexis Ohanian (one of reddit's co-founders).
Also... bring back TechTV lol
"Humancentric technology at the edge" - love this in my sci-fi books but what does it do?
That's not quite right: Digg was closer to a pure link-sharing site, being able to comment and discuss was lackluster.
Digg <-> Reddit <-> Webforum
Kind of HN for the masses. I don't remember if there were comments but one could vote links up or down.
I would not be surprised if there's a lot of brouhaha over how it's moderated, since moderation is considered way more controversial now than it used to be in the old days.
Pass.
Conversation should be over here.
Digg was the first site where I started seeing brainrot nonsense content on the front page every day, with orders of magnitude larger than usual upvotes of tech news, from the same small number of usernames (Mr BabyMan, I hate that I even remember your stupid username).
For me, Digg was the first time experiencing product managers experimenting with modern proto-influencer virality algorithms. It made the internet worse, and now every site does it.
In Pog form?
