5 ms·

Genuinely curious...are you old enough to remember Digg and what happened to it? I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit

Genuinely curious...are you old enough to remember Digg and what happened to it? I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit being a weird alternative. And after a series of huge mistakes, almost overnight Reddit was flooded with users and Digg relegated to nothing. It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.

hericium 5y ago
> It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear. Reminds me of the Freenode IRC network which pretty much stopped existing[1][2] overnight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_... [2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c1646791c61953 https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Similar to my response to the OP, the comparisons don’t work because IRC as a whole, no less one network, are not empires. Reddit did a god awful redesign. Then piled on forcing their official mobile app usage by limiting the site more and more. Unlike the small geeky IRC world, none of this did anything to curb Reddit popularity. While it’s entirely possibly an equivalent move in IRC or some other niche geeky place would have an exodus or major consequences. Reddit has banned a number of subreddits too. With hundreds of thousands of active members. None of this curbs its popularity. And not everything they ban is problematic like inappropriate non consensual sexual posts or aggressive bigotry. Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily-users-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    It's the early adopters that move, not the masses that eventually follow a few years later. It's a small community that shapes crowds.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      My best argument to this that I would gladly be proven wrong so I don’t look silly being wrong. Is there any example in the past ~7 years, even ~10 years of any major cultural user content sites that had precedence like Digg, losing influence the way Digg and other contemporaries did? The only examples that I can think of is Tumblr. If there’s so many examples before 10 years ago. And maybe 1 example in recent times. Your point can still stand. However it also doesn’t mean much when the resilience of web giants are totally different between the Digg Web time and after that
      - thinkingemote 5y ago
        Yeah I think also that we underestimate these massive sites by thinking they have not learned from Digg etc.
- abstractbeliefs 5y ago
  the freenode irc network disappeared overnight, but everyone just updated their links to point at libera.chat instead, which has almost all of the same projects, active users, etc. It was essentially just an infrastructure change, which is the nice thing about open protocols and server implementations. Libera has 40k users and over 1000 foss projects that were on freenode. the freenode userbase and community is alive and well, just under a new link
  - jcpham2 5y ago
    I was a Freenode user for a decade, many more IRC networks in the preceding decade, since 1999 or so. I enjoy chatting with my friends and participating in projects realtime on IRC. I left freenode when all the bitcoin/monero related projects moved to Libera. Update your links, drop your nick registrations on the old network, register on the new - keep on trucking.
skinnymuch 5y ago
I’ve done posts before. As have others. The scope, popularity, and longevity of the fallen past top sites like Friendster, MySpace, Digg, Slashdot, Altavista, Excite. Or web builders like Geocities, Angelfire. Other social networks like Bebo, Hi5. Other messaging apps like Viber. Or older ones like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ. Finally people stopped bringing up the old messengers. They had such tiny userbases. The comparisons don’t make sense. As do all other older sites pale in comparison to absolute mammoths like Reddit now. Digg was so small compared to Reddit. It lasted for such a short period of time. People have finally stopped bringing up MySpace when touting Facebook/Instagram’s fall. MySpace peaked for at most two years 2005-2006. Before being a ghost land before the end of 2008. MySpace’s peak user base was peanuts. It also likely wasn’t very accurate in how they were able to report things. Their revenue and cash flow even smaller. The internet is broader with mobile and desktop usage. Cellular data and wifi. Global. Billions more users. Comparing Digg to Reddit just doesn’t work. Reddit isn’t the site it was before 2010. During the digg exodus. The few years after that. And to nowadays. ———————- Edit: for some actual numbers. Copy pasting from my other comment: Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily-users-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...
- forix 5y ago
  Not sure why Viber is on your list of fallen messaging apps. In the past few years I've seen more and more "X has joined Viber. Say hi!" notifications about my contacts (based in the US, which if anything makes me think it's growing).
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    My bad!
hellbannedguy 5y ago
But Reddit is a monopoly now. Digg was never a monopoly, or had near the number of idiot customers.
guareber 5y ago
I'll give one counterpoint: When did you see anyone on TV mention Digg? Reddit's become mainstream, it's quoted by serious news outlets, joked around on Last Week Tonight (and other politic joke shows), and I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Facebook. Which is to say, surely but very slowly.
- Kye 5y ago
  I'm sure I saw a mention once or twice on TechTV and/or G4, but that just supports your point.
  - ilikecakeandpie 5y ago
    They got a huge boost from Stephen Colbert mentioning them
PhoenixReborn 5y ago
(Disclaimer: I used to work at Reddit but left in 2018) While I think you're absolutely right, I think Digg made a number of other missteps with the Digg v4 launch that Reddit did not make. In particular, they shut down the old Digg site to reuse the servers for the new one, a mistake that Reddit was particularly careful not to make. Digg was also already on the way down before their failed launch, and before the exodus to Reddit - a condition that doesn't apply to Reddit today. People have been making Digg comparisons about Reddit before I worked there, and now long after I've left. I don't think the 2 are comparable. Will Larson writes about it here: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
- pibechorro 5y ago
  Reddit is on the way down. They may be gaining users, but the platform is a lot less interesting. The quality of content is way down, the spam and clickbait way up, and censorship by dictatorial moderators is out of control. Its a big echo chamber now. You are seeing a huge demand for more free speech platforms. Youtube is outofcontrol, Google is editing search, twitter is peering over the abyss now that Jack is gone and Reddit is right along them. It may take a while, but in a few years they are going to face steep competition. It may very well be an open source decentralized project like Mastodon.
  - yabones 5y ago
    Reddit was always a feudal system, from the moment they introduced subreddits. Simply being the first to land-grab a name makes you the king. Your chosen loyalists become moderators, and the serfs farm content for you.
  - PhoenixReborn 5y ago
    I don’t particularly buy this idea since Mastodon has already existed for several years - and in that time, all the major social media players have only increased their market share. As far as free speech platforms go you have things like Gab, Voat, etc which prioritize free speech in name. While that may be commendable as a value, the core audience they attract in the beginning is inevitably too extreme for the platform to go mainstream. By the time Reddit replaced Digg, Digg was already losing users routinely. I don’t think any of the current social media players are in that position just yet.
p2p_astroturf 5y ago
I remember Digg being as shitty a useless get-rich-quick non-idea fad as Reddit that I visited a total of 5 times during its lifespan. Both sites pitch link sharing as the most easy to implement possible thing you can do and still have a web 2.0 site; A way to justify the owner of the site being the king - i.e, the guy who gets all the profit from this. This and you can write one line comments on the links. After many revisions, you can now almost have the functionality of an ASCII text editor on these sites. It's a miracle that there is ever any good content on Reddit at all (well, actually it's just Murphy's law). If you are able to have a useful discussion on Reddit, you are literally abusing the platform for something it's not intended for. You get banned for saying anything neutral because the subs are full of circle jerking product consuming lowlifes who downvote you (not unlike the alcohol bar format) and when you get too many downvotes you cannot post anymore, and the UI makes it harder to read downvoted comments. I don't see how investing in reddit is any different than any ill-designed shitcoin. It's literally just as useless. Unlike Dig, I actually came across reddit posts a total of 3 times in the last 15 years of my software engineering work when I had to look something up. Web forums in the early 2000s were already a stupid design: You want to discuss a topic? You have to roll your own server and decide what ad-hoc protocol in the form of {phpbb,invpb,...} to use, then "grow" a "community" (aka the suckers who so happen to frequent your forum) and try to sustain it with. Then the mods eventually disagree with people due to human nature and long time users get banned? Literally open any old web forum ever and you will see tons of people with 10K posts that are banned because one day the mod felt like banning them forever. I really hate this stupid fucking community format, as I just want to discuss topics and I don't give 2 shits about who so happens to be the "official community". If I want to talk about my reverse engineering work, I really do not care what some moderators think about the way I talk; I just want to talk about my subject and let anyone who cares join the discussion. If people disagree with me because they don't like my spelling, they should block me one by one, not be decided by a centralized committee. It's amazing how many people have the opposite attitude, it's like they came on the internet thinking it's an extension of some social drama shit like high school. Now let's look at Freenet: I press the "new forum" button and the topic is up forever as long as there is one person reading messages thus propagating them (at the end of the day any individual can backup whatever he cares about and restore it at a later date, all within the simple protocol) and moderation is done at the user end like it should be, by subscribing to filters. At least that's how i _think_ it works, you can never be sure with these kiddie p2p projects. Freenet is basically a hack around webshit but it gives an example of how things should work and how they could have worked 20 years ago if the US government didn't assassinate Napster and set forth millions of copyright / "CP" panic muppets to get outraged about the imaginary threat posed by data transmission.

hericium 5y ago

> It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear. Reminds me of the Freenode IRC network which pretty much stopped existing[1][2] overnight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_... [2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c1646791c61953 https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...

skinnymuch 5y ago
Similar to my response to the OP, the comparisons don’t work because IRC as a whole, no less one network, are not empires. Reddit did a god awful redesign. Then piled on forcing their official mobile app usage by limiting the site more and more. Unlike the small geeky IRC world, none of this did anything to curb Reddit popularity. While it’s entirely possibly an equivalent move in IRC or some other niche geeky place would have an exodus or major consequences. Reddit has banned a number of subreddits too. With hundreds of thousands of active members. None of this curbs its popularity. And not everything they ban is problematic like inappropriate non consensual sexual posts or aggressive bigotry. Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily-users-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  It's the early adopters that move, not the masses that eventually follow a few years later. It's a small community that shapes crowds.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    My best argument to this that I would gladly be proven wrong so I don’t look silly being wrong. Is there any example in the past ~7 years, even ~10 years of any major cultural user content sites that had precedence like Digg, losing influence the way Digg and other contemporaries did? The only examples that I can think of is Tumblr. If there’s so many examples before 10 years ago. And maybe 1 example in recent times. Your point can still stand. However it also doesn’t mean much when the resilience of web giants are totally different between the Digg Web time and after that
    - thinkingemote 5y ago
      Yeah I think also that we underestimate these massive sites by thinking they have not learned from Digg etc.
abstractbeliefs 5y ago
the freenode irc network disappeared overnight, but everyone just updated their links to point at libera.chat instead, which has almost all of the same projects, active users, etc. It was essentially just an infrastructure change, which is the nice thing about open protocols and server implementations. Libera has 40k users and over 1000 foss projects that were on freenode. the freenode userbase and community is alive and well, just under a new link
- jcpham2 5y ago
  I was a Freenode user for a decade, many more IRC networks in the preceding decade, since 1999 or so. I enjoy chatting with my friends and participating in projects realtime on IRC. I left freenode when all the bitcoin/monero related projects moved to Libera. Update your links, drop your nick registrations on the old network, register on the new - keep on trucking.

skinnymuch 5y ago

I’ve done posts before. As have others. The scope, popularity, and longevity of the fallen past top sites like Friendster, MySpace, Digg, Slashdot, Altavista, Excite. Or web builders like Geocities, Angelfire. Other social networks like Bebo, Hi5. Other messaging apps like Viber. Or older ones like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ. Finally people stopped bringing up the old messengers. They had such tiny userbases. The comparisons don’t make sense. As do all other older sites pale in comparison to absolute mammoths like Reddit now. Digg was so small compared to Reddit. It lasted for such a short period of time. People have finally stopped bringing up MySpace when touting Facebook/Instagram’s fall. MySpace peaked for at most two years 2005-2006. Before being a ghost land before the end of 2008. MySpace’s peak user base was peanuts. It also likely wasn’t very accurate in how they were able to report things. Their revenue and cash flow even smaller. The internet is broader with mobile and desktop usage. Cellular data and wifi. Global. Billions more users. Comparing Digg to Reddit just doesn’t work. Reddit isn’t the site it was before 2010. During the digg exodus. The few years after that. And to nowadays. ———————- Edit: for some actual numbers. Copy pasting from my other comment: Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily-users-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...

forix 5y ago
Not sure why Viber is on your list of fallen messaging apps. In the past few years I've seen more and more "X has joined Viber. Say hi!" notifications about my contacts (based in the US, which if anything makes me think it's growing).
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  My bad!

hellbannedguy 5y ago

But Reddit is a monopoly now. Digg was never a monopoly, or had near the number of idiot customers.

guareber 5y ago

I'll give one counterpoint: When did you see anyone on TV mention Digg? Reddit's become mainstream, it's quoted by serious news outlets, joked around on Last Week Tonight (and other politic joke shows), and I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Facebook. Which is to say, surely but very slowly.

Kye 5y ago
I'm sure I saw a mention once or twice on TechTV and/or G4, but that just supports your point.
- ilikecakeandpie 5y ago
  They got a huge boost from Stephen Colbert mentioning them

PhoenixReborn 5y ago

(Disclaimer: I used to work at Reddit but left in 2018) While I think you're absolutely right, I think Digg made a number of other missteps with the Digg v4 launch that Reddit did not make. In particular, they shut down the old Digg site to reuse the servers for the new one, a mistake that Reddit was particularly careful not to make. Digg was also already on the way down before their failed launch, and before the exodus to Reddit - a condition that doesn't apply to Reddit today. People have been making Digg comparisons about Reddit before I worked there, and now long after I've left. I don't think the 2 are comparable. Will Larson writes about it here: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/ https://lethain.com/digg-v4/

pibechorro 5y ago
Reddit is on the way down. They may be gaining users, but the platform is a lot less interesting. The quality of content is way down, the spam and clickbait way up, and censorship by dictatorial moderators is out of control. Its a big echo chamber now. You are seeing a huge demand for more free speech platforms. Youtube is outofcontrol, Google is editing search, twitter is peering over the abyss now that Jack is gone and Reddit is right along them. It may take a while, but in a few years they are going to face steep competition. It may very well be an open source decentralized project like Mastodon.
- yabones 5y ago
  Reddit was always a feudal system, from the moment they introduced subreddits. Simply being the first to land-grab a name makes you the king. Your chosen loyalists become moderators, and the serfs farm content for you.
- PhoenixReborn 5y ago
  I don’t particularly buy this idea since Mastodon has already existed for several years - and in that time, all the major social media players have only increased their market share. As far as free speech platforms go you have things like Gab, Voat, etc which prioritize free speech in name. While that may be commendable as a value, the core audience they attract in the beginning is inevitably too extreme for the platform to go mainstream. By the time Reddit replaced Digg, Digg was already losing users routinely. I don’t think any of the current social media players are in that position just yet.

p2p_astroturf 5y ago

I remember Digg being as shitty a useless get-rich-quick non-idea fad as Reddit that I visited a total of 5 times during its lifespan. Both sites pitch link sharing as the most easy to implement possible thing you can do and still have a web 2.0 site; A way to justify the owner of the site being the king - i.e, the guy who gets all the profit from this. This and you can write one line comments on the links. After many revisions, you can now almost have the functionality of an ASCII text editor on these sites. It's a miracle that there is ever any good content on Reddit at all (well, actually it's just Murphy's law). If you are able to have a useful discussion on Reddit, you are literally abusing the platform for something it's not intended for. You get banned for saying anything neutral because the subs are full of circle jerking product consuming lowlifes who downvote you (not unlike the alcohol bar format) and when you get too many downvotes you cannot post anymore, and the UI makes it harder to read downvoted comments. I don't see how investing in reddit is any different than any ill-designed shitcoin. It's literally just as useless. Unlike Dig, I actually came across reddit posts a total of 3 times in the last 15 years of my software engineering work when I had to look something up. Web forums in the early 2000s were already a stupid design: You want to discuss a topic? You have to roll your own server and decide what ad-hoc protocol in the form of {phpbb,invpb,...} to use, then "grow" a "community" (aka the suckers who so happen to frequent your forum) and try to sustain it with. Then the mods eventually disagree with people due to human nature and long time users get banned? Literally open any old web forum ever and you will see tons of people with 10K posts that are banned because one day the mod felt like banning them forever. I really hate this stupid fucking community format, as I just want to discuss topics and I don't give 2 shits about who so happens to be the "official community". If I want to talk about my reverse engineering work, I really do not care what some moderators think about the way I talk; I just want to talk about my subject and let anyone who cares join the discussion. If people disagree with me because they don't like my spelling, they should block me one by one, not be decided by a centralized committee. It's amazing how many people have the opposite attitude, it's like they came on the internet thinking it's an extension of some social drama shit like high school. Now let's look at Freenet: I press the "new forum" button and the topic is up forever as long as there is one person reading messages thus propagating them (at the end of the day any individual can backup whatever he cares about and restore it at a later date, all within the simple protocol) and moderation is done at the user end like it should be, by subscribing to filters. At least that's how i _think_ it works, you can never be sure with these kiddie p2p projects. Freenet is basically a hack around webshit but it gives an example of how things should work and how they could have worked 20 years ago if the US government didn't assassinate Napster and set forth millions of copyright / "CP" panic muppets to get outraged about the imaginary threat posed by data transmission.