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The Return of Digg, a Star of an Earlier Internet Era
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- returnInfinity 2y agoReddit is worth 27 billion right now. What could have been.
- wewewedxfgdf 2y agoThe founders sold Reddit for how much was it $10M or $20M?
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- Macha 2y agoTo be fair, that was followed by like 5-6 years being a thing that Conde Nast had probably forgotten they owned and going between making a loss and barely breaking even with a skeleton crew. 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.
- conradfr 2y agoI still don't understand how one of the most popular website with free content and moderation and extremely cacheable content was never profitable. Unrelated but they removed the <subreddit>.reddit.com shortcut some months ago.
- dehrmann 2y agoMost people aren't willing to pay for content, and it's harder to target ads, or you're not showing ads at the right time.
- dehrmann 2y agoCondé practically forgetting about reddit was one of the best things that happened to it. There was pressure to scale the side up, but they didn't have time to chase engagement metrics to the detriment of the experience. It's probably the only $10B+ tech company I can think of that ran so lean for so long.
- DeathArrow 2y agoIt might get acquired by Elon. :)
- forgetfreeman 2y ago*quietly checks the status of phpBB
- nedrylandJP 2y agoA decent number of redditors moved to Lemmy instances after reddit pulled that move with the API/unofficial apps a few summers ago
- Macha 2y agoIt felt like the Lemmy instances really died off in a month or two.
- baggachipz 2y agoSome did, others are thriving. Still a small community though.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoI've moved our forums to Xenforo a few years ago, by the creators of vBulletin. It's alright if you liked vB but it doesn't seem to get much updates, but that might be because it's "finished" software. 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.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago> it doesn't seem to get much updates, but that might be because it's "finished" software. Thank the gods.
- Loughla 2y agoDigg killed itself and let reddit eat its lunch with user hostile practices. Just like slashdot before digg. 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.
- nehal3m 2y agoThose are the effects of enshittification. Users and advertisers are stuck. 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."
- nailer 2y agoThis seems fitting, Doctorow was also on https://boingboing.net/ https://boingboing.net/ which started as a place for whimsical or intellectually curious content but now every third article is obsessed with US politics.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- roger_ 2y agoDid Slashdot really kill itself or was it just never ambitious enough to seek a broader base or try to foster communities? 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.
- hoistbypetard 2y agoI think it's more that second thing than the first one. I joined slashdot in the late 90s, and though some of the OSDN stuff briefly sniffed at enshittification, they didn't really ever take that plunge. 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.
- cyberlurker 2y agohttps://archive.ph/2025.03.05-123859/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/digg-alexis-ohanian-kevin-rose.html https://archive.ph/2025.03.05-123859/https://www.nytimes.com...
- TomMasz 2y agoThe Digg of (literally) yesterday was not the Digg that shot itself in the foot. It was just a site that posted links to various things you could find in other places. Not sure what they're planning but I can't help feeling the ol' ship has sailed on Digg as any kind of community site.
- probably_wrong 2y agoJust for posterity sake I'd like to point out that the Digg of yesterday also shot themselves in the foot when they chose (allegedly) to copy all of their content from DamnInteresting [1]. 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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046023
- TomMasz 2y agoI noticed the content change, but missed the reason behind it.
- roger_ 2y agoI really hope they: 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.
- dartos 2y agoThe issue is that none of that drives engagement.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoThey'll have none. Digg was taken over by power-users IIRC and that's why everyone left. As for the spam and policies, I don't expect any change.
- flkiwi 2y agoGiven Kevin Rose's web3 turn, I don't have high hopes.
- criddell 2y agoI think he's pretty much done with cryptocurrency stuff and has moved on to health and AI (separately).
- flkiwi 2y agoI was less focused on his NFT/crypto phase as on his faddishness. He just sort of grabs after whatever is in the headlines.
- paradox460 2y agoI mean, he always has. Let's not forget that diggs grew the way it did because he talked about it on TechTV (rip)
- flkiwi 2y agoI found myself watching an episode of diggnation a couple of months ago. It wasn't as funny as I remember, but, man, those were simpler times.
- nailer 2y agoIf I make a post that gets 100K likes, please give me some of the ad revenue.
- jdlyga 2y agothe web3 bros moved on to ai agents
- nailer 2y agoThat's just the scammers. The people building financial products never left.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoI was there Gandalf, I was there 3,000 years ago. Gotta Digg. “Did you hear that awful sound. Oh! Another Server’s Down.”
- danso 2y agoDang I thought this was going to be a throwback (2013) article about Digg's post-v4 relaunch [0] by Betaworks. > 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-rebounds-after-relaunch-but-users-remain-on-the https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/4/3950596/diggs-traffic-rebo...
- almosthere 2y agoI "liked" the new digg after it was purchased because someone took up the mantle, but I expected it to grow into the features it was missing, even perhaps have a new diggnation podcast behind it. But it basically just sat still, hoping to just ride the domain name. It also went extreme woke since I believe the human editors were hired that way.
- lmm 2y agoSo are they going to avoid the negative changes that Reddit made? Since they're saying the new Digg is going to be explicitly aimed at mobile users, sounds like no?
- rchaud 2y agoMobile users = app based = no ad blocking and maximum tracking. New Digg does not want the old Digg audience that pirates MP3s, torrents TV shows and hates advertising.
- angry_moose 2y agoOh damnit. I actually like current Digg. Doesn't nearly have the reach it used to, but its definitely in my "scan once a day list" for a couple interesting articles. > 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.
- rideontime 2y agoLike a lot of guys who haven't had a hit since the dotcom boom, he seems to have spent the past decade jumping on whatever bandwagon. He went big into crypto, too. https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/moonbirds https://www.coingecko.com/en/nft/moonbirds
- dehrmann 2y agoAnother pattern I've seen is people recycling their old ideas, but with a twist that's the latest trend.
- qingcharles 2y agoThe floor price for these things isn't awful ($1000) as NFT PFPs go, so they've retained some sort of value, perhaps because of Rose.
- DustinBrett 2y agoWe need it, Reddit has become terrible.
- IshKebab 2y agoYeah but old Digg wasn't as good as Reddit in its heyday. 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.
- y-c-o-m-b 2y agoBy my rough estimate/experience, late 2018 is when enshittification began to really seep into everything both online and offline. Covid was the final nail in the coffin.
- mike_hock 2y agoA Reddit exodus to Digg would truly be ironic.
- pseudospock 2y agoJust use Lemmy.
- samtheDamned 2y agoLemmy has grown quite a lot and it has been easy to replace reddit with for things like tech focused news and discussion. Unfortunately smaller community focused subreddits still don't have a great alternative but with lemmy slowly growing who knows maybe new communities can pop up.
- superultra 2y agoI'm a user of the original Digg (and many of its iterations, including plastic.com). 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.
- basisword 2y agoThey kind of took that quote out of context. In another article he begins the quote with something like "I'm completely making this up but imagine...". It wasn't completely serious. His real example was more around using AI to help moderators so they are focussed less on grunt work and more on community. Sounds sensible. In reality though I think he just thought it would be fun to give Digg another shot - and why not?
- Stevvo 2y agoI missed Diggnation, it was the first podcast I listed to. Happy to find it has already been revived; https://www.diggnation.show/ https://www.diggnation.show/
- doix 2y agoYeah, it was my first podcast too. I'm pretty sure it's part of the reason I went into tech, had a pretty big influence on my life. Kevin mentioned trying to buy back digg on the podcast, I couldn't tell if it was a serious comment or not. Looks like it was.
- ojbyrne 2y agoJust to be clear, digg started uncapitalized. I still miss the small d. It was more humble.
- whoomp12342 2y agoits a trap!!!!!!
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoIt's funny because Reddit basically owes Digg everything. 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.
- sylens 2y agoDigg v4 was a huge deal in how badly it was designed and rolled out
- josefresco 2y agoV4 was the final death blow. But the Google Panda algorithm update (and vote manipulation) set the stage.
- paradox460 2y agoFor what it's worth, reddit is only 6 months younger than diggs, and both were developed in tandem. 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
- drooopy 2y agoI just realized that Diggnation is also back.
- peter422 2y agoIt is very funny that the article highlights these two guys saving Digg, and they both care so deeply about it that they are going to... sit on the board and keep their day jobs. 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.
- righthand 2y agoKevin Rose especially out of touch, but mostly because he spends his time hyping his own ideas and if they don’t work he steps out until the next idea comes around.
- HumblyTossed 2y agoThey'll never get back what it once was. Things are different now. Rose is ... different also.
- xhkkffbf 2y agoMetacomment: There are 100 comments here. Only 2 on the NY Times. That's a huge difference. Of course only paid subscribers can comment. Maybe that's the root of difference.
- picafrost 2y agoAs one platform chases profits and loses its soul, another resurrects to welcome the nostalgic refugees. The eternal cycle of digital migration continues.
- permo-w 2y agodoes it though? do you really expect this to be a success? people will just stay on reddit like they always do. twitter has been taken over by one of the most hated people in the world and they appear to be doing better than ever user-wise
- basisword 2y agoI think current Reddit is very different from what Digg was. Reddit is too much user generated content (i.e. the exact same AskReddit questions asked on a weekly basis) and not enough cool links/videos anymore. At least on the non-logged in homepage. If Digg is exclusively links, it'll definitely have a place imo.
- permo-w 2y agoobviously it massively depends on what subs you follow, but yes this is the problem with reddit. it's completely antithetical to long-form content that builds over time.
- thomassmith65 2y agoThey need AI to ensure only MrBabyMan's posts reach the front page. Human curation wasn't 100% effective.
- indigodaddy 2y agoAhh the nostalgia: https://youtu.be/W1_YoG7lqI4 https://youtu.be/W1_YoG7lqI4
- nntwozz 2y agoOoof yeah that hits hard. At the end of the video they mention del.icio.us, another blast from the past.
- indigodaddy 2y agoI'm pretty sure I watched that live at the time too
- ed 2y agoKind of crazy Kevin wasn’t required to mention it was his project!
- dehrmann 2y agoRemember the Businessweek cover?
- keane 2y agoA classic! https://www.businessinsider.com/businessweeks-tech-covers-the-smart-the-safe-and-the-silly-2009-9#:~:text=Digg%20is%20still%20struggling%20to%20make%20a%20profit https://www.businessinsider.com/businessweeks-tech-covers-th...
- bityard 2y agoBack in the day, my top three websites I would visit were: 1) Slashdot 2) Digg 3) Reddit 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.
- DrillShopper 2y agoAt the very beginning there weren't subreddits. When they introduced subreddits they put all previous posts under /r/reddit.com.
- RobotToaster 2y ago09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 Anyone else remember?
- qingcharles 2y agoThe MPAA remembers.
- mike_hock 2y agoCSS?
- vekatimest 2y agoAACS.
- scottrogers86 2y agoHad a feeling something was brewing here with the relaunch of Diggnation. Welcome back!
- dusted 2y agoAnyone remember fazed.org (slogan: until the weekend heals us) ? Absolutely loved that site, in a way, it was similar to hn in design and "random interesting stuff" type of content.. For me, what killed it was the now long dead "stumple upon" (well, maybe not dead, but they did something years ago to make it suck more)
- jaredcwhite 2y agoCue "It's a Trap!" meme. 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!