9 ms·

Digg 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 po

• nehal3m 2y ago
  Those 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 ago
    This 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 ago
  Did 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 ago
    I 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.
    • jghn 2y ago
      This is an interesting point. 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.
      • antod 2y ago
        With slashdot I wouldn't RTFA (hadn't used that term for ages) until after reading some or most of the comments to give me an idea of whether or not it was going to be worth it. 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.
        • mingus88 2y ago
          I’m really trying to pull back from that habit because I simply can’t tell what is legit discourse anymore 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
• AlecSchueler 2y ago
  Reddit got big enough that the competition died off. When Digg took a nosedive there were plenty of other places with some community people could move to. Even BB forums were still a thing back then. Now pretty much everything that isn't extremely niche, and even many things that are, have been soaked up by Reddit.
  • dingnuts 2y ago
    lately Reddit has been feeling really like dead Internet though. every subreddit is talking about the same current event all the time. there are smaller spaces that are thriving just like the old days.
    • kacesensitive 2y ago
      I miss 2021-22 reddit. Seemed we finally went back to normal.
      • superkuh 2y ago
        Shifting baselines in action. 2021-22 reddit was/is terrible. It had already accepted the massive injections of venture capital and turned into facebook for all the refugees in the second half of the 2010s. Things like corporations (and for-profit human persons) posting to their own account pages instead of subreddits, the terrible redesigns, constant top-down moderation instead of letting subreddits be like forums, etc, etc. Reddit normal is 2008-2013. This kind of normal still exists on usenet, if you seek it.
        • giraffe_lady 2y ago
          I remember that period as the one where non-nude sexual images of children was a huge problem on reddit, but it wasn't specifically against the rules. The admins were doing things like working closely with, even giving out a mod of the year award to, violenacrez, the guy who created and maintained r/jailbait and r/creepshots¹ as well as dozens of similar subs. The material itself was bad enough but it was extremely obvious to everyone that these subs were being used for people to meet and DM each other CSAM. 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
• mtzaldo 2y ago
  It could mean people are being payed to post content to keep momentum.
  • criddell 2y ago
    Kevin Rose has talked about how important some of the power users (like Mr Babyman) was to Digg. He didn't say so explicitly (not that I recall), but I got the impression that there was definitely some kind of relationship between Digg and some users.
• joelthelion 2y ago
  As long as enough people care enough to move to something else, we're good. Right now, it looks like lemmy might have just enough momentum, but I'm not sure yet.
• suspended_state 2y ago
  Reddit has a much broader aim than Slashdot ever did. Slashdot _is_ just about discussing news, just like HN. Reddit is basically a BBS with no particular topic or usage in mind. They cannot be compared.
• looseyesterday 2y ago
  I think reddit is the best among a very large selection of poor choices. Where else could you go?
  • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    People already left and they're in Discord. Reddit today is a shell of what it was.
    • wholinator2 2y ago
      You don't have to link anything but what kind of discord servers? Also the problem with discord for me is the fact that information only exists momentarily. Reddit search is bad but at least you can Google. Discord servers are basically impenetrable if you can't check it constantly
      • mingus88 2y ago
        Yeah I just can’t grok discord as a replacement for message boards 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
      • whywhywhywhy 2y ago
        Yeah I'm not saying its a good replacement, it's actually atrocious but its already replaced reddit and is where the actual users are now. 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.
  • dartos 2y ago
    Private discord servers for everything nowadays. The open searchable internet is dead for people trying to find community, imo.
  • baggachipz 2y ago
• ubermonkey 2y ago
  I was part of the Digg-to-Reddit migration 15 years ago or whatever, and now i don't even remember what Digg did to piss us all off.
  • phailhaus 2y ago
    They got rid of downvoting, which caused everyone's feed to devolve into garbage really fast.
• dartos 2y ago
  > that tech has gotten to a point where user hostile moves don't have as much of an impact anymore 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.
  • juujian 2y ago
    Yeah, now everyone and their mom is on the internet. And their mom probably more then they are.
    • dingnuts 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • Smithalicious 2y ago
        I knew Elon had a lot of kids but I hadn't heard of him being anyone's mom!
        • ASUfool 2y ago
          To me, he's just a mother of another sort that I cannot say in polite company.
    • wdr1 2y ago
      time for us all to go back to gopher
  • jghn 2y ago
    > 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. 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.
• stronglikedan 2y ago
  At least reddit still maintains old.reddit. Digg never gave users the choice. If there is ever only new reddit, then there won't be reddit for me.
  • ethagnawl 2y ago
    Please don't remind them that it still works.
    • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      I know you're joking, but I'd love to know their take on it. I assume they're viewing the logs and cursing all of us forcing them to keep maintaining old.
      • jghn 2y ago
        I always assumed that the new reddit UI was more for app based usage than browser. And there is/was a hope to steer more people towards using the app. 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.
        • ryandrake 2y ago
          I've always assumed there's some PM sitting there at Reddit, watching the usage metrics every month, and as soon as it dips below his threshold, he'll order it shut down. "Should we tell 1 out of 1000 users to fuck off, or 1 out of 100 users?"
          • ikr678 2y ago
            I think they have stats showing that the most prolific contributors all use the old reddit interface and so they don't yet want to risk their more engaging content.
• SirMaster 2y ago
  I care to some extent. But both old.reddit.com still works just fine and 3rd party apps when using my personal API key still work. I am still using Apollo on iOS and it's still working just fine for me. 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.
  • liotier 2y ago
    old.reddit is nice but it feels like having a conversation while on death row - still a couple of appeals pending but the endgame is not really in doubt. The end of RedditIsFun (https://www.reddit.com/r/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.
    • pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Not to mention, moderation tools are spread over the old site, the new site, and the mobile site in completely incongruous ways. 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".
      • SirMaster 2y ago
        I'm a mod and I mainly use the mod interface in the Apollo app that I still use.
      • UncleSlacky 2y ago
        I moderate exclusively on Old Reddit with the Moderator Toolbox extension, I can't imagine doing it any other way.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • 2y ago
• emacsen 2y ago
  This is interesting, what do you mean by hostile user practices? Can you say more (about both /. and Digg)?
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  >But it seems like nobody really cares. Reddit is referred to by most of it's users as an app. That should tell you everything you need to know.
• donatj 2y ago
  What did it do that was particularly "user hostile"? 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
  • Jordan-117 2y ago
    They fundamentally broke how the site worked: - 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.)
  • Rebelgecko 2y ago
    People felt the same way about i.reddit.com until it got turned off.
• phailhaus 2y ago
  That's because Digg's changes fundamentally changed how users interact with the site and receive content. From an article at the time: > 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-redesign-revolt https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/31/digg-...
  • nailer 2y ago
    Killing third party apps makes the site unusable. Some embedded videos don't have sound, you now have to click the link to the third party site to be able to hear a video. 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.
    • eek2121 2y ago
      There are still 3rd party apps. One for iOS is called Hydra, which looks and works similarly to Apollo.
    • whateveracct 2y ago
      Reddit is perfectly usable in iOS Safari
    • lovich 2y ago
      The moderation is hyper partisan on all sides. Not just the left. 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
• jghn 2y ago
  > But it seems like nobody really cares. 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.
• ta1243 2y ago
  > Just like slashdot before digg. Fuck Beta
• BeetleB 2y ago
  I think Slashdot's major changes came after Digg had "died".
• righthand 2y ago
  Yes it is for me too. I even went so far to downrank reddit links in Kagi. Most of the time Reddit links require using old theme or turning off my vpn. So it’s not worth ranking them higher.
  • paradox460 2y ago
    Fwiw you can make kagi rewrite all reddit links to old
    • righthand 2y ago
      I just want to support decentralized social media. I can’t handle the constant national hysteria the stems from centralization. I don’t use reddit other than reading comments on a movie I saw or recipes for eggplant. Now that I’ve down ranked it I have found there are other sites and communities to read instead with the same information. For example lemmy is active enough for movies and there are popular cooking blogs with comments.
• codexb 2y ago
  [dead]
• QuantumGood 2y ago
  It had a huge impact on Reddit, but it's akin to an oil tanker: Dropping a huge anchor doesn't slow it down much visibly.
• dehrmann 2y ago
  The rise of TikTok makes me think people might not consciously care, but they'll vote with their eyeballs if someone comes along with a better experience.
• karaterobot 2y ago
  People don't care, that's true. Most people just want to see funny memes and videos, they don't think too hard about it. Not saying that's good, in fact I'd say the opposite. 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.
• newsclues 2y ago
  Only a small fraction of users are content creators (at least successfully). 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.
  • mingus88 2y ago
    I miss the internet when folk posted about what they were passionate about and that was it
    • newsclues 2y ago
      Yes, but I also miss when the people on the internet were smarter than average.
• bena 2y ago
  Slashdot was always more IT focused. Digg and reddit were more general appeal. 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.
• ElCapitanMarkla 2y ago
  > But it seems like nobody really cares. 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.
• JeremyNT 2y ago
  > Reddit pushing new Reddit layout and killing 3rd party apps is what did it for me. But it seems like nobody really cares. 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.
• lelanthran 2y ago
  > Reddit pushing new Reddit layout and killing 3rd party apps is what did it for me. But it seems like nobody really cares. 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...