26 ms·

Digg is gone again

424 points by hammerbrostime 7mo ago

mmmlinux 7mo ago
That was fast.
Aspie96 7mo ago
Article: > Digg isn't going away. Post: > Digg is gone again.
hammerbrostime 7mo ago
Did you know it was back? They are blaming bots.
- gnabgib 7mo ago
  Sure.. Digg.com is back (118 points, 6 months ago, 209 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  "This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem."
- jasonlotito 7mo ago
  Yes.
PaulHoule 7mo ago
I think the [dupe] is a false alarm in the sense that they just put up a banner saying it is shut down and I think they were starting it up again back then.
- dang 7mo ago
  Ok, unduped now. Thanks!
MildlySerious 7mo ago
I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort. Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.
- calmbonsai 7mo ago
  Cutting staff does in no way mandate a un-notified and abrupt "hard-reset". They could at least put it in read-only mode for a short time and allow downloading of extant community content prior to a scheduled "reset day". This smacks of flailing leadership and zero respect for their target user demographic.
  - amarant 7mo ago
    They say trust is their product, well,I guess they're sold out
    - calmbonsai 7mo ago
      In Digg's non-defense, Kevin Rose has been a serial-rug-puller for his entire career. See also Pownce, Milk, and Moonbirds. The only sustained business I'm aware of is Hodinkee.
      - al_borland 7mo ago
        Kevin Rose didn't start Hodinkee, he started Watchville years after Hodinkee was already well established. Watchville merged with Hodinkee, at which point he became the CEO for 2 years. From what I can tell Watchville was abandoned a few years ago.
  - idatum 7mo ago
    > Digg's founder who started the company back in 2004 Their plan is to make the internet what is was 22 years ago.
andrewinardeer 7mo ago
Whatever happened to MrBabyMan?
dang 7mo ago
Related - others? Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments) Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments) Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments) Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments) Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)
- bsimpson 7mo ago
  Kevin Rose (original digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (a.k.a. kn0thing, original reddit founder) did an AMA recently about restarting digg (context so people don't have to click links)
  - kawsper 7mo ago
    If someone wants to read the AMA, it is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qhf27j/alexis_ohanian_and_kevin_rose_here_to_talk_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qhf27j/alexis_ohania...
- NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
  > Digg.com Is Back - Jan 2026 Damn, that didn't take long at all...
  - SoftTalker 7mo ago
    Well, it's like two major LLM models ago?
ahmedfromtunis 7mo ago
I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read. I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me. The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.
- bink 7mo ago
  One of the things I always disliked about the original Digg was their threading. The slashdot like feed where the oldest comments were at the top and there was only one level of replies tended to encourage the "first" comments and harmed the quality of the discussion. I was glad to see it use a reddit-like comment thread for the new site, but it also meant there wasn't much reason to use it over reddit. I'm a bit surprised with Alexis' involvement they didn't anticipate the bot problem. Alexis left reddit several years ago but I'm sure he's still in touch with the folks who run the place. It would've been worth it to talk to them about the threats they currently face and how they deal with them.
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    Wasn’t part of the Reddit story was that they bootstrapped it with fake content?
    - bink 7mo ago
      Absolutely. They kinda brag about it now. But I think it was just the founders making multiple accounts. It sounds like the new Digg was worried about bots scaring people away from the site with thinly disguised ads.
  - Andrex 7mo ago
    v3 introduced proper nested comments and filtering, problem was they were slow to load but even worse was the design. Just very bloated and padded and the information density dropped through the floor. (All based on very old memories.)
armchairhacker 7mo ago
> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed. Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.
- iamdamian 7mo ago
  >> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed. > Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI. This… seems like regular prose to me. What makes you say so confidently it was written by AI?
  - armchairhacker 7mo ago
    There are more tells. Rule of three, short cliche sentences. > We know how frustrating this is, and we hope you'll give us another look once we have something to show, we’ll save your usernames! I think it's partly human. But ex: > Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. isn't a natural sentence.
    - troosevelt 7mo ago
      How is that not a natural sentence? I think people are reading into stuff. That's just good writing. Could it be generated? Sure. But there aren't the obvious tells you act like there are.
      - GeorgeWBasic 7mo ago
        "Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall." is a VERY ChatGPT way to write. It's not proof, but the parent is right that this smells a bit of AI writing.
        7mo ago
ivm 7mo ago
There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.
- snapetom 7mo ago
  They introduced user-created communities a few months ago. They had problems with squatting and splintering, which might have played a role in their annoucement.
- gzread 7mo ago
  Why doesn't that make sense?
  - ivm 7mo ago
    Because there's no real discussion in such broad communities. Only jokes, generic replies, and silly fights. They're equivalent to comment sections on news sites.
    - gzread 7mo ago
      And it doesn't make sense to you that someone might make money from a platform without discussion?
    - pndy 7mo ago
      > They're equivalent to comment sections on news sites. In my country these are either gone or provided by facebook.
popalchemist 7mo ago
[flagged]
dgeiser13 7mo ago
Didn't Kevin Rose re-acquire Digg in the last year or so?
- troosevelt 7mo ago
  Yes, he did. Now he's gonna be the full-time CEO according to this.
- al_borland 7mo ago
  He and Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit) went in on it together.
multiplegeorges 7mo ago
Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.
- cheschire 7mo ago
  This leads to paid certifications from limited experts leading to political payoffs controlling the certifiers
sieabahlpark 7mo ago
[dead]
paride5745 7mo ago
Really annoying, I was starting to use it for a few niche communities instead of Reddit. If they relaunch, I hope they develop something integrated with the fediverse. I believe the time to build walled gardens is over, plugging with the fediverse might give them a running start to build something g together with the wide fediverse community, maybe something easier to use for non-techies and well moderated. We will see I guess…
- ierukah 7mo ago
  Well, most of the Threadiverse would block federation with digg if that were to happen, just like how it happened to threads.
JensenKarlsson 7mo ago
Community /books helped me track down a book I've been dying to reread for almost ten years now. Reddit failed the task, so did all other places I turned to. Cheers for that, and rip.
basisword 7mo ago
Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
So as predicted it wasn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage 6 months ago. And I will continue to die on the will die on the hill that Reddit only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. Alexis Ohanian still doesn't seem to have any clue that it was right-place-right-time and Kevin Rose seems to have not learned much either. Can we stop giving either anymore credibility? As with any social site it's the user base/community that helps pull thru darkness. And no one was really asking for this. Let sleeping dogs lie.
- flomo 7mo ago
  > legendary Digg slip up I wasn't a digg user, but this was done to combat 'voting rings' (bots), and the reddit migration was memed partially because it was/is far more open to manipulation. So at least their principles have been somewhat consistent.
- jlarocco 7mo ago
  I'm pretty sure 95% of the success of all internet and tech companies boils down to extreme luck and being in the right place at the right time. Any time one of the founders is giving advice, always take it with a huge grain of salt. Survivorship bias to the extreme.
keyboardJones 7mo ago
> We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away. I think the HN title needs adjusted
- axus 7mo ago
  "Digg is Just Resting"
  - blitzar 7mo ago
    Digg has gone to live on a farm in the countryside where it can run around and play with aol, myspace and all the other websites. No you can't visit.
int32_64 7mo ago
I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.
- ranger_danger 7mo ago
  Why do you think people will stop at politics?
- bsder 7mo ago
  Erm, Brexit, anyone? You thinking that astroturfing only happens for US politics is dangerously naive.
- pacomerh 7mo ago
  Wouldn't that be almost impossible?. Politics affects our lives every day. Your comment suggests that you believe it doesn't affect yours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
  - gzread 7mo ago
    Banning discussion of politics is an endorsement of the politics that are already happening. People think it's apolitical but it's not.
    - lordloki 7mo ago
      This sounds a lot like: You're either with us or against us, or you have nothing to fear is you have nothing to hide.
  - troosevelt 7mo ago
    I've nver seen discussion of politics on forums do anything but turn into hate-filled, dogmatic posts which aren't productive at all. Every political thread here turns into the same takes and HN imagines itself as intellectually better than others. It's not interesting or productive. If talking about politics fixed things, why are politics worse today than they've ever been? There's no costs and no solutions to ranting about politics online. The vast majority of people do not want to get on a forum to escape their life to see every more or worse content about their daily lives. You're right, there needs to be some outlet but when people propose this it's because they are sick and tired of politics and the injection of them into everthing is not helping those politics, it just makes it worse. Tons of people aren't political creatures and want nothing to do with politicians. This notion that more politics will fix thing isn't born out by Reddit, X, the US Congress, Brexit, etc. It's too easy to divide and manipulate people.
jjcm 7mo ago
The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem. We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.
- georgemcbay 7mo ago
  > We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years. I don't believe there is any practical way to do it. Sure, there are ways to verify a human linked to a specific account exists in a one-off fashion, but for individual interactions you'll never know that it isn't an LLM reading and posting if they put even a small amount of effort to make it seem humanish.
- r0fl 7mo ago
  If your site creates more than $3 of value then I’ll happily setup 1000 bots a day and pay you the $2 per account every single day
  - Andrex 7mo ago
    Supply and demand? He'd just up the charge in that case. It's cat-and-mouse but he's getting richer and richer while the value to you will be constantly in flux.
mikeocool 7mo ago
Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic. Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?
- dana321 7mo ago
  That and most of the news being behind a paywall, which they can scrape anyway. The internet archive is my safe haven these days, i can go back and remember the old internet.
  - mikeocool 7mo ago
    Ha yeah, I quite like the 2003 vintage.
- bobsmooth 7mo ago
  Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.
  - georgeburdell 7mo ago
    4chan has bots too.
  - seattle_spring 7mo ago
    Curious how you came to that conclusion. Anecdotally, places where you can slur to your heart's content like /r/conservative seem far more inundated with bots than other areas of Reddit. I feel like that's really saying something too, because Reddit has a really bad bot problem overall.
softwaredoug 7mo ago
They literally just went public in Jan. Building it back up was going to take years I don’t understand what kind of shenanigans transpired. But it seems there’s more to in than “bots” If it truly is bots, maybe a private invite only social network is the way to go.
hazelnut 7mo ago
Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin. To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it. Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.
- gagik_co 7mo ago
  Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.
  - hazelnut 7mo ago
    The Reddit CEO mentioned that the community thrives when humans talk to humans - and not with AI slop. He also said they are working on efforts to identify automated accounts. https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-human-place-on-internet-ai-slop-2026-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-hum...
    - trevwilson 7mo ago
      Reddit can't even manage to regularly identify and ban bots that copy previously popular posts/comments verbatim, and that's a much easier problem than modern LLM-based bots.
    - isbvhodnvemrwvn 7mo ago
      Actions speak more than words, especially true for CEOs.
    - blitzar 7mo ago
      The used car salesman mentioned that the car was in perfect working condition.
sunaookami 7mo ago
The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.
- xtracto 7mo ago
  I want a "reddit" like discussion board where: - Users don't have to pay to post links/stories - Users have to pay to comment on links/stories - Users have to pay to "upvote" comments. Downvotes don't exist - Each link "lives" a certain amount of time before it is locked. - After lock time, users who posted the link get "paid" a % of the collected $ comments/upvotes. Comments that are upvoted also earn $ proportionally to the upvotes. Hashcash was conceived to solve automated spam/email. Participating in a discussion must cost something, that's the only way bots and spam will get partially stopped. Or, if they start to optimize to get "the most votes", then so be it, their content will increase in quality.
  - fragmede 7mo ago
    What's stopping you from building it yourself?
  - 0gs 7mo ago
    +1 let's make this
  - craftkiller 7mo ago
    It seems like that would lead to a proliferation of ragebait, deliberately controversial posts, and overly simplistic articles to attract the greatest amount of comments. I frequently see deeply technical high-value posts on HN with very few comments but each thread about politics ends up getting hundreds of comments.
  - toomuchtodo 7mo ago
duckkg5 7mo ago
Digg may have a bot problem but Reddit isn't far behind. So many subreddits are full of slop that they've become useless and/ or completely unreliable. What's an actual viable solution to this kind of thing? CATPCHAs aren't it. Maybe micro-fees to actually post things would discourage bot posting? I really don't know. Seems like it's just dead internet all over the place these days.
- direwolf20 7mo ago
  Without irony: accept the death of the internet, and touch grass
tannhaeuser 7mo ago
Is that the whole story? Why isn't reddit overrun by bots then (or are they?), and why wouldn't basic proof-of-work techniques fence against bots? Since they started out just in January, isn't it plausible to assume they didn't meet their target user figures and investors jumped ship?
- mikeocool 7mo ago
  Reddit very much is.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 7mo ago
  Go to any career subreddit and it's almost entirely LLM- generated rage bait. Never mention political subreddits, those have been gamed for years.
- geenat 7mo ago
  On reddit you can downvote spam, so I don't think it survives on the populated reddits.
- pndy 7mo ago
  Surely that's what happen. They probably couldn't compete with reddit at this point and bots were a secondary issue. Hoping that the interest will develop on its own, partially by the brand knowledge among older users wasn't enough. It's been over a decade now and reddit despite of own exodus that happen recently still remains the default social link aggregator, and a global multi-forum. Not mention that younger generations prefer different kind of platforms and this largely-text based site might be not attractive to them at all
grey-area 7mo ago
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product. Hmm... > We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. What does this even mean? How many metaphors can it mix up in one paragraph? Can't they write a blog post the old fashioned way, with feeling? Imagine reading a corporate blog post about being laid off which the founder couldn't even be bothered to write. Amazing how close to corporate newspeak chatgpt can get (prompt was the headings of this blog post), it has the same sort of blank say-nothing feeling of this blog post: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b4890e54ac819193f221351ea900a7 https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b4890e54ac819193f221351ea900a7
tsumnia 7mo ago
Damn. I still have faith that what a lot of us that migrated to new Digg envision is possible. Post pandemic Internet has choppier waters than before, but I'm going to try and keep a positive outlook and I look forward to their followup emails. Thanks for the fun this past year Digg.
amatecha 7mo ago
More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.
- al_borland 7mo ago
  I wonder if the old forum model would work. Instead of these mega-forum-platfroms, there are just small communities with a niche focus at their own URL. I suppose bots could find forums that use the most popular software and still make accounts and spam, but it would be much more obvious and less fruitful for someone to spam deck builders in Vancouver (something I saw often on Digg) on a forum that is focused on aquariums owners in the midwest.
  - gzread 7mo ago
    Spammers don't care if it's fruitful - they just run software that finds every forum and spams it. That's why you can block so many by asking "is an elephant big or small?" on the sign-up form.
  - rchaud 7mo ago
    Old forums still exist and work just fine without any CEOs pontificating about "community". I'm on plenty of niche interest boards built on PHPbb, Xenforo and Discourse. Chronologically ordered discussions, RSS support, no algorithmic "For You" bullshit. Build it and they will come.
    - al_borland 7mo ago
      I was on a lot of them 20-ish years ago. They all shutdown with the advent of Facebook Groups. I tried spinning up a Facebook Group to keep the crew together, as we had talked daily on one of those forums for nearly a decade, but it didn’t see much action and died out. A friend tried to start a new forum a few years ago based on his current hobby. It had some decent traction and even led to in-person events, but seemed cyclical based on the season, and I noticed about a year ago he shut it down. I’m currently on one old school forum, but I’m not super into the niche, so my visits are infrequent.
valeg 7mo ago
"Morbius" of social news aggregators
cable2600 7mo ago
Did they have a working business plan? Step 1: Copy Reddit Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit!
- rchaud 7mo ago
  Step 0: acquire the company through a leveraged buyout by the CEO's own private equity firm [0] Step 1: speed-run into the ground while loading it up with the debt of the purchase price and paying yourself management fees. Step 2: close up shop, write down the loss and reduce tax liability for next year? [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/digg-launches-its-new-reddit-rival-to-the-public/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/digg-launches-its-new-redd...
al_borland 7mo ago
That didn't last long. I'm not sure I want to invest my time again if/when they relaunch. I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.
thm 7mo ago
https://flipso.com https://flipso.com might be an alternative.
- atulseth22 7mo ago
  [dead]
pacomerh 7mo ago
It's a shame, the intention is still there, if they decide to come back I'll give it another shot. Btw, why are we publishing simple static pages at ~2.84 MB compressed.
- cbg0 7mo ago
  Those 100 npm packages won't load themselves.
jdprgm 7mo ago
This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch? There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?
- latexr 7mo ago
  > Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? Two months, according to The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/tech/894803/digg-beta-shutdown-layoffs-ai https://www.theverge.com/tech/894803/digg-beta-shutdown-layo... This is particularly embarrassing since from what I recall they were all in on AI with the new website, so to shut it down so fast because of it…
  - Balgair 7mo ago
    Fail Fast I guess!
- solus_factor 7mo ago
  They were pretty clear about it - they screwed up by underestimating the scale of the problems. It's better to admit your mistake quickly and try to fix things.
mmaunder 7mo ago
Cheapest four letter domain on Earth at this point, given the negative value of the business and brand.
crjohns648 7mo ago
I stopped using Digg a long long time ago. It just felt too slow to get the news I care about. I was an avid Slashdot user way back in the day, but the site was basically the same throughout the day, and I wanted faster updates. Digg did this perfectly for a time, but eventually I migrated entirely to Reddit (even before whatever that drama was that caused a big exodus from Digg). I think Reddit right now is the sweet spot: up to date information, longer-term articles to read, and easy to catch up on things I missed. I was recently pressured to sign up for X (or Twitter or whatever), and I had to turn off all of the notifications since I was constantly spammed with "BREAKING: X RESPONDS TO Y ABOUT Z!!!!" Right now having Reddit for scrolling and Hackernews for articles+discussion feels like it works for me.
- ilikehurdles 7mo ago
  Reddit is flooded with AI slop. r/all currently has AI-generated text posts and articles on the first page. Upvoted because they're the typical orange man bad stuff, but LLM slop nonetheless. Assuming the engagement is organic, it's depressing how much of the site has no eye for this stuff. There are decent small communities I'm a part of but the trash feels like it is encroaching. And the notifications you describe are exactly reddit's notifications? "your comment received 10/20/50/100 upvotes!" "x responds to y about z" "News is trending"
  - ikr678 7mo ago
    If you use the old. site you don't get notifications.
akomtu 7mo ago
Registration by snail mail coming soon to most of the Internet?
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  That will never happen, so why bring it up?
- pndy 7mo ago
  I have a hazed memory of a site/software that was collecting postcards from around the world from their users - as a form of appreciation or something. That could become a kind of a solution here but then again, some already mentioned that wouldn't stop bad actors from running AI on their accounts anyway.
ThalesX 7mo ago
I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc. I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
- p2detar 7mo ago
  The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
  - _cenw 7mo ago
    And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action). It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
    - gzread 7mo ago
      I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.
frou_dh 7mo ago
You really gotta wonder how much value the "Digg" brand actually has, because the number of people that remember/care about the site from its original glory days is ever dwindling.
- 1123581321 7mo ago
  They’re only in their 40s and 50s. Not quite dead yet. :)
  - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
    But is there still any credit to mine there?
  - firmretention 7mo ago
    Hey some of us are in our late thirties! :)
aboardRat4 7mo ago
I am very curious where people who complain about the bots really get to see them. The only website which became totally useless for me after the general availability of LLMs is OkCupid. It's indeed dead. The rest are fine. What am I doing differently compared to everyone else? I'm regularly using: telegram, whatsapp, wechat, hackernews, lobsters, reddit, opennet.ru, vk.com, pornhub, youtube, odysee, libera.chat, arxiv, gmail, github, gitlab, sourcehut, codeberg, thepiratebay, rutracker, Anna's archive, xda-developers. facebook and twitter became broken for me, but not because of bots, rather because of the "smart feed" ("the algorithm"), which is hiding all posts of my friends and promotes incendiary garbage. In other words, I am seeing enshittification full-scale, but not the bots.
- gzread 7mo ago
  The only one I'd expect to see them is vk but maybe they can't make money doing it in Russia. YouTube comment sections are botted.
  - aboardRat4 7mo ago
    Ah, I never read YouTube comments. Nothing ever useful there.
lucianmarin 7mo ago
Subreply.com is working just fine, no AI agents. Spam accounts get deleted.
- emsixteen 7mo ago
  The legibility of that site is incredibly bad.
aboardRat4 7mo ago
Who wants to join me in writing an AGPL "antisocial network", which would be basically a convenient interface over rss-bridge, gnus, and deltachat?
- Andrex 7mo ago
  ...so you're reinventing usenet? ...I'm in.
gethly 7mo ago
> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. The loyalty users have to the communities they've already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely. This. So much This.
dwedge 7mo ago
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. Am I completely off base or did they use AI to write the post complaining about AI?
- insin 7mo ago
  > Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. Digg isn't just here again. It's gone again. The LLM style is like nails down a blackboard, are people blind to it or do they just not even read the stuff they're posting?
  - SoftTalker 7mo ago
    It's an LLM pattern but it was learned from training on these kinds of posts. People actually wrote that way, a lot, on the internet.
    - whamlastxmas 7mo ago
      I'd love to see an analysis of the prevalence of "it's not x, it's y" before and after 2022
  - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
    It is not an LLM style and you may want to reconsider your choice of allowing LLMs to live free in your head.
- darkstar999 7mo ago
  I don't know if they used AI but there were two "lastly" sentences right next to each other so at the very least it wasn't well edited.
- furyofantares 7mo ago
  The whole post is blatant LLM output.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
avazhi 7mo ago
lol 100% that entire page was written by an LLM. So fucking obvious and I’m so tired of reading the same awful writing style with all these corporate spiel rants. If you don’t care enough to write something yourself, just don’t even bother.
sourcecodeplz 7mo ago
Ah just let it go already, why keep ruining peoples memories...
rubyfan 7mo ago
The title doesn’t capture the mood of page. Maybe: Dead internet theory confirmed, Digg the latest victim
Havoc 7mo ago
Surprised anyone took the revive attempt seriously frankly.
pluc 7mo ago
"It may be that the purpose of your existence is merely to serve as a warning to others"
jonwinstanley 7mo ago
Wait, digg was back?
gregjw 7mo ago
god damn it i really enjoyed the new digg
RobRivera 7mo ago
>When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on. This 1000x times
mrcwinn 7mo ago
Everyone here seems focused on bots, as does the author of the post. The bigger problem (as also stated in the latter half of the post) is straight-forward: there product wasn't very good. Who is asking for digg to return, save for a very (very) tiny community of nostalgic diehards? Digg is irrelevant. That doesn't mean the internet is dead. It just means digg is.
figassis 7mo ago
The problem seems to be identify, a real problem, and looks like it will only get worse. Would creating a zero knowledge digital identity service (maybe centralized, maybe decentralized idk), where you prove you're human via your government id, passport, driver license, whatever, and the service can then attest you're a real person? So if I'm Digg, I would ask for some form of OAuth, the system would simply verify that you are in fact a human, and you would go on to create your account, forever verified. This way the identity service only does identity, it does not keep a record of where you are attesting, no logs, nothing, just your identity and basically saying yes/no, no sharing of ids or any other data. So people would go through one hurdle in life, to get this id, and reuse it for every service. Is this a worthwhile idea? I know many have tried, so help me poke holes in it.
- whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
  But they can just plug an AI into a verified account.
  - yakattak 7mo ago
    I don’t love the original idea because uploading identification is risky. You could just plug AI into a verified account but at least the vector is a single account instead of unbounded.
  - zulban 7mo ago
    But then if the AI is detected that person can be permanently banned. No more AI. No new accounts.
    - hrimfaxi 7mo ago
      So if someone compromises your identity they can unperson you? How will the AI be detected? By another AI?
      - zulban 7mo ago
        "So if someone compromises your identity they can unperson you?" You've identified a problem that unrelated systems also have. Like banks and identity theft. This solution isn't responsible for causing that problem. "How will the AI be detected? By another AI?" However a platform likes to. Let the best platform win.
vehemenz 7mo ago
I'm somewhat relieved. I didn't invest much effort into my community, but I had an amazing, top-level name and over 1000 members. Moderation was really hard. We didn't have AI posters, but there were persistent posters who were extremely annoying (mostly in their post volume and long-windedness) while still following the rules. I was really trying a hands-off approach with moderation, and it seemed to be working for the most part. It's all moot now though.
IAmGraydon 7mo ago
This is why identity verification is going to become mandatory for anyone who wants to participate in these kinds of sites. If you want to blame someone for it, blame humanity. I reluctantly will say that I welcome it if it would bring the dead internet back to life.
zeusdclxvi 7mo ago
I downloaded the mobile app, and now it's just a login screen that doesn't work
thecarbonista 7mo ago
[flagged]
wycy 7mo ago
This kind of makes the Digg team look like a joke. Rebuilding was always going to be hard, but I think this kills any chance of building it up a third time since no one can take it seriously.
- tommoor 7mo ago
  Digg v3 was in 2006, this is at least v5 :)
  - Andrex 7mo ago
    I think there was a v4 that attempted to bridge the gap between v3 and v4. Then v5 was when it wasn't curated at all and just a generic news aggregator. So this is v6 I guess.
mvkel 7mo ago
The patterns were there if you knew to look for them. The original Digg excepted, Kevin Rose's attention span is extremely limited. He will give something ~3-4 months of attention before (apparently) getting bored and wanting to move on to something else. Up until that point, he will be an unrelenting hype man of whatever his attention is lasered on at that moment. Then the hype posts start to drift. They show up once every few days, then once a week, then stop entirely. Any criticism or skepticism is considered a buzz kill in the cloud of good vibes only. A few months later, a dramatic explainer post arrives (underestimating the cold start problem? Really??), outlining why the idea didn't work and why the next one will be better, for sure, for real. This (AI generated) note from the current CEO paints an optimistic picture, but the most likely outcome will be that Digg simply doesn't launch. It's sustained on the nostalgic vapors of the old guard, not renewed by a replenished sense of purpose, or connection. I'd say I'd love to be proven wrong, but I personally question the utility of a Web 2.0 social network phoenixing itself. We have endured a decade+ of originality being buffed out of web products, most now resembling variations of Bootstrap and shadcn in service of dev convenience and getting rich quicker. Surely in the age of vibe coding, we can afford to take creative risks again, and think of something new.
- r0fl 7mo ago
  Milk Moonbirds Digg Too comfortable with money in the bank to give full attention to a new venture. I'm done falling for the Kevin Rose hype train. Long time fan but this is just pathetic.
  - stringfood 7mo ago
    I think anyone with tens of millions of dollars would find it hard to compete in the business world - they should stay in their garden with their rare plants
    - mvkel 7mo ago
      Having contempt for someone because of how much money they have (or have not) is not a virtuous trait
gorjusborg 7mo ago
From the article, verbatim: > We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away. Post title is misleading.
intellectronica 7mo ago
Remember when Reddit sold to Conde Nast for peanuts because Digg was going to win? :D
esskay 7mo ago
How many more times is it going to be rebuilt before they grasp the obvious bit - it's dead Dave.
pier25 7mo ago
I was excited about a Reddit alternative. I signed up months before the public beta. When I tried the public beta the new Digg website turned out to be a terribly bloated and slow NextJS app. Used it once and never again.
kevwil 7mo ago
I can appreciate how "building social is hard" in 2026, but is trying to be social on the internet still a worthy goal? The world has such problems with isolation and distrust that I'm not sure "online" is the solution. If Digg can do something different and help heal the world, more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. That's not a slight to Digg, but more a comment on the slipping mental health of the world.
irenetusuq 7mo ago
[dead]
jzig 7mo ago
> None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on. What is HN doing differently then?
- pixl97 7mo ago
  A lot of banning for one, along with getting rid of most politics and off topic stuff. Issue is we are seeing a ton of AI stuff getting posted so it's a losing battle.
  - papyrus9244 7mo ago
    I used to love HN. Lots of interesting stuff, great articles, novel projects. Now it feels like the frontpage is always around 70% LLM-related stuff. And not breakthrough research or projects, just "new Claude version X" and shit like that. Eternal September I guess?
    - pndy 7mo ago
      Try this: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/462650-hacker-news-filter https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/462650-hacker-news-filter - works pretty well. And once again, mandatory tags feature which you could either use to hide content or "subscribe" to would help here.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- dudeinhawaii 7mo ago
  It's not, hence the "don't post AI slop as your comment" posting a few days back that had 1000+ comments. Currently an unsolved problem - just stealthier on some platforms than others. Trigger the right topic on HN and the bots come out in-force together with humans sloppily copy/pasting LLM content.
- _zagj 7mo ago
  Did you not see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777 Look at how many updoots it has. Look at how many vacuous, enthusiastic replies it got. That post is especially egregious, but you see stuff like that on a lesser scale every day here, now. My favorite bit is when they go out of their way to shill specific plans/pricing, e.g.: > You really NEED the $200 Claude MAX plan.
busymom0 7mo ago
They fired significant number of people on a Friday.
vivzkestrel 7mo ago
- I am amazed that nobody has managed to come up with some revolutionary patented tech yet that can keep all the bots out or atleast 99% of them
giancarlostoro 7mo ago
At some point websites will just have to start charging an entry fee just to make it so if you really are yet another bot, at least you are paying for your stay. If you're not rate limiting your websites in 2026 on a per user level, you really need to, and figure out how to do it meaningfully. Raise limits for known human power users, especially if they pay to use your website. I wonder if the "short-term" "fix" is people will start to migrate off the web and into mobile, though none of this stops agents from using phone emulators, so kind of pointless, but I imagine crawling the web is easier for AI.
- zuccs 7mo ago
  Digg did charge a $5 fee (which they donated) for the beta.
  - gongleson 7mo ago
    I signed up and paid the $5 for the groundbreakers, which was last year and was pre-beta. We had a fair few months with just people who had donated before they launched the beta signups (which if I remember correctly didn't cost anything).
comet_browser 7mo ago
Digg's death in 2010 was essentially the original case study for how to destroy platform trust overnight. The v4 redesign wasn't just bad UX — it was a signal that the company had fundamentally changed its relationship with users. When Kevin Rose tried to "fix" the front page by giving power users less influence, he accidentally revealed that the whole value of Digg was those power users. What's interesting is that every subsequent attempt to revive Digg has been a bet that brand nostalgia outlasts institutional memory of why it failed. It doesn't.
user3939382 7mo ago
Make it $1 to register you’ll cut the audience by 90% and 95+ percent of those will be real people. Just a guess but based on some professional experience.
jrnichols 7mo ago
yet somehow after all these years... Fark is still the same. It has managed to avoid the onslaught of bots. At least to some extent. I'm amazed it's still around. Metafilter too, although it seems to have a LOT fewer comments nowadays.
Nifty3929 7mo ago
Pretty soon ads will have to target agents.

Digg is gone again

424 points by hammerbrostime 7mo ago

mmmlinux 7mo ago

That was fast.

Aspie96 7mo ago

Article: > Digg isn't going away. Post: > Digg is gone again.

hammerbrostime 7mo ago

Did you know it was back? They are blaming bots.

gnabgib 7mo ago
Sure.. Digg.com is back (118 points, 6 months ago, 209 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430
PaulHoule 7mo ago
"This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem."
jasonlotito 7mo ago
Yes.

PaulHoule 7mo ago

I think the [dupe] is a false alarm in the sense that they just put up a banner saying it is shut down and I think they were starting it up again back then.

dang 7mo ago
Ok, unduped now. Thanks!

MildlySerious 7mo ago

I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort. Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.

calmbonsai 7mo ago
Cutting staff does in no way mandate a un-notified and abrupt "hard-reset". They could at least put it in read-only mode for a short time and allow downloading of extant community content prior to a scheduled "reset day". This smacks of flailing leadership and zero respect for their target user demographic.
- amarant 7mo ago
  They say trust is their product, well,I guess they're sold out
  - calmbonsai 7mo ago
    In Digg's non-defense, Kevin Rose has been a serial-rug-puller for his entire career. See also Pownce, Milk, and Moonbirds. The only sustained business I'm aware of is Hodinkee.
    - al_borland 7mo ago
      Kevin Rose didn't start Hodinkee, he started Watchville years after Hodinkee was already well established. Watchville merged with Hodinkee, at which point he became the CEO for 2 years. From what I can tell Watchville was abandoned a few years ago.
- idatum 7mo ago
  > Digg's founder who started the company back in 2004 Their plan is to make the internet what is was 22 years ago.

andrewinardeer 7mo ago

Whatever happened to MrBabyMan?

dang 7mo ago

Related - others? Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments) Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments) Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments) Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments) Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)

bsimpson 7mo ago
Kevin Rose (original digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (a.k.a. kn0thing, original reddit founder) did an AMA recently about restarting digg (context so people don't have to click links)
- kawsper 7mo ago
  If someone wants to read the AMA, it is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qhf27j/alexis_ohanian_and_kevin_rose_here_to_talk_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qhf27j/alexis_ohania...
NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
> Digg.com Is Back - Jan 2026 Damn, that didn't take long at all...
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  Well, it's like two major LLM models ago?

ahmedfromtunis 7mo ago

I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read. I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me. The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.

bink 7mo ago
One of the things I always disliked about the original Digg was their threading. The slashdot like feed where the oldest comments were at the top and there was only one level of replies tended to encourage the "first" comments and harmed the quality of the discussion. I was glad to see it use a reddit-like comment thread for the new site, but it also meant there wasn't much reason to use it over reddit. I'm a bit surprised with Alexis' involvement they didn't anticipate the bot problem. Alexis left reddit several years ago but I'm sure he's still in touch with the folks who run the place. It would've been worth it to talk to them about the threats they currently face and how they deal with them.
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  Wasn’t part of the Reddit story was that they bootstrapped it with fake content?
  - bink 7mo ago
    Absolutely. They kinda brag about it now. But I think it was just the founders making multiple accounts. It sounds like the new Digg was worried about bots scaring people away from the site with thinly disguised ads.
- Andrex 7mo ago
  v3 introduced proper nested comments and filtering, problem was they were slow to load but even worse was the design. Just very bloated and padded and the information density dropped through the floor. (All based on very old memories.)

armchairhacker 7mo ago

> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed. Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.

iamdamian 7mo ago
>> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed. > Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI. This… seems like regular prose to me. What makes you say so confidently it was written by AI?
- armchairhacker 7mo ago
  There are more tells. Rule of three, short cliche sentences. > We know how frustrating this is, and we hope you'll give us another look once we have something to show, we’ll save your usernames! I think it's partly human. But ex: > Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. isn't a natural sentence.
  - troosevelt 7mo ago
    How is that not a natural sentence? I think people are reading into stuff. That's just good writing. Could it be generated? Sure. But there aren't the obvious tells you act like there are.
    - GeorgeWBasic 7mo ago
      "Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall." is a VERY ChatGPT way to write. It's not proof, but the parent is right that this smells a bit of AI writing.
      - 7mo ago

ivm 7mo ago

There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.

snapetom 7mo ago
They introduced user-created communities a few months ago. They had problems with squatting and splintering, which might have played a role in their annoucement.
gzread 7mo ago
Why doesn't that make sense?
- ivm 7mo ago
  Because there's no real discussion in such broad communities. Only jokes, generic replies, and silly fights. They're equivalent to comment sections on news sites.
  - gzread 7mo ago
    And it doesn't make sense to you that someone might make money from a platform without discussion?
  - pndy 7mo ago
    > They're equivalent to comment sections on news sites. In my country these are either gone or provided by facebook.

popalchemist 7mo ago

[flagged]

dgeiser13 7mo ago

Didn't Kevin Rose re-acquire Digg in the last year or so?

troosevelt 7mo ago
Yes, he did. Now he's gonna be the full-time CEO according to this.
al_borland 7mo ago
He and Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit) went in on it together.

multiplegeorges 7mo ago

Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.

cheschire 7mo ago
This leads to paid certifications from limited experts leading to political payoffs controlling the certifiers

sieabahlpark 7mo ago

[dead]

paride5745 7mo ago

Really annoying, I was starting to use it for a few niche communities instead of Reddit. If they relaunch, I hope they develop something integrated with the fediverse. I believe the time to build walled gardens is over, plugging with the fediverse might give them a running start to build something g together with the wide fediverse community, maybe something easier to use for non-techies and well moderated. We will see I guess…

ierukah 7mo ago
Well, most of the Threadiverse would block federation with digg if that were to happen, just like how it happened to threads.

JensenKarlsson 7mo ago

Community /books helped me track down a book I've been dying to reread for almost ten years now. Reddit failed the task, so did all other places I turned to. Cheers for that, and rip.

basisword 7mo ago

Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

So as predicted it wasn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage 6 months ago. And I will continue to die on the will die on the hill that Reddit only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. Alexis Ohanian still doesn't seem to have any clue that it was right-place-right-time and Kevin Rose seems to have not learned much either. Can we stop giving either anymore credibility? As with any social site it's the user base/community that helps pull thru darkness. And no one was really asking for this. Let sleeping dogs lie.

flomo 7mo ago
> legendary Digg slip up I wasn't a digg user, but this was done to combat 'voting rings' (bots), and the reddit migration was memed partially because it was/is far more open to manipulation. So at least their principles have been somewhat consistent.
jlarocco 7mo ago
I'm pretty sure 95% of the success of all internet and tech companies boils down to extreme luck and being in the right place at the right time. Any time one of the founders is giving advice, always take it with a huge grain of salt. Survivorship bias to the extreme.

keyboardJones 7mo ago

> We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away. I think the HN title needs adjusted

axus 7mo ago
"Digg is Just Resting"
- blitzar 7mo ago
  Digg has gone to live on a farm in the countryside where it can run around and play with aol, myspace and all the other websites. No you can't visit.

int32_64 7mo ago

I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.

ranger_danger 7mo ago
Why do you think people will stop at politics?
bsder 7mo ago
Erm, Brexit, anyone? You thinking that astroturfing only happens for US politics is dangerously naive.
pacomerh 7mo ago
Wouldn't that be almost impossible?. Politics affects our lives every day. Your comment suggests that you believe it doesn't affect yours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
- gzread 7mo ago
  Banning discussion of politics is an endorsement of the politics that are already happening. People think it's apolitical but it's not.
  - lordloki 7mo ago
    This sounds a lot like: You're either with us or against us, or you have nothing to fear is you have nothing to hide.
- troosevelt 7mo ago
  I've nver seen discussion of politics on forums do anything but turn into hate-filled, dogmatic posts which aren't productive at all. Every political thread here turns into the same takes and HN imagines itself as intellectually better than others. It's not interesting or productive. If talking about politics fixed things, why are politics worse today than they've ever been? There's no costs and no solutions to ranting about politics online. The vast majority of people do not want to get on a forum to escape their life to see every more or worse content about their daily lives. You're right, there needs to be some outlet but when people propose this it's because they are sick and tired of politics and the injection of them into everthing is not helping those politics, it just makes it worse. Tons of people aren't political creatures and want nothing to do with politicians. This notion that more politics will fix thing isn't born out by Reddit, X, the US Congress, Brexit, etc. It's too easy to divide and manipulate people.

jjcm 7mo ago

The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem. We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.

georgemcbay 7mo ago
> We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years. I don't believe there is any practical way to do it. Sure, there are ways to verify a human linked to a specific account exists in a one-off fashion, but for individual interactions you'll never know that it isn't an LLM reading and posting if they put even a small amount of effort to make it seem humanish.
r0fl 7mo ago
If your site creates more than $3 of value then I’ll happily setup 1000 bots a day and pay you the $2 per account every single day
- Andrex 7mo ago
  Supply and demand? He'd just up the charge in that case. It's cat-and-mouse but he's getting richer and richer while the value to you will be constantly in flux.

mikeocool 7mo ago

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it. Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma. And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic. Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?

dana321 7mo ago
That and most of the news being behind a paywall, which they can scrape anyway. The internet archive is my safe haven these days, i can go back and remember the old internet.
- mikeocool 7mo ago
  Ha yeah, I quite like the 2003 vintage.
bobsmooth 7mo ago
Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.
- georgeburdell 7mo ago
  4chan has bots too.
- seattle_spring 7mo ago
  Curious how you came to that conclusion. Anecdotally, places where you can slur to your heart's content like /r/conservative seem far more inundated with bots than other areas of Reddit. I feel like that's really saying something too, because Reddit has a really bad bot problem overall.

softwaredoug 7mo ago

They literally just went public in Jan. Building it back up was going to take years I don’t understand what kind of shenanigans transpired. But it seems there’s more to in than “bots” If it truly is bots, maybe a private invite only social network is the way to go.

hazelnut 7mo ago

Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin. To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it. Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.

gagik_co 7mo ago
Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.
- hazelnut 7mo ago
  The Reddit CEO mentioned that the community thrives when humans talk to humans - and not with AI slop. He also said they are working on efforts to identify automated accounts. https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-human-place-on-internet-ai-slop-2026-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-hum...
  - trevwilson 7mo ago
    Reddit can't even manage to regularly identify and ban bots that copy previously popular posts/comments verbatim, and that's a much easier problem than modern LLM-based bots.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 7mo ago
    Actions speak more than words, especially true for CEOs.
  - blitzar 7mo ago
    The used car salesman mentioned that the car was in perfect working condition.

sunaookami 7mo ago

The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.

xtracto 7mo ago
I want a "reddit" like discussion board where: - Users don't have to pay to post links/stories - Users have to pay to comment on links/stories - Users have to pay to "upvote" comments. Downvotes don't exist - Each link "lives" a certain amount of time before it is locked. - After lock time, users who posted the link get "paid" a % of the collected $ comments/upvotes. Comments that are upvoted also earn $ proportionally to the upvotes. Hashcash was conceived to solve automated spam/email. Participating in a discussion must cost something, that's the only way bots and spam will get partially stopped. Or, if they start to optimize to get "the most votes", then so be it, their content will increase in quality.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  What's stopping you from building it yourself?
- 0gs 7mo ago
  +1 let's make this
- craftkiller 7mo ago
  It seems like that would lead to a proliferation of ragebait, deliberately controversial posts, and overly simplistic articles to attract the greatest amount of comments. I frequently see deeply technical high-value posts on HN with very few comments but each thread about politics ends up getting hundreds of comments.
- toomuchtodo 7mo ago

duckkg5 7mo ago

Digg may have a bot problem but Reddit isn't far behind. So many subreddits are full of slop that they've become useless and/ or completely unreliable. What's an actual viable solution to this kind of thing? CATPCHAs aren't it. Maybe micro-fees to actually post things would discourage bot posting? I really don't know. Seems like it's just dead internet all over the place these days.

direwolf20 7mo ago
Without irony: accept the death of the internet, and touch grass

tannhaeuser 7mo ago

Is that the whole story? Why isn't reddit overrun by bots then (or are they?), and why wouldn't basic proof-of-work techniques fence against bots? Since they started out just in January, isn't it plausible to assume they didn't meet their target user figures and investors jumped ship?

mikeocool 7mo ago
Reddit very much is.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 7mo ago
Go to any career subreddit and it's almost entirely LLM- generated rage bait. Never mention political subreddits, those have been gamed for years.
geenat 7mo ago
On reddit you can downvote spam, so I don't think it survives on the populated reddits.
pndy 7mo ago
Surely that's what happen. They probably couldn't compete with reddit at this point and bots were a secondary issue. Hoping that the interest will develop on its own, partially by the brand knowledge among older users wasn't enough. It's been over a decade now and reddit despite of own exodus that happen recently still remains the default social link aggregator, and a global multi-forum. Not mention that younger generations prefer different kind of platforms and this largely-text based site might be not attractive to them at all

grey-area 7mo ago

> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product. Hmm... > We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. What does this even mean? How many metaphors can it mix up in one paragraph? Can't they write a blog post the old fashioned way, with feeling? Imagine reading a corporate blog post about being laid off which the founder couldn't even be bothered to write. Amazing how close to corporate newspeak chatgpt can get (prompt was the headings of this blog post), it has the same sort of blank say-nothing feeling of this blog post: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b4890e54ac819193f221351ea900a7 https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b4890e54ac819193f221351ea900a7

tsumnia 7mo ago

Damn. I still have faith that what a lot of us that migrated to new Digg envision is possible. Post pandemic Internet has choppier waters than before, but I'm going to try and keep a positive outlook and I look forward to their followup emails. Thanks for the fun this past year Digg.

amatecha 7mo ago

More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.

al_borland 7mo ago
I wonder if the old forum model would work. Instead of these mega-forum-platfroms, there are just small communities with a niche focus at their own URL. I suppose bots could find forums that use the most popular software and still make accounts and spam, but it would be much more obvious and less fruitful for someone to spam deck builders in Vancouver (something I saw often on Digg) on a forum that is focused on aquariums owners in the midwest.
- gzread 7mo ago
  Spammers don't care if it's fruitful - they just run software that finds every forum and spams it. That's why you can block so many by asking "is an elephant big or small?" on the sign-up form.
- rchaud 7mo ago
  Old forums still exist and work just fine without any CEOs pontificating about "community". I'm on plenty of niche interest boards built on PHPbb, Xenforo and Discourse. Chronologically ordered discussions, RSS support, no algorithmic "For You" bullshit. Build it and they will come.
  - al_borland 7mo ago
    I was on a lot of them 20-ish years ago. They all shutdown with the advent of Facebook Groups. I tried spinning up a Facebook Group to keep the crew together, as we had talked daily on one of those forums for nearly a decade, but it didn’t see much action and died out. A friend tried to start a new forum a few years ago based on his current hobby. It had some decent traction and even led to in-person events, but seemed cyclical based on the season, and I noticed about a year ago he shut it down. I’m currently on one old school forum, but I’m not super into the niche, so my visits are infrequent.

valeg 7mo ago

"Morbius" of social news aggregators

cable2600 7mo ago

Did they have a working business plan? Step 1: Copy Reddit Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit!

rchaud 7mo ago
Step 0: acquire the company through a leveraged buyout by the CEO's own private equity firm [0] Step 1: speed-run into the ground while loading it up with the debt of the purchase price and paying yourself management fees. Step 2: close up shop, write down the loss and reduce tax liability for next year? [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/digg-launches-its-new-reddit-rival-to-the-public/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/14/digg-launches-its-new-redd...

al_borland 7mo ago

That didn't last long. I'm not sure I want to invest my time again if/when they relaunch. I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.

thm 7mo ago

https://flipso.com https://flipso.com might be an alternative.

atulseth22 7mo ago
[dead]

pacomerh 7mo ago

It's a shame, the intention is still there, if they decide to come back I'll give it another shot. Btw, why are we publishing simple static pages at ~2.84 MB compressed.

cbg0 7mo ago
Those 100 npm packages won't load themselves.

jdprgm 7mo ago

This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch? There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?

latexr 7mo ago
> Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? Two months, according to The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/tech/894803/digg-beta-shutdown-layoffs-ai https://www.theverge.com/tech/894803/digg-beta-shutdown-layo... This is particularly embarrassing since from what I recall they were all in on AI with the new website, so to shut it down so fast because of it…
- Balgair 7mo ago
  Fail Fast I guess!
solus_factor 7mo ago
They were pretty clear about it - they screwed up by underestimating the scale of the problems. It's better to admit your mistake quickly and try to fix things.

mmaunder 7mo ago

Cheapest four letter domain on Earth at this point, given the negative value of the business and brand.

crjohns648 7mo ago

I stopped using Digg a long long time ago. It just felt too slow to get the news I care about. I was an avid Slashdot user way back in the day, but the site was basically the same throughout the day, and I wanted faster updates. Digg did this perfectly for a time, but eventually I migrated entirely to Reddit (even before whatever that drama was that caused a big exodus from Digg). I think Reddit right now is the sweet spot: up to date information, longer-term articles to read, and easy to catch up on things I missed. I was recently pressured to sign up for X (or Twitter or whatever), and I had to turn off all of the notifications since I was constantly spammed with "BREAKING: X RESPONDS TO Y ABOUT Z!!!!" Right now having Reddit for scrolling and Hackernews for articles+discussion feels like it works for me.

ilikehurdles 7mo ago
Reddit is flooded with AI slop. r/all currently has AI-generated text posts and articles on the first page. Upvoted because they're the typical orange man bad stuff, but LLM slop nonetheless. Assuming the engagement is organic, it's depressing how much of the site has no eye for this stuff. There are decent small communities I'm a part of but the trash feels like it is encroaching. And the notifications you describe are exactly reddit's notifications? "your comment received 10/20/50/100 upvotes!" "x responds to y about z" "News is trending"
- ikr678 7mo ago
  If you use the old. site you don't get notifications.

akomtu 7mo ago

Registration by snail mail coming soon to most of the Internet?

NetMageSCW 7mo ago
That will never happen, so why bring it up?
pndy 7mo ago
I have a hazed memory of a site/software that was collecting postcards from around the world from their users - as a form of appreciation or something. That could become a kind of a solution here but then again, some already mentioned that wouldn't stop bad actors from running AI on their accounts anyway.

ThalesX 7mo ago

I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc. I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.

p2detar 7mo ago
The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
- _cenw 7mo ago
  And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action). It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
  - gzread 7mo ago
    I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.

frou_dh 7mo ago

You really gotta wonder how much value the "Digg" brand actually has, because the number of people that remember/care about the site from its original glory days is ever dwindling.

1123581321 7mo ago
They’re only in their 40s and 50s. Not quite dead yet. :)
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  But is there still any credit to mine there?
- firmretention 7mo ago
  Hey some of us are in our late thirties! :)

aboardRat4 7mo ago

I am very curious where people who complain about the bots really get to see them. The only website which became totally useless for me after the general availability of LLMs is OkCupid. It's indeed dead. The rest are fine. What am I doing differently compared to everyone else? I'm regularly using: telegram, whatsapp, wechat, hackernews, lobsters, reddit, opennet.ru, vk.com, pornhub, youtube, odysee, libera.chat, arxiv, gmail, github, gitlab, sourcehut, codeberg, thepiratebay, rutracker, Anna's archive, xda-developers. facebook and twitter became broken for me, but not because of bots, rather because of the "smart feed" ("the algorithm"), which is hiding all posts of my friends and promotes incendiary garbage. In other words, I am seeing enshittification full-scale, but not the bots.

gzread 7mo ago
The only one I'd expect to see them is vk but maybe they can't make money doing it in Russia. YouTube comment sections are botted.
- aboardRat4 7mo ago
  Ah, I never read YouTube comments. Nothing ever useful there.

lucianmarin 7mo ago

Subreply.com is working just fine, no AI agents. Spam accounts get deleted.

emsixteen 7mo ago
The legibility of that site is incredibly bad.

aboardRat4 7mo ago

Who wants to join me in writing an AGPL "antisocial network", which would be basically a convenient interface over rss-bridge, gnus, and deltachat?

Andrex 7mo ago
...so you're reinventing usenet? ...I'm in.

gethly 7mo ago

> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. The loyalty users have to the communities they've already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely. This. So much This.

dwedge 7mo ago

> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. Am I completely off base or did they use AI to write the post complaining about AI?

insin 7mo ago
> Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. Digg isn't just here again. It's gone again. The LLM style is like nails down a blackboard, are people blind to it or do they just not even read the stuff they're posting?
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  It's an LLM pattern but it was learned from training on these kinds of posts. People actually wrote that way, a lot, on the internet.
  - whamlastxmas 7mo ago
    I'd love to see an analysis of the prevalence of "it's not x, it's y" before and after 2022
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  It is not an LLM style and you may want to reconsider your choice of allowing LLMs to live free in your head.
darkstar999 7mo ago
I don't know if they used AI but there were two "lastly" sentences right next to each other so at the very least it wasn't well edited.
furyofantares 7mo ago
The whole post is blatant LLM output.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

avazhi 7mo ago

lol 100% that entire page was written by an LLM. So fucking obvious and I’m so tired of reading the same awful writing style with all these corporate spiel rants. If you don’t care enough to write something yourself, just don’t even bother.

sourcecodeplz 7mo ago

Ah just let it go already, why keep ruining peoples memories...

rubyfan 7mo ago

The title doesn’t capture the mood of page. Maybe: Dead internet theory confirmed, Digg the latest victim

Havoc 7mo ago

Surprised anyone took the revive attempt seriously frankly.

pluc 7mo ago

"It may be that the purpose of your existence is merely to serve as a warning to others"

jonwinstanley 7mo ago

Wait, digg was back?

gregjw 7mo ago

god damn it i really enjoyed the new digg

RobRivera 7mo ago

>When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on. This 1000x times

mrcwinn 7mo ago

Everyone here seems focused on bots, as does the author of the post. The bigger problem (as also stated in the latter half of the post) is straight-forward: there product wasn't very good. Who is asking for digg to return, save for a very (very) tiny community of nostalgic diehards? Digg is irrelevant. That doesn't mean the internet is dead. It just means digg is.

figassis 7mo ago

The problem seems to be identify, a real problem, and looks like it will only get worse. Would creating a zero knowledge digital identity service (maybe centralized, maybe decentralized idk), where you prove you're human via your government id, passport, driver license, whatever, and the service can then attest you're a real person? So if I'm Digg, I would ask for some form of OAuth, the system would simply verify that you are in fact a human, and you would go on to create your account, forever verified. This way the identity service only does identity, it does not keep a record of where you are attesting, no logs, nothing, just your identity and basically saying yes/no, no sharing of ids or any other data. So people would go through one hurdle in life, to get this id, and reuse it for every service. Is this a worthwhile idea? I know many have tried, so help me poke holes in it.

whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
But they can just plug an AI into a verified account.
- yakattak 7mo ago
  I don’t love the original idea because uploading identification is risky. You could just plug AI into a verified account but at least the vector is a single account instead of unbounded.
- zulban 7mo ago
  But then if the AI is detected that person can be permanently banned. No more AI. No new accounts.
  - hrimfaxi 7mo ago
    So if someone compromises your identity they can unperson you? How will the AI be detected? By another AI?
    - zulban 7mo ago
      "So if someone compromises your identity they can unperson you?" You've identified a problem that unrelated systems also have. Like banks and identity theft. This solution isn't responsible for causing that problem. "How will the AI be detected? By another AI?" However a platform likes to. Let the best platform win.

vehemenz 7mo ago

I'm somewhat relieved. I didn't invest much effort into my community, but I had an amazing, top-level name and over 1000 members. Moderation was really hard. We didn't have AI posters, but there were persistent posters who were extremely annoying (mostly in their post volume and long-windedness) while still following the rules. I was really trying a hands-off approach with moderation, and it seemed to be working for the most part. It's all moot now though.

IAmGraydon 7mo ago

This is why identity verification is going to become mandatory for anyone who wants to participate in these kinds of sites. If you want to blame someone for it, blame humanity. I reluctantly will say that I welcome it if it would bring the dead internet back to life.

zeusdclxvi 7mo ago

I downloaded the mobile app, and now it's just a login screen that doesn't work

thecarbonista 7mo ago

[flagged]

wycy 7mo ago

This kind of makes the Digg team look like a joke. Rebuilding was always going to be hard, but I think this kills any chance of building it up a third time since no one can take it seriously.

tommoor 7mo ago
Digg v3 was in 2006, this is at least v5 :)
- Andrex 7mo ago
  I think there was a v4 that attempted to bridge the gap between v3 and v4. Then v5 was when it wasn't curated at all and just a generic news aggregator. So this is v6 I guess.

mvkel 7mo ago

The patterns were there if you knew to look for them. The original Digg excepted, Kevin Rose's attention span is extremely limited. He will give something ~3-4 months of attention before (apparently) getting bored and wanting to move on to something else. Up until that point, he will be an unrelenting hype man of whatever his attention is lasered on at that moment. Then the hype posts start to drift. They show up once every few days, then once a week, then stop entirely. Any criticism or skepticism is considered a buzz kill in the cloud of good vibes only. A few months later, a dramatic explainer post arrives (underestimating the cold start problem? Really??), outlining why the idea didn't work and why the next one will be better, for sure, for real. This (AI generated) note from the current CEO paints an optimistic picture, but the most likely outcome will be that Digg simply doesn't launch. It's sustained on the nostalgic vapors of the old guard, not renewed by a replenished sense of purpose, or connection. I'd say I'd love to be proven wrong, but I personally question the utility of a Web 2.0 social network phoenixing itself. We have endured a decade+ of originality being buffed out of web products, most now resembling variations of Bootstrap and shadcn in service of dev convenience and getting rich quicker. Surely in the age of vibe coding, we can afford to take creative risks again, and think of something new.

r0fl 7mo ago
Milk Moonbirds Digg Too comfortable with money in the bank to give full attention to a new venture. I'm done falling for the Kevin Rose hype train. Long time fan but this is just pathetic.
- stringfood 7mo ago
  I think anyone with tens of millions of dollars would find it hard to compete in the business world - they should stay in their garden with their rare plants
  - mvkel 7mo ago
    Having contempt for someone because of how much money they have (or have not) is not a virtuous trait

gorjusborg 7mo ago

From the article, verbatim: > We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away. Post title is misleading.

intellectronica 7mo ago

Remember when Reddit sold to Conde Nast for peanuts because Digg was going to win? :D

esskay 7mo ago

How many more times is it going to be rebuilt before they grasp the obvious bit - it's dead Dave.

pier25 7mo ago

I was excited about a Reddit alternative. I signed up months before the public beta. When I tried the public beta the new Digg website turned out to be a terribly bloated and slow NextJS app. Used it once and never again.

kevwil 7mo ago

I can appreciate how "building social is hard" in 2026, but is trying to be social on the internet still a worthy goal? The world has such problems with isolation and distrust that I'm not sure "online" is the solution. If Digg can do something different and help heal the world, more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. That's not a slight to Digg, but more a comment on the slipping mental health of the world.

irenetusuq 7mo ago

[dead]

jzig 7mo ago

> None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on. What is HN doing differently then?

pixl97 7mo ago
A lot of banning for one, along with getting rid of most politics and off topic stuff. Issue is we are seeing a ton of AI stuff getting posted so it's a losing battle.
- papyrus9244 7mo ago
  I used to love HN. Lots of interesting stuff, great articles, novel projects. Now it feels like the frontpage is always around 70% LLM-related stuff. And not breakthrough research or projects, just "new Claude version X" and shit like that. Eternal September I guess?
  - pndy 7mo ago
    Try this: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/462650-hacker-news-filter https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/462650-hacker-news-filter - works pretty well. And once again, mandatory tags feature which you could either use to hide content or "subscribe" to would help here.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
dudeinhawaii 7mo ago
It's not, hence the "don't post AI slop as your comment" posting a few days back that had 1000+ comments. Currently an unsolved problem - just stealthier on some platforms than others. Trigger the right topic on HN and the bots come out in-force together with humans sloppily copy/pasting LLM content.
_zagj 7mo ago
Did you not see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47282777 Look at how many updoots it has. Look at how many vacuous, enthusiastic replies it got. That post is especially egregious, but you see stuff like that on a lesser scale every day here, now. My favorite bit is when they go out of their way to shill specific plans/pricing, e.g.: > You really NEED the $200 Claude MAX plan.

busymom0 7mo ago

They fired significant number of people on a Friday.

vivzkestrel 7mo ago

- I am amazed that nobody has managed to come up with some revolutionary patented tech yet that can keep all the bots out or atleast 99% of them

giancarlostoro 7mo ago

At some point websites will just have to start charging an entry fee just to make it so if you really are yet another bot, at least you are paying for your stay. If you're not rate limiting your websites in 2026 on a per user level, you really need to, and figure out how to do it meaningfully. Raise limits for known human power users, especially if they pay to use your website. I wonder if the "short-term" "fix" is people will start to migrate off the web and into mobile, though none of this stops agents from using phone emulators, so kind of pointless, but I imagine crawling the web is easier for AI.

zuccs 7mo ago
Digg did charge a $5 fee (which they donated) for the beta.
- gongleson 7mo ago
  I signed up and paid the $5 for the groundbreakers, which was last year and was pre-beta. We had a fair few months with just people who had donated before they launched the beta signups (which if I remember correctly didn't cost anything).

comet_browser 7mo ago

Digg's death in 2010 was essentially the original case study for how to destroy platform trust overnight. The v4 redesign wasn't just bad UX — it was a signal that the company had fundamentally changed its relationship with users. When Kevin Rose tried to "fix" the front page by giving power users less influence, he accidentally revealed that the whole value of Digg was those power users. What's interesting is that every subsequent attempt to revive Digg has been a bet that brand nostalgia outlasts institutional memory of why it failed. It doesn't.

user3939382 7mo ago

Make it $1 to register you’ll cut the audience by 90% and 95+ percent of those will be real people. Just a guess but based on some professional experience.

jrnichols 7mo ago

yet somehow after all these years... Fark is still the same. It has managed to avoid the onslaught of bots. At least to some extent. I'm amazed it's still around. Metafilter too, although it seems to have a LOT fewer comments nowadays.

Nifty3929 7mo ago

Pretty soon ads will have to target agents.