Digg failed because they weren't listening to what the users wanted. Reddit has been doing the same thing for a long time, and there's a large number of people looking for somewhere to migrate to. It'd be hilarious if New Digg becomes that, but I'm pretty skeptical that New Digg is going to be any better. What little I've seen about New Digg talks about crypto, AI, and "Gems" you can earn which is far from a good sign.
I’m not sure that Reddit doing the same thing is a big a problem as random acts of admin overreach and the looming threat of old Reddit going away. The moment that happens, I’m done with the service. New Reddit is a prime example of enshittification.
I think that social media has been a massive experiment where we asked, what if we let capital interests subvert our desire for community to get us to watch ads? And we have learned that it’s just not a good idea. I think perhaps Digg was one of the better ones but I solemnly wish social media was mostly illegal, especially advertising based, for profit sites.
I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
Im not sure that advertising specifically is the issue.
I think a lot of the ills of social media are ills of the medium itself... once it reaches "everyone scale," game theory maturity and whatnot.
Anyway the way past it is probably to go past it... and onto the next medium. Back is rarely an available option.
On that note... its curious that Digg now describes itself as a "community platform," not a social network. Ironic, considering they bought the name "digg."
This doesn't make sense, since it's advertisers who are the ones putting pressure on sites like Twitter to stop spreading extremist content.
The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Wrong take. The social or political positions that advertisers take are all strategically calculated to maximize sales and they take those position regardless of the advertising platform.
Correct take: Monetization pressure creates engagement pressure which is unnatural for human social communities outside of temporary fads and social upheaval events. In social terms Facebook, X, Truth Social... are thirsty and can only continue to grow their revenue share if they convince you to be thirsty too.
People forget that there a billionaires at the helm of these companies putting their feet on the scale of what is shown.
They are not impartial nor are the benevolent. They have a vested interest in influencing the content people are exposed to. They can hide behind the “social” components and say “we’re innocent here we just show the content people engage with” meanwhile they directly influence what content gets a chance to be interacted with.
it doesn't even matter. I've run a small community at a loss, for "fun", for the better part of a decade and people just go elsewhere when the winds change and they find themselves no longer in an echo chamber they agree with. everyone just wants to shout into the void and be validated and it doesn't even matter who the audience is
> if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly.
Agree completely
> without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.
Disagree: without ads, moving the needle from “quite enjoyable” to “utterly addicting” doesn’t make your site twice as profitable. With ads it does. So the need that all social media has today, to promote ragebait and drive them to obsession is far, far less if you weren’t on an ad-based monetization.
> pressure to moderate content
We didn’t have censors in every living room in America before FB making sure you don’t say anything doubleplus ungood and yet political discourse is horrifying now compared to before. I question the need for “moderators” to combat wrongthink by deleting it.
Hackernews remains mostly ok by focusing on a niche that’s always been easy on the Internet for obvious reasons: tech. Once it strays even one step away, like the intersection of tech and policy, or the intersections of science and humanities, guaranteed you will get some totally ridiculous takes.
And, HN can only not-rely on advertising because it exists as a sort of funny pseudo-advertisement thing for some startup incubator.
You are definitely right there, reddit has become more annoying because even old reddit now has chat pinging me all the time. And every single time I post a comment on my iPhone reddit I get reminded to subscribe to notifications for comment replies.
I've thought about how I'd build one and I keep landing on content based ads, give me ads that target page content. You are already interested in the content you see, so why not. Generic "show everyone you can" ads should also be fine, and slightly discounted. But I do wonder if it would even be enough to keep the lights on.
The trouble is that ad-based business models incentivize maximizing engagement, because more engagement gives you more places to put ads. It turns out maximizing engagement is the primary driver of all of the bad things about social media, and honestly the modern internet as a whole. Regardless of how the ads are chosen, ad-based models will always end up at the same place: pushing extremist content in order to maximize engagement.
you'd think Reddit could handle this, since subreddits are very narrow and coupled to interests. but I guess you'd also think a PC review site would be able to do the same thing and not show car ads or etc
The old internet used to be like this, you'd pick the type of ads you wanted on your site, so a lot of sites had ads that looked like the content on the site.
Digg was more of a news aggregator than “social media” which I see as user generated posts + profile interactions. As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.
I do think you are right about the rest as it applies to Twitter and Facebook.
Social Media and News aggregation are not entirely different things, right? I mean, in the sense that News (and other link) Aggregation was one of the things that grew into Social Media. I think you are right to say it is more of an aggregation site, but also it’s worth nothing that in Digg’s heyday, Social Media was barely a thing.
Social networking was a thing. Social networking, link aggregation, discussion boards—it’s like pouring milk, hot sauce, and vodka into a vat to get Social Media.
Digg rather famously did have both followers and "influencers", though not in quite the same sense that those creatures are known today. Arguably its failure to limit the impact of both are what led to the forms we see today.
There's been an awful lot written about all of this over the years, much of it overly simplistic and some of it just straight-up wrong; we all want to believe that we're just plain smarter than the ancients, even when those ancients were us.
If you're interested in (ahem) digging into this, start by searching for things like "Digg voting network".
> I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
It's also worth considering that you could just be part of the right demographic that finds it palatable. I know in certain circles the HN groupthink on women's issues for example are seen as a meme.
I think algorithmically curated social media feeds should be regulated the way we do tobacco. Massive education campaigns and obnoxious labeling laws so that everyone and their dog knows it's toxic. Maybe take away their safe harbor while we're at it. The algorithm is a form of editorial control after all, so it can no longer be argued that these sites simply function as a "public square".
My ideal social media site would be a slight modification of the link aggregator model.
Instead of a centralized repository of links with comments, it would be a sort of overlay on top of every other website that would create a comment section that isn’t owned or moderated by the original host. It would encourage folks to actual read the original articles and visit those sites, but allow you to have discussions with a particular demographic cohort (e.g., have a discussion among HN crowd on a nytimes article)
Sounds kinda like StumbleUpon with comments. I'm not sure I'd like to host unmoderated content on my site, but I do miss the original StumbleUpon experience. Reading through the history of what happened to StumbleUpon in the 2010s is sad, and indicates that this idea may not actually be viable (or maybe was ahead of its time, or maybe wasn't done right).
I'm cautiously optimistic. I was active on Reddit for ages (thanks for letting me in on the IPO!) but nuked my account the summer when they killed all the 3rd party clients. I miss having something like Reddit, even if that site itself is dead to me.
I was a refugee of the Great Digg Migration to reddit some 14 or so years ago. old.reddit and adblockers as well as very aggressive curation of subreddits have kept it to an overall positive experience over the decade.
I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet; everytime I come back from a week or two of backpacking without internet connection I realize how overstimulated with inane bullshit we all are.
I was an early refugee from Digg, been on reddit for 17 years now.
Aggressive curation of subreddits did help, but I fear the decent subreddits are slowly dying out. The modern iteration of site (It's more of an app these days) appears to attract the wrong type of users for the healthy conversations that I enjoy.
I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.
I was thinking about this as an approach for a side project to build in order to (speed up) learn elixir/phoenix for work. While the old-school forums dedicated to specific topics work (why re-invent them?) I was thinking of a "tribal" social network.
You as a person decide you want to create a space with a combination of reddit-like features, maybe video, etc. Only people you invite can discover it (or you can allow them to invite people) It could work for neighborhood groups (similar to nextdoor but with a limited crowd that you like/trust), school groups, family, or specific interests -- although specific interests are the idea's weakest selling point since it lacks easy discoverability.
Yeah, there are forums, discord, etc. etc., but I thought it could potentially be interesting. And yeah, people would abuse it (i.e., share pirated and illegal content), so maybe not really viable.
> Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
This is true of all social media platforms. People who have all day to post/reply and figure out how to game the system will always dominate the discussion. This is also why online propaganda works so well, it is literally their day job. People who have a life will always be at a major disadvantage. In some ways Reddit is worse off because those people also become moderators. The only thing that saves it is the ability for users to flee a subreddit if the moderator becomes a tyrant and start a parallel subreddit with hopefully more sane moderation.
The default subreddits are mostly a writeoff at this point. Terminally online people latched on to them and are never letting go. Or they were useless from the start like AITA.
Same here. I (proudly) had my account there banned for posting the AACS key.
Went to reddit and was not unhappy there for many years, but, aside from some targeted subreddits (/r/beagle!) I rarely spend any time on reddit anymore. The new reddit changes just feel user-hostile and they are aggressively pushing users away from old.reddit.com, it feels like a matter of time before they announce that they are killing old reddit.
Perhaps we are getting old but I also find happiness is inversely proportional to my time spent on social media.
> I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet...
Some of that is a function of age I am sure. When you are young, sites like reddit and digg hold promises of some new and interesting unknown unknown. As you get older, the amount of unknown unknowns fall off a cliff and you are just left with the known knowns and known unknowns... occasionally you are once again interested in the known unknowns, but you certainly didn't need a website to remind you they existed. The novelty is gone.
Funny, it’s actually after I come back from a week of backpacking that my “internet quality time” is highest - there’s a bunch of new, meaningful content for me to go through.
After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.
Agreed. Throwaway account because I’m an internet nomad and I don’t have a long term account here (they get banned anyway).
Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.
It’s amusing to see the usual HN flex with smug superiority but both Reddit and 4chan even to this today demolish HN in every (good and bad) criteria. Moderation here has stifled honest discussion in favor of safe-harbor, bullshit talking points.
Every time someone mentions reddit 14 years ago all I can think about are all the admins that allowed r/jailbait on the front page. I honestly wouldn't tell people you used it then
Some people probably used reddit like me, I never looked at the front page, I just went straight to a sub link directly. I remember always pulling up rage comics. I didn't care about comments, or any other communities.
It’s easy to forget but this is pretty on point IMO. There was so much overlap between HN and /r/programming, tons of industry people would just back to back scroll them and ignore the rest of Reddit.
If the only thing that comes to your mind when people talk about the digg migration is the underage jailbait subreddit, that speaks more about you than anyone else.
It was a significant shift in social media and internet history, regardless of what some fringe subreddits had.
I’ve been a user during the alpha/beta process and their response rate to bug fixes has been great imo. The frequent posters kickstarting the flywheel are pretty spammy but I think it’s to drive traffic to publishers who have consistent ad traffic. They will eventually have to monetize their traffic so I’m pretty convinced they’ve hired people to post content from trash sites like pc world and the like. That said, impressed with the pace of development.
Nostalgic for the old Digg days. Invite-only communities not so much. But given the botting all over social media, guess I can't blame them.
I would not be surprised if there's a lot of brouhaha over how it's moderated, since moderation is considered way more controversial now than it used to be in the old days.
It's where Reddit's userbase came from but it isn't exactly like reddit. It was more like HN until they ruined it to make the investors happy and instead investors got their investment killed in one day.
No one's really asking for this. And anyone that's asking for it is just looking for another forum/site to surf amidst thousands of subreddits and discords and the main social posting networks (of which now include the fediverse, bluesky, whatever). This isn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage. Not to mention the inevitable mistelling of what happened with Digg v4 and the 'right place right time' that allowed Reddit to survive. Let sleeping dogs lie.
The original Digg was shut down around 2012 (though really it died in 2010). The domain was sold off and the new owners replaced it with something that might have looked like Digg at first glance, but it was entirely relying on editors to select posts... Basically, it was a curated blog themed to look like a social media site.
That version of Digg limped along for almost twice as long as the original Digg, until a few months back when the domain was sold to Keven Rose (one of the original Digg founders) and Alexis Ohanian (one of reddit's co-founders).
Back in the day I was mostly on slashdot, Reddit, digg, and metafilter.
Digg was the first site where I started seeing brainrot nonsense content on the front page every day, with orders of magnitude larger than usual upvotes of tech news, from the same small number of usernames (Mr BabyMan, I hate that I even remember your stupid username).
For me, Digg was the first time experiencing product managers experimenting with modern proto-influencer virality algorithms. It made the internet worse, and now every site does it.
You forgot Fark! Except that was unironic brainrot and everybody knew what it was. Unlike now, where critical thinking went out the window and everybody takes things at face value.
I mean, I love digg, I even worked there for years....but digg didn't make it for a reason. It wasn't the new release of digg that killed it, it was the fact that reddit was just better in every way. I don't know what digg can do that is worth the views it will need to survive. GenX nostalgia can only take you so far.
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