Reason Digg faded was that Reddit decentralized moderation across subreddits. Although there are still some global rules set by Reddit (no drug sourcing is one I personally disagree with).
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is federated Reddit. It's also open source just lacks community. Some things are also already better like more performant front end. If I was to bet on something to overtake Reddit, it would probably be it.
> Reason Digg faded was that Reddit decentralized moderation across subreddits.
What ultimately killed Digg was the disastrous "Digg v4" redesign in 2010. Reddit's features helped it capture the fleeing users, but it was ultimately Digg's actions that triggered the mass migration, and Digg never really recovered.
It sorta has been since a few years now. However, moderated groups will always face the spam problem. Spammers only forgot about it for some years because ISP's rarely include access these days (and text groups had been fairly dead by that time).
Yes, it sort of still is being used. There aren't a lot of messages these days, but there are some.
One difficulty these days is that I am unsure how to suggest to add new newsgroups, and it seems also some other people are unsure too. (I think someone wanted to add a newsgroup for the COVID-19 pandemic, but seemed to be unsure how (I think they wanted to add it to the alt.* hierarchy); I checked just now and the Usenet provider I use does not seem to have such a newsgroup at this time. I would think that you would need to contact the hierarchy administrators, probably. Unfortunately, I do not know how.) Of course, this is not a problem with existing newsgroups.
In the case of spam, there still is some, but it seems these days the spam on Usenet are all from Google Groups. (There are legitimate messages from Google Groups too, although many of the legitimate messages come from other providers.)
NNTP does have many advantages. It is better in many ways than web interfaces are, and I think also better than mailing lists are too, although you can have all three if wanted. I know I am not the only one who wants this, to have NNTP for these things (I have seen others both on HN and elsewhere; even on Usenet they suggested even isolated forums should have a NNTP backend, and I agree).
Hacker News. Once upon a time, Digg was good for tech-related news. It became more popular and people switched to Reddit and now to HN. I’m here for the same reason I was on Digg years ago.
Ruqqus[0]. Its Reddit with a focus on anti-censorship. It was launched in 2019, so the community is not quite mature yet.
As you can probably guess, it is a truly hateful place.
Practically speaking it is essentially (from my observation) a safe space for racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, covid denial, dangerous conspiracy theories, misinformation, etc.
I hesitate to bring attention to the site at all because I don’t want the hate to proliferate, but I suppose it is better to know this exists rather than letting it incubate hate under the radar.
Edit: I also want to say I think anti-censorship is noble and Ruqqus, as a technology, is pretty well done. I think building a non-hateful community on Ruqqus would elevate it to be better than Reddit.
I was hopeful when I first heard of Ruqqus ("reddit without censorship!") but after a visit I just realized that it's too toxic place to visit without going mad. We humans make good ideas turn so so bad.
Reddit needs a digg moment to make all the normal users leave. There's no reason for anyone to leave reddit unless they're being censored and at the moment reddit isn't really censoring very much
It doesn't yet have the features that will make it a real competitor, but I'm working on something called https://littr.me
It is a decentralized link aggregator based on ActivityPub.
There are also a number of other projects using the same paradigm in various states of development. In my opinion, when these will come together and intercommunicate with one another then we can say they represent the competition.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 69.1 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is federated Reddit. It's also open source just lacks community. Some things are also already better like more performant front end. If I was to bet on something to overtake Reddit, it would probably be it.
What ultimately killed Digg was the disastrous "Digg v4" redesign in 2010. Reddit's features helped it capture the fleeing users, but it was ultimately Digg's actions that triggered the mass migration, and Digg never really recovered.
https://gurlic.com
One difficulty these days is that I am unsure how to suggest to add new newsgroups, and it seems also some other people are unsure too. (I think someone wanted to add a newsgroup for the COVID-19 pandemic, but seemed to be unsure how (I think they wanted to add it to the alt.* hierarchy); I checked just now and the Usenet provider I use does not seem to have such a newsgroup at this time. I would think that you would need to contact the hierarchy administrators, probably. Unfortunately, I do not know how.) Of course, this is not a problem with existing newsgroups.
In the case of spam, there still is some, but it seems these days the spam on Usenet are all from Google Groups. (There are legitimate messages from Google Groups too, although many of the legitimate messages come from other providers.)
NNTP does have many advantages. It is better in many ways than web interfaces are, and I think also better than mailing lists are too, although you can have all three if wanted. I know I am not the only one who wants this, to have NNTP for these things (I have seen others both on HN and elsewhere; even on Usenet they suggested even isolated forums should have a NNTP backend, and I agree).
"I click on the top alternative, Parler, and the root page redirects to some advertising page about the site.
Whereas if I go to the root page of reddit, I get content.
I think that's a huge turn off for alot of people.
Show interesting content, and let the product speak for itself.
If you go to Hacker News, you see content, you don't see a page explaining why Hacker News is great.
I just closed the Parler website rather than figure out what hoops I have to jump through to see content and what it's like."
It uses the old reddit open source code, and the administration is even based around the pyramid of debate, similar to hackernews.
As you can probably guess, it is a truly hateful place.
Practically speaking it is essentially (from my observation) a safe space for racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, covid denial, dangerous conspiracy theories, misinformation, etc.
I hesitate to bring attention to the site at all because I don’t want the hate to proliferate, but I suppose it is better to know this exists rather than letting it incubate hate under the radar.
Edit: I also want to say I think anti-censorship is noble and Ruqqus, as a technology, is pretty well done. I think building a non-hateful community on Ruqqus would elevate it to be better than Reddit.
[0]: https://github.com/ruqqus/ruqqus
"anti-censorship" is just a euphemism for a place where someone can say the N-word without being banned.
It is a decentralized link aggregator based on ActivityPub.
There are also a number of other projects using the same paradigm in various states of development. In my opinion, when these will come together and intercommunicate with one another then we can say they represent the competition.