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.
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.
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.
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.
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 feeling 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.
Kevin Rose must be on that hype train again. I've been on Reddit for 17 years since the Digg crash. All they had to do was not screw it up for many of us and we wouldn't be at this reinvent stage.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 43.1 ms ] thread"Humancentric technology at the edge" - love this in my sci-fi books but what does it do?
I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.
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 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.
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.
I just can't figure out where people are turning next.
I am still confused what the new Digg is (on the web)
When I login, I don't see any news/articles/content.
I only see the ability for me to post (and the meme image below)
https://i.imgur.com/kBOAlZS.gif
Note: this doesn't seem to be a problem in the app ... but why do I need to run an app when this could easily just be available on the web.
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)
In Pog form?
Pass.