We’re a gaming site sure, but I think our broader focus is on using computers for entertainment purposes, and it’s not as if sites like Digg and its aggregation successor Reddit don’t gameify their workings to a significant extent, what with the reputation and the karma and the scoring and whatnot.
Digg has been restarted before, in fact several times! Some history is called for here.
A Timeline of Digg’s Several Graves
2004 Digg is launched, let’s call this Digg 1
2005 Reddit is launched; at first it’s much the underdog
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010 “Digg v4” happens, a badly handled redesign (I call it Digg 2), a mass exodus to Reddit begins
2011
2012 Digg’s traffic has fallen by 90%; Digg redesigns again (Digg 3), changing over to entirely editorially-curated content; Digg’s IP is sold in two chunks
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018 Digg’s remaining assets are sold to a company called “BuySellAds,” which should give you some indication of where their priorities lay; later it’s sold to the even more hilariously evilly-named “Money Group”; Digg 4
2019 Lemmy, a Fediverse alternative to sites like Reddit and Digg, is launched
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025 June: Digg relaunched in private beta, Digg 5 why not
2026 January: Digg goes public; March: then is taken offline yet again a couple of months later
Yes, Digg is a year older than Reddit, and yes, at first it was the obvious frontrunner. Nowadays Reddit could definitely stand to have some more challengers, but it looks like it’s not going to come from Digg, at least not in the near future.
I got in near the end of Digg’s private beta. I think I was one of its more prolific commenters, and I had considered starting a SetSideB community there. Ha ha, I’m glad I didn’t now! There were people on Digg making concerted efforts trying to push it rightward, trying to spread the meme that Reddit, the very site that once hosted TheDonald, was somehow far left-leaning. I’d tell you more about their odious arguments, but I blocked them as soon as I noticed them. Digg had good block button, at least.
There had been problems with AI bots trying to push content, yes, but Digg also used made a lot of use of AI itself. Moderation was handled partly by algorithm, and many pages would have Digg-generated AI summaries, marked “tl;dr.” I came to resent them.
Original co-founder Kevin Rose, in many ways the face of Digg, is back on board. He seems to come back every time they’re having problems, but never seems to stay for long. Digg’s apology message, which is now their entire website, came suddenly. We users were given absolutely no advance warning, the site, and all of our posts and comments and votes, were just gone entirely. Here one moment, gone the next. Good job there Rose.
I don’t think it’s right to say, as the front page now does, that “[t]he internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts.” That is true if you view it in terms of posters. But the web is mostly comprised of readers. One of Digg’s early ideas, lifted somewhat from Slashdot, was that users with good posts get more influence. That also became Digg’s downfall, as power users with high influence banded together to upvote each other’s posts, making themselves more and more powerful within that framework.
I wonder if AI agents could be used by nefarious actors to automate gaming such a system? I don’t know. At a certain point, the problems with a system start to look, not like fixable problems, but like inherent flaws. But anyway, my fondness is still for entirely human-curated sites, like my favorite hangout spot Metafilter. It certainly has problems, but it doesn’t have a runaway bot problem, or at least none that I’ve noticed so far.
Please support the human-made web. The whole online world depends on it. Thank you.
