Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I’ve seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.
I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool. Not sure how that’s legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.
The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it’s going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.
What is this cursed place? The clickbait has eaten everything. uBlock should make this into a blank page.
Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator founded in the middle of 2004 (around 7 or 8 months before Reddit), that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. At one point it actually had a higher number of daily active users than Reddit and it was, for several years, Reddit’s chief competitor.
The fascinating thing about Digg is that it went through enshittification long before it became the phrase to describe our current internet zeitgeist. It happened incredibly early in its life, but for reasons and in ways that would come to be emblematic of the current internet. The core reason is that the owners of the website were just looking to get out of the game with a pile of fast, easy cash ASAP. They were in talks with Google to sell Digg for $200 million in 2008, but that deal fell through.
The beginning of the end for Digg came in August of 2010, when the site went through a major redesign, referred to as “Digg v4,” that fundamentally altered the ranking of posts on the site to heavily favor power users, as well as introducing a metric ton of bugs. It’s hard to describe the feeling of waking up one day and have your favorite website totally, completely destroyed. It was a Frankensteinian abomination; a cruel, misshapen doppelganger of an aggregator that now mainly linked to advertisements thinly disguised as “user content” and content posted by literally a handful of users who were able to manipulate post rankings to exclude any and all posts from non-power users from the front page, driving traffic exclusively to where they wanted it. As many of these power users existed on the political spectrum somewhere between Libertarian and outright Fascists, the political content on the website became especially jarring. No boiling of frogs took place here like it did on Reddit. One single code deployment and server restart later and the website was unusable.
The complete catastrophe that was this redesign triggered a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. Digg was never able to recover and Reddit became the de facto content aggregator site for the internet (and it’s where I spent around 8 hours of every day from September of 2010 to some time in 2023 when they finally gutted the API and I moved to Lemmy). In a grand example of historical irony, Alexis Ohanian said, in an open letter to the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose,
Eventually, Digg was gutted for spare parts and its components and miscellaneous intellectual property sold off piecemeal for a total sum that was less than 5% of the value of the initial deal with Google. And the website Digg itself was ultimately sold in April of 2018 to BuySellAds for an undisclosed, but almost certainly pathetic, sum.
And now, dear reader, you are aware of the sad and tragic history of Digg, whose rise and fall was an unheeded warning of the precipice towards which the internet as a whole is headed.
You and I had the same experience and the way you describe Digg’s life is nothing short of poetry.
Also fuck MrBabyMan.
One thing I will never be sorry to see go is the age of pathetic power users who steal content from others and repost it ad nauseam for their own social network capital. Because those people are getting out competed by AI, who are stealing stories from those users, as well as stories posted by other AI. And thank you, writing is a small hobby of mine.
Everything is such a mess. This site has been pretty lovely, compared to basically any others.
It shows—you certainly have a way with words.
Lol woah, Kevin Rose, blast from the past. He had one hit with Digg, botched it, and spent the rest of his free time spitballing useless startup ideas at anyone who would listen. I think he had to be the inspiration for the Ryan Howard character in the office.
Thank you! Wow, they were truly ahead of their time. 🙃
Somehow I never tried looking at Digg
It reminds me of the original “Your doctor doesn’t want you to know these 8 tricks for belly fat” ads, only that’s the actual content?
Digg was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that “enhanced” that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)
Basically they fucked it up right there.
I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it’s remnants are owned by some advertising company.
Was there an exodus in waves? Did some people stay behind, but fewer and fewer as time passed?
I’m not really adding to the conversation with this but wanted to share anyway:
Stupid overweight body of Christ.
That’s spot on
Digg is basically credited as being the catalyst for Reddit, giving it its initial strong launch and overall growth trajectory. Reddit was a place for nerds. As it grew and started hitting mainstream, that changed. But without the users from Digg, Reddit would have likely been as popular as Twitter at the start, a platform that has historically struggled to be relevant. At it’s inception, I think only about 10% of new account holders would remain on the platform. Maybe even lower. That’s a stark contrast from say Facebook that had something like a 90% to 95% retention rate.