Discussion

A Hard Reset, and What Comes Next

armchairhacker: > This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.

ahmedfromtunis: I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read.I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.

iamdamian: >> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.> Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.This… seems like regular prose to me. What makes you say so confidently it was written by AI?

armchairhacker: There are more tells. Rule of three, short cliche sentences.> We know how frustrating this is, and we hope you'll give us another look once we have something to show, we’ll save your usernames!I do think it's partly human. But> Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.This isn't a natural sentence.

MildlySerious: I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.

snapetom: Argh. Also quite irritated. I had 50/50 transitioned over to it despite the lower traffic because it was a calm oasis. The thing about bots is believable, though, because you could already see it happening. Dead Internet has been real for a while, and I'd love to seem Kevin and Alex do a followup on this.

bink: One of the things I always disliked about the original Digg was their threading. The slashdot like feed where the oldest comments were at the top and there was only one level of replies tended to encourage the "first" comments and harmed the quality of the discussion. I was glad to see it use a reddit-like comment thread for the new site, but it also meant there wasn't much reason to use it over reddit.I'm a bit surprised with Alexis' involvement they didn't anticipate the bot problem. Alexis left reddit several years ago but I'm sure he's still in touch with the folks who run the place. It would've been worth it to talk to them about the threats they currently face and how they deal with them.

popalchemist: OH NO. Anyway...

ekjhgkejhgk: You chose to put your effort into building something that someone else owns.Next time try doing it in a way that you control it.

andrewinardeer: Whatever happened to MrBabyMan?

dgeiser13: Didn't Kevin Rose re-acquire Digg in the last year or so?

troosevelt: Yes, he did. Now he's gonna be the full-time CEO according to this.

troosevelt: How is that not a natural sentence? I think people are reading into stuff. That's just good writing.Could it be generated? Sure. But there aren't the obvious tells you act like there are.

mmmlinux: That was fast.

ngokevin: "This is not...this is" is a tell

troosevelt: There isn't any "this is" in that sentence.

netsharc: I think you're someone who really needs to be concerned about AI being more intelligent than you...

troosevelt: Is this necessary?For the record, I'm correct that what he stated is there is not there, your quip not withstanding.

multiplegeorges: Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.

RobotToaster: If you're looking for a new platform lemmy is probably your best bet, at least if a server goes down everything is still saved on federated servers.

NuclearPM: Why didn’t it make sense to you?

MildlySerious: You're right, and that is one of the lessons to be reminded of here.My main point wasn't that, though. It's simply a bad and low-effort way to handle the situation, and like one of the other replies points out, there are better options. They could have just as well disabled posting and maybe even viewing of submissions and communities for the time being. Just shutting it all down immediately without notice leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I will not be among the people returning for their next relaunch. I am sure others feel the same way, and I don't think it is a wise decision to needlessly put off your early adopters if you're hoping for them to come back "next time".

JensenKarlsson: Community /books helped me track down a book I've been dying to reread for almost ten years now. Reddit failed the task, so did all other places I turned to. Cheers for that, and rip.

basisword: The rule of three is a basic writing structure taught to 12 year olds. I know people have given up on even the basics (capitalisation) in recent years but let's not just banish structured writing to "AI".

calmbonsai: Cutting staff does in no way mandate a un-notified and abrupt "hard-reset".They could at least put it in read-only mode for a short time and allow downloading of extant community content prior to a scheduled "reset day".This smacks of flailing leadership and zero respect for their target user demographic.

amarant: They say trust is their product, well,I guess they're sold out

ranger_danger: My experience with lemmy has not been nice. A majority of people there are just downright awful, and the mods are often power-hungry and overzealous in their actions. Many times entire servers are defederated from many others due to how a large percentage of their users behave.

int32_64: I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.

ranger_danger: Why do you think people will stop at politics?

mikeocool: Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting we each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?

keyboardJones: > We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away.I think the HN title needs adjusted

axus: "Digg is Just Resting"

hazelnut: Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.

gagik_co: Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.

tsumnia: Damn. I still have faith that what a lot of us that migrated to new Digg envision is possible. Post pandemic Internet has choppier waters than before, but I'm going to try and keep a positive outlook and I look forward to their followup emails.Thanks for the fun this past year Digg.

grey-area: > This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.Hmm...> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.What does this even mean? How many metaphors can it mix up in one paragraph? Can't they write a blog post the old fashioned way, with feeling? Imagine reading a corporate blog post about being laid off which the founder couldn't even be bothered to write.

sunaookami: The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.

xtracto: I want a "reddit" like discussion board where:- Users don't have to pay to post links/stories - Users have to pay to comment on links/stories - Users have to pay to "upvote" comments. Downvotes don't exist - Each link "lives" a certain amount of time before it is locked. - After lock time, users who posted the link get "paid" a % of the collected $ comments/upvotes. Comments that are upvoted also earn $ proportionally to the upvotes.Hashcash was conceived to solve automated spam/email. Participating in a discussion must cost something, that's the only way bots and spam will get partially stopped. Or, if they start to optimize to get "the most votes", then so be it, their content will increase in quality.

fragmede: What's stopping you from building it yourself?

tannhaeuser: Is that the whole story? Why isn't reddit overrun by bots then (or are they?), and why wouldn't basic proof-of-work techniques fence against bots? Since they started out just in January, isn't it plausible to assume they didn't meet their target user figures and investors jumped ship?

mikeocool: Reddit very much is.