I think it will be a long, long slow death. Digg is still out there doing something over a decade after it’s users exited en masse. I think Reddit as a store of useful human content, will just keep slipping and having more noise than useful signals. It’ll be a while, but at the same time it’s already dead. For me it was just so shocking for them to not realize what their actual value is. Pissing off the oil you are drilling, is not going to go well in the long run!
People have been talking about Digg in context to the last large exodus involving Reddit, but prior to all that conversation I'd never heard of it (joined Reddit a few years after that was history).
Just took a look at it, and... what am I looking at? It was supposed to be the predecessor to Reddit, but it looks like an early 2010s news site.
In that time period - 2008 to 2011 - if you'd told an internet person you'd never heard of digg, they'd look at you like you'd asked them what their favourite flavour of crayon was. It was the social news aggregator for normal people; all the appeal of news aggregators and comments sections, but without the nerdy belligerence of Slashdot, the lul-so-randum basement humour of Fark, or the primitive interface and sneering elitism of Reddit.
Just took a look at it, and... what am I looking at? It was supposed to be the predecessor to Reddit, but it looks like an early 2010s news site.
That's the now digg, not the then digg.
Here's an example of their frontpage when they were at their peak, in 2009. Then, for contrast, here is the redesigned frontpage that killed them, launched August 25, 2010. ... Ok, only half joking - the bugs and errors were a problem - but this is a stable version of digg 4.0 - the controversial redesign that 'killed' the site, though half of the changes that drove off their userbase were related to the algorithm and how pages/posts/content was promoted. I never really used the site so I don't remember exact details, but it did result in 'poweruser' problems with a few people dominating content, and users also complained that the 4.0 version of the site seemed to promote a lot of content they didn't want while making it hard to access what they were interested in.
After it's collapse the company's assets were broken up and the domain/website/'digg' name were sold off as a package - it looks like the new owners have redesigned the site to look more like a news site and less like a news aggregator.
Thanks for the insight, that definitely makes much more sense.
Maybe one day a popular site will actually listen to user feedback and not blow themselves up.
Yeah I know, wishful thinking lol
Congrats! Welcome to the Light Side. :)
Capitalists are constitutionally incapable of understanding that anything is not about profit. However, if I were an investor, I wouldn't touch Reddit with a 10-foot pole. If I were an advertiser, make it 20 feet.
Welcome to the club!
For me, it was tough to let go after 11 years, but I feel a hankering for the old days of PHPbb forums and how nothing was centralised. Most of all, it feels good to push back against rampant capitalism, even by a tiny amount.
100% on the same boat. Loved it, hated to leave it, but capitalized ruins everything around me. The enshittification of everything. But on the bright side, here comes Lemmy!
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