this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?
I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.
Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn't like got buried really fast.
Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn't care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.
Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I'll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)
So that's what killed Digg. ...that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (...insert comparison to modern Reddit here)
Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. Thanks for the quick lesson
But conservatives want to repeat history.
Just not the good parts.
I don't remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg's social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.
IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.
Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg's front-page, but they didn't have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.
That's only part of what killed Digg. The final nail in the coffin was when they redesigned the website to give power users even more power to control the front page than they already had.
Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆
Digg's biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That's why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said "go right ahead".
So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.
Now, to Reddit's credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.
Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It's all allowed unless it's blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it's just organic random users.
Now, you don't see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I'm not sure they're interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They're this close to saying "fuck it, it's a free-for-all" and going full Digg publicly.
lmao even if that happens i fucking bet NOTHING will change. too many people are just addicted to the site and even if it does we'll just get an overload of turbo-redditors here
That's not what happened at all imho.
What killed digg realistically is that it had less control than Reddit and because Kevin Rose blocked posts about the DVD encryption codes and people over reacted to that block. For days digg was full of people simply reposting them (as Digg was worried about getting sued which was fair enough)
Didn't really have anything to do with politics.
Don't forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Digg admins were actually ok and I never had an issue with them
Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their "rights" and "censorship."
By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.
I don't even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010's and beyond.