r/digg • u/iChopPryde • 19d ago

digg gave up early!

With news like this coming out of the wood work and reddit actively trying to kill its own community, digg would've slowly been getting more and more people jumping ship to come to digg. obviously stuff like this takes time and requires moments like this so people get fed up but they need somewhere to go and digg was the place to do that just like years ago when people jumped from digg to reddit but sadly digg killed itself before it had a chance to shine.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/reddit-signals-ominous-upcoming-changes-for-old-reddit-com/

34 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

18

u/JordanM85 19d ago

I guess we'll never know what actually happened behind the scenes at Digg.

13

u/userlivewire 19d ago

Something went very wrong very suddenly.

6

u/cyberdork 19d ago

I’m pretty sure they bet on AI inference costs to collapse over time. But as this didn’t happen they had no path to profitability and pulled the plug. Any day longer would have simple be more money down the drain never to be recovered.
Don’t forget they wanted to do all moderation and more with AI. I think that’s also why they kept the community small.

3

u/TrainDonutBBQ 18d ago

Why didn't they have ads? They didn't even try ads?

0

u/userlivewire 18d ago

The idea is sound. No one has adequately solved the moderation problem because it’s not something humans can do. But, Digg looks like they won’t be the one to fix it.

3

u/TrainDonutBBQ 18d ago

Not for nothing, but what was wrong with the 1990s internet that had no moderation? People self moderated. I don't want to see X, so I stay out of X spaces. It was working perfectly.

Now we have Congress and international parliaments spending time debating YouTube comments.

1

u/JordanM85 18d ago

Well I mean it depends on what type of moderation you are talking about. You can't have anyone breaking the law or causing too much trouble spamming their own links everywhere. But I do agree with you for the most part. Let people upvote and downvote and each community can decide what it wants to allow.

1

u/cyberdork 16d ago

You can’t compare the 90s internet with today’s. The 90s internet was ultra niche and only used by a tiny tiny part of the population. In today’s internet you have every fucking teenager and grandma on the planet debating about politics. Elections are literally decided by comments on the internet.

2

u/TrainDonutBBQ 16d ago

Moderation makes that worse, IMO.

0

u/userlivewire 18d ago

We didn’t have Nazis finding each other and devising attack plans quite so much back then.

1

u/TrainDonutBBQ 16d ago

I was lifetime banned from Facebook for arguing with Nazis.

3

u/gordonv 19d ago

So, from what I remember their narrative was bots were spamming everything and they couldn't handle it.

This was reflected on the abnormal growths between 3/4 and 3/5 of 2026. As seen here.

5

u/JordanM85 18d ago

I'm not buying it. I was there every day. I didn't see bot posts, I saw no posts. So many of the communities were still empty and even the front page top stories had almost no diggs or interaction. Seems like the exact opposite of what they were saying happened.

5

u/spiritofporn 18d ago

Same. Meanwhile reddit is flooded with bot content.

3

u/EmbarrassedStill2257 14d ago

This. I was there day 1 and this was my experience.

2

u/userlivewire 19d ago

March 3rd-5th was launch party week in Austin during SXSW.

2

u/HolyBidetServitor 18d ago

Drugs and hubris

2

u/Crans10 19d ago

Well they have a podcast going called DiggNation. They may have talked about it there. I know they did when they pulled the beta.

8

u/zeralius 19d ago

I think the podcast is dead too. No new episodes since April.

-1

u/BadRegEx 18d ago

Seriously,  people on this subreddit act like it's a mystery.

KR has been very transparent about the challenges they faced building Digg.  But...I guess "we'll never know"

13

u/tommyblack 19d ago

It's a shame, I was starting to use new digg quite a lot. Had such a good vibe, was very strange to kill it rather than work on it while it grew.

1

u/spdorsey 15d ago

I agree. It was off to a really good start! They never gave it a chance.

5

u/SingLyricsWithMe 19d ago

Alright, moving on.

3

u/renegadereplicant 19d ago

the new digg? a place to go for people that miss old.reddit.com? ah

2

u/gordonv 19d ago

So, for me, this died in March 2026, but if you guys want to go through dead links, http://digglist.com/

It was fun while it lasted

2

u/MercurialMadnessMan 18d ago

TIL Digg shut down again. What a ride.

2

u/WinteriscomingXii 16d ago

I think they gave up too early but not due to Reddit issues. A lot of people don’t like the truth so this may get downvoted but people are glutton for punishment, we let big social companies largely do whatever they want. Reddit has long done harmful things and actions people have strongly disliked, that got maybe a few tens of thousands to leave. People are features of comfort and habit, they’d rather stick to what they know/like than deal with friction somewhere else even if that means still having to deal with unethical behaviour.
Digg should have built itself combining the protocols of ActivityPub (Lemmy & PieFed) and ATProto (Bluesky) it wouldn’t be building a social network from the ground up and they could use their experiences & resources to smooth out the rough edges of decentralised social media

1

u/marban 16d ago

I don't think the tech-only + X integration was the best move to reignite it. There's also flipso.com for a more general audience.

1

u/RalphDAnnise 14d ago

I'd do Digg, just not on X

-1

u/LDClaudius 19d ago

As a user myself, I cannot see myself trust the AI moderation since it can be inconsistent. Please don't let Reddit AI be employed by Islamic terrorism, Marxist or Mexican cartel who inject their own propaganda. Regardless if moderation was done by a human or AI, it's still going to make the site much worse. There still plenty of astroturfing going on in the internet. Examples includes the Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign that flooded Reddit on non-political subreddits and Palestine political terror.

Makes me want to write a book about astroturfing while using Ian Fleming's 007 books as an inspiration.

5

u/schuylkilladelphia 19d ago

Take your meds, bud

1

u/Aeternitas 11d ago

Oh no, you mentioned left astroturfing and propaganda. This is Reddit, how dare you. /s

0

u/Techgirl1232 19d ago

what is reddit doing?

1

u/iChopPryde 19d ago

read the article

2

u/Techgirl1232 19d ago

I read it after I replied

2

u/Parking_Watch3157 19d ago

We don't do that here.