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Digg is gone again

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Re: Digg is gone again

#271

Post by troosevelt »

pacomerh wrote: post #93
int32_64 wrote: post #49

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

Wouldn't that be almost impossible?. Politics affects our lives every day. Your comment suggests that you believe it doesn't affect yours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

I've nver seen discussion of politics on forums do anything but turn into hate-filled, dogmatic posts which aren't productive at all. Every political thread here turns into the same takes and HN imagines itself as intellectually better than others. It's not interesting or productive. If talking about politics fixed things, why are politics worse today than they've ever been? There's no costs and no solutions to ranting about politics online.

The vast majority of people do not want to get on a forum to escape their life to see every more or worse content about their daily lives.

You're right, there needs to be some outlet but when people propose this it's because they are sick and tired of politics and the injection of them into everthing is not helping those politics, it just makes it worse.

Tons of people aren't political creatures and want nothing to do with politicians. This notion that more politics will fix thing isn't born out by Reddit, X, the US Congress, Brexit, etc. It's too easy to divide and manipulate people.

Re: Digg is gone again

#272

Post by mvkel »

The patterns were there if you knew to look for them.

The original Digg excepted, Kevin Rose's attention span is extremely limited. He will give something ~3-4 months of attention before (apparently) getting bored and wanting to move on to something else.

Up until that point, he will be an unrelenting hype man of whatever his attention is lasered on at that moment.

Then the hype posts start to drift. They show up once every few days, then once a week, then stop entirely. Any criticism or skepticism is considered a buzz kill in the cloud of good vibes only.

A few months later, a dramatic explainer post arrives (underestimating the cold start problem? Really??), outlining why the idea didn't work and why the next one will be better, for sure, for real.

This (AI generated) note from the current CEO paints an optimistic picture, but the most likely outcome will be that Digg simply doesn't launch. It's sustained on the nostalgic vapors of the old guard, not renewed by a replenished sense of purpose, or connection.

I'd say I'd love to be proven wrong, but I personally question the utility of a Web 2.0 social network phoenixing itself. We have endured a decade+ of originality being buffed out of web products, most now resembling variations of Bootstrap and shadcn in service of dev convenience and getting rich quicker.

Surely in the age of vibe coding, we can afford to take creative risks again, and think of something new.

Re: Digg is gone again

#273

Post by gzread »

ivm wrote: post #248
gzread wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't that make sense?

Because there's no real discussion in such broad communities. Only jokes, generic replies, and silly fights. They're equivalent to comment sections on news sites.

And it doesn't make sense to you that someone might make money from a platform without discussion?

Re: Digg is gone again

#275

Post by troosevelt »

dbmikus wrote: post #267
mikeocool wrote: post #51

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 with 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…

Every website needs to add the "friend or foe" system[0] so that I can mark bots to avoid their content and mark good posters so I can filter just to theirs. [0]: https://hackersmacker.org/

This should be seperate from marking bots because what this really wil do is embed people into hearing only what they want, making discussion worse.

Re: Digg is gone again

#276

Post by gzread »

mschuster91 wrote: post #218
gzread wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.

You need to ditch and replace all your devices and acquire a new phone number. I'm serious. Virtually all large websites these days employ a lot of fingerprinting and persistence technologies. And yes, ditch them. Even well over a decade ago, Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts. You must be extremely careful of never using any device that was associated with your o…

How contagious is it? Can I get other people banned from Reddit by logging into my instantly banned account on their wifi network?

Re: Digg is gone again

#277

Post by troosevelt »

armchairhacker wrote: post #176
ahofmann wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

150m page views a month is peanuts and very far away from the "social" networks numbers. I don't have those numbers, but I know how many page views we had 2011 while running a german browser game community.

The internet seems to have grown massively within the past couple years (unfortunately, almost certainly because of bots). I bet the number today is orders of magnitude higher.

I would bet money that HN's traffic is not orders of magnitude higher than 2020. HN is not as popular as HNers think it is.

Re: Digg is gone again

#278

Post by gzread »

dangus wrote: post #269
tlonny wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN may not be “mainstream” but it is certainly _very_ vulnerable to bot spam given the topics discussed and the make-up of the audience. You can already see it happening now - at least the bots that write like vanilla Claude/ChatGPT. Presumably there is a much larger hidden cohort of bots that are instructed to talk more naturally and thus are better adept at flying under the radar…

I would say that HN has a lot of features that would be seen as draconian in how much they limit your interaction by other platforms. You can barely comment before you are rate limited. You can’t upvote until you’ve been around a pretty long time. New accounts are given a green badge of dishonor that makes users scrutinize their comments more. I’m not saying these are bad things but they’re probably too restrictive f…

If you are rate limited, a moderator has manually applied a rate limit to your account. Accounts are not rate limited by default. You can appeal the decision by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

Re: Digg is gone again

#279

Post by cindyllm »

PaulHoule wrote: post #246
kstrauser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose ChatGPT uses a semicolon more often than an individual person. On a pageful of comments from many random people, someone using a semicolon doesn't mean they're a bot even if 100% of their comments on that page includes one.

It behooves you to not write like that if you don’t want people dehumanizing you.

[dead]

Re: Digg is gone again

#280

Post by gzread »

dartharva wrote: post #187
mikeocool wrote: post #51

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 with 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…

You mean a complete collapse of social media, not the whole internet. The internet is a telecom ecosystem and has a lot more to it than just forums and link aggregators. I honestly believe it might not even be such a bad thing. People were arguably better without social networks and media, and it's perhaps better to let the cancerous thing just die and keep the internet just as a utility powering boring things like b…

What would you say are the major applications of the internet? It's used for business and academia in ways that aren't going away, yes. M2M communication will stay. Social media is the largest user-facing segment and it might not. I don't have a sense of how big these sectors are relative to each other. If the largest sectors of the internet disappear, the internet shrinks a lot.
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