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Digg is gone again

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Re: Digg is gone again

#41

Post by MildlySerious »

snapetom wrote: post #16
MildlySerious wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Yeah. Sadly the default communities were flooded with blog spam, and that's just the part I noticed. A couple days ago a bunch of smaller communities also got a noticeable bump in members. That didn't change anything in my own community, but others apparently weren't so lucky.

I can see why the team got overwhelmed. I wouldn't want to have to deal with that.

Re: Digg is gone again

#42

Post by amarant »

calmbonsai wrote: post #9
MildlySerious wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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

Re: Digg is gone again

#43

Post by basisword »

armchairhacker wrote: post #17
iamdamian wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

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 think it's partly human. But ex: > Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. isn't a natural sentence.

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".

Re: Digg is gone again

#44

Post by basisword »

Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.

Re: Digg is gone again

#45

Post by MildlySerious »

RobotToaster wrote: post #34
MildlySerious wrote: post #6

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.

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.

I do have a lemmy account, but have not really returned to it in a while. Maybe I haven't found the right communities yet, but it had nothing about it that felt engaging. People upvoted, but nobody talked. No interaction. Digg felt more alive from day one. I replied to a post in a niche community with ~100 members and only afterwards realized it was @justin.

Re: Digg is gone again

#46

Post by ChrisArchitect »

So as predicted it wasn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage 6 months ago.

And I will continue to die on the will die on the hill that Reddit only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. Alexis Ohanian still doesn't seem to have any clue that it was right-place-right-time and Kevin Rose seems to have not learned much either. Can we stop giving either anymore credibility? As with any social site it's the user base/community that helps pull thru darkness. And no one was really asking for this.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Re: Digg is gone again

#48

Post by kstrauser »

GeorgeWBasic wrote: post #32
troosevelt wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall." is a VERY ChatGPT way to write. It's not proof, but the parent is right that this smells a bit of AI writing.

It's also a VERY HUMAN way to write.

I don't care so much about Digg, but the endless "haha, I caught you!" comments annoy me more than the rare actual AI-written content they label.

Re: Digg is gone again

#50

Post by jjcm »

The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem.

We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.

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