I think I had blocked maybe one or two of the default communities very early on, and after that I hadn’t noticed any spam. I used the app at least once a day since the open beta started. Whatever they were doing to combat the bots appeared to be working. It’s a huge shame they thought otherwise and shut down.
I just checked the front page a couple of times out of curiosity, but I never bothered really checking it out too much. I was always surprised how dead it looked from the outside, but that might have been the wrong impression.
Edit: As an illustration, the last snapshot of Digg on internet archive a couple of days ago shows a front page where almost all posts had less than 30 upvotes, and the only two posts breaking above 50 are tech nostalgia posts about a Windows 98 screensaver (105 upvotes, 9 comments) and some young woman reviewing instagram 15 years ago (59 upvotes, 6 comments). Fitting for a platform from the past, worrying if they wanted to be part of the future.
In terms of activity, Digg thus never seemed to be able to keep up with more famous and well-funded competitors such as eviltoast.org. Never mind that a lot of the users seemed to have been trolls upset about being banned by Reddit. SEO is probably part of the problem, but it seems unlikely to be the full story. I think their problem is that it never took off.
That’s interesting and I missed that post, thanks!
It can be easy to lose track of how successful the fediverse already is, as the number of users will remain negligible compared to mainstream platforms for a really long time and possibly forever. Seeing how it easily outperforms a major player like Digg trying to re-establish themselves puts things into perspective.
A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack. Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn’t imaginative enough. That’s a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different.
Small team, completely reimagined, not simply an alternative, genuinely different… They are describing a federated instance.
It was active enough that there was new content every day. Checking multiple times a day I’d see the same stuff but I saw that as a positive that kept me from wasting too much time.
Did it have niche communities that had successfully moved over, but that were not featured on the front page?
Sorry if it’s a stupid question, I just always had the impression I didn’t understand what I was looking at and now it’s gone and I’m genuinely curious.
My community is a niche one Albumartworksheaven. It took me a month to have more followers on digg than here in 6 months. My community was featured twice
I guess that’s one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.
I don’t think many of the niche communities really had time to thrive, since people were trying to build up a lot of the main ones. I think some were starting to just get traction, which could be a reason why they chose now, stopping before it really got away from them.
It had some, yeah. Maybe not “successfully moved” per-say but they were there. I never really got a chance to dig into them very much but I was a member of the /spongebob community and it had some sincere activity from people who wanted to grow it into something fun and engaging.
I think I had blocked maybe one or two of the default communities very early on, and after that I hadn’t noticed any spam. I used the app at least once a day since the open beta started. Whatever they were doing to combat the bots appeared to be working. It’s a huge shame they thought otherwise and shut down.
How was it? Did it feel lively?
I just checked the front page a couple of times out of curiosity, but I never bothered really checking it out too much. I was always surprised how dead it looked from the outside, but that might have been the wrong impression.
Edit: As an illustration, the last snapshot of Digg on internet archive a couple of days ago shows a front page where almost all posts had less than 30 upvotes, and the only two posts breaking above 50 are tech nostalgia posts about a Windows 98 screensaver (105 upvotes, 9 comments) and some young woman reviewing instagram 15 years ago (59 upvotes, 6 comments). Fitting for a platform from the past, worrying if they wanted to be part of the future.
In terms of activity, Digg thus never seemed to be able to keep up with more famous and well-funded competitors such as eviltoast.org. Never mind that a lot of the users seemed to have been trolls upset about being banned by Reddit. SEO is probably part of the problem, but it seems unlikely to be the full story. I think their problem is that it never took off.
It was overall, less active than the Fediverse.
That’s interesting and I missed that post, thanks!
It can be easy to lose track of how successful the fediverse already is, as the number of users will remain negligible compared to mainstream platforms for a really long time and possibly forever. Seeing how it easily outperforms a major player like Digg trying to re-establish themselves puts things into perspective.
Maybe they’ll relaunch as a piefed instance, lol
I was thinking the same thing when I read this:
Small team, completely reimagined, not simply an alternative, genuinely different… They are describing a federated instance.
It was active enough that there was new content every day. Checking multiple times a day I’d see the same stuff but I saw that as a positive that kept me from wasting too much time.
Did it have niche communities that had successfully moved over, but that were not featured on the front page?
Sorry if it’s a stupid question, I just always had the impression I didn’t understand what I was looking at and now it’s gone and I’m genuinely curious.
My community is a niche one Albumartworksheaven. It took me a month to have more followers on digg than here in 6 months. My community was featured twice
Oooh, neat community! Joined!
I guess that’s one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.
I don’t think many of the niche communities really had time to thrive, since people were trying to build up a lot of the main ones. I think some were starting to just get traction, which could be a reason why they chose now, stopping before it really got away from them.
It had some, yeah. Maybe not “successfully moved” per-say but they were there. I never really got a chance to dig into them very much but I was a member of the /spongebob community and it had some sincere activity from people who wanted to grow it into something fun and engaging.
Not noticing it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Isn’t that the best we can ask for nowadays though?
Don’t lower your bar.
I didn’t notice the spam and I was quite happy using the new Digg, so I don’t exactly know what you think I should have been doing differently.
To reiterate, my points are:
Didn’t spend a lot of time there but my experience was similar. Didn’t notice any spam, but activity was sparse.