Technology

What is this cursed place?

Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. The fascinating thing about Digg is that it went through enshittification long before it became the phrase to describe our current internet zeitgeist. It happened incredibly early in its life, but for reasons and in ways that would come to be emblematic of the current internet. The core reason is that the owners of the website were just looking to get out of the game with a pile of fast, easy cash ASAP. They were in talks with Google to sell Digg for $200 million in 2008, but that deal fell through. In August of 2010, the site went through a major redesign that also fundamentally altered the ranking of posts on the site to heavily favor power users, as well as introducing a metric ton of bugs. It's hard to describe the feeling of waking up one day and have your favorite website totally, completely destroyed. It was a Frankensteinian abomination; a cruel, misshapen doppelganger of an aggregator that now mainly linked to advertisements thinly disguised as "user content." No boiling of frogs took place here like it did on Reddit. One single code deployment and server restart later and the website was unusable. It triggered a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. Digg was never able to recover and Reddit became the de facto content aggregator site for the internet (and it's where I spent around 8 hours of every day from September of 2010 to some time in 2023 when they finally gutted the API and I moved to Lemmy). In a grand example of historical irony, Alexis Ohanian said, in an open letter to the Founder of Digg, Kevin Rose,

this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."

Eventually, Digg was gutted for spare parts and its components and miscellaneous intellectual property sold off piecemeal for a total sum that was less than 5% of the value of the initial deal with Google. And the website Digg itself was ultimately sold in April of 2018 to BuySellAds for an undisclosed, but almost certainly pathetic, sum.

And now, dear reader, you are aware of the sad and tragic history of Digg, whose rise and fall was an unheeded warning of the precipice towards which the internet as a whole is headed.

Somehow I never tried looking at Digg

It reminds me of the original "Your doctor doesn't want you to know these 8 tricks for belly fat" ads, only that's the actual content?

Kind of. In most high traffic spaces it feels simply pointless; as in, nobody will read it.

In Reddit (and Twitter) however it feels like people will read it, misread it, and punish you for what you didn't say.

Bots are already proliferating the fediverse. Kbin is constantly spammed with "buy online drugs here" links. Transparent bots (those that are tagged as bots) try to boost engagement by reposting things from Reddit, but are still perpetuating one of the rest aspects of reddit even if they're being upfront about it. AI generated articles posted on obvious junk websites are constantly being spammed by the same accounts.

It's a difficult problem to solve.

There will always be bots on the Internet. I do not believe this is a solvable problem. Instead, we focus on mitigation.

However, Reddit has little incentive to fight the bots because it increases engagement metrics. In fact, it costs money and reduces profits to reduce bot activity. Hence, so many bots.

Right here on Lemmy, because nobody financially benefits from turning a blind eye to the problem, I think we have a head start. This platform is created by users for users. For that reason, I think we should never have the problem quite to the same extent as they do.

Products and Services… ad eternum!

It's not hopeless! The Fediverse is AFAIK entirely nonprofit, and smaller instances means more moderator eyes on everything, too.

If I had to predict the future, I think apps like Reddit, Twitter, Tioktok, etc will be the places for entertainment and the Fediverse will become the place for conversation.

Got a link? I'd be curious to read that.

Dead Internet theory in full effect.