Just a few years ago, you would never see such a disparity in votes vs comments. But these days, this is pretty much the norm. I’ve seen posts with 10K+ upvotes and no more than 80 comments.
I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool. Not sure how that’s legal as I thought ads needed to be marked or differentiated from regular content, but here we are.
The future looks bleak and AI even bleaker. Because it’s going to be used against us to make the rich richer and not to make our lives better.
What is this cursed place? The clickbait has eaten everything. uBlock should make this into a blank page.
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?
Digg was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that “enhanced” that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)
Basically they fucked it up right there.
I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it’s remnants are owned by some advertising company.
I’m not really adding to the conversation with this but wanted to share anyway:
What is this cursed place?
Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator founded in the middle of 2004 (around 7 or 8 months before Reddit), that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. At one point it actually had a higher number of daily active users than Reddit and it was, for several years, Reddit’s chief competitor.
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.
The beginning of the end for Digg came in August of 2010, when the site went through a major redesign, referred to as “Digg v4,” that 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” and content posted by literally a handful of users who were able to manipulate post rankings to exclude any and all posts from non-power users from the front page, driving traffic exclusively to where they wanted it. As many of these power users existed on the political spectrum somewhere between Libertarian and outright Fascists, the political content on the website became especially jarring. 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.
The complete catastrophe that was this redesign 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.
You and I had the same experience and the way you describe Digg’s life is nothing short of poetry.
Also fuck MrBabyMan.
Digg is basically credited as being the catalyst for Reddit, giving it its initial strong launch and overall growth trajectory. Reddit was a place for nerds. As it grew and started hitting mainstream, that changed. But without the users from Digg, Reddit would have likely been as popular as Twitter at the start, a platform that has historically struggled to be relevant. At it’s inception, I think only about 10% of new account holders would remain on the platform. Maybe even lower. That’s a stark contrast from say Facebook that had something like a 90% to 95% retention rate.
We can still find engagement in small niche subs on Reddit. We’ve known, for many years, that people were going to move away from large corporate-controlled sites such as Reddit, Twitter etc…
The Fediverse is addressing this. It isn’t a panacea. However, it is a re-imagining of what we want the Internet to be.
There are many others, that will come along after us, to address this further.
What will stop bots from coming here? Registration filters and user reports?
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.
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 worst 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.
Kbin is constantly spammed with “buy online drugs here” links.
Got examples? I’ve never seen this once as a Kbin user.
One thing I noticed the other day, while banning one such bot, is that the same network has been posting on Reddit as well.
Turns out the Reddit ones have been posting the spam for months, while the Lemmy ones get banned within hours.
Part of that is the lower volume of content here, but part of it is also the great people that take the time to report bad content ♥️
I’d say in about 2 years, the entire place is going to be bots with AI generated content that try to mimic “real users” using their new Dynamic Product Ads tool
Yeah, it’s just partially like that now lol. A few weeks ago there was a side-by-side reddit screenshot post on Lemmy. It showed the exact same reddit post, with the exact same tens of comments (all word for word, some in response to each other iirc), from different accounts less than a year apart. 100% fabrication. I’d never seen such extensive bot-masquerading as people behaviour; it was a realization moment for me
I think X led the way in robotic hellscape innovation that’s now being adopted by Reddit.
Just wait till the advertisers find out the eyeballs they are paying for are also just AI sock puppets. Enshitification strikes again.
I know there is software that exists that can poison art so LLM can’t use it. I am hoping we make something like that against AI bots and ads. What a brutal future we have coming man.
Can you imagine once we move to androids and other synthetic like machines? Or brain implants? Your bff that’s telling you to eat more eggs because they read they were really good for might literally be saying that because of chicken farmers or some vested third party who makes bank on eggs. Just wild that we are going to be attacked from all sides by corporate greed.
