I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.
You need both. LLMs can, I think, do the bulk of removing posts that break community guidelines, but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines. Most would also like to have a human to escalate a dispute to.
Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.
> but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines
The comments above you are suggesting that global guidelines are unnecessary. Instead, they suggest you don't need moderation at all when LLMs now give us the technology to filter out the stuff individual users don't want to see based own their own personal policies. I am sure you can come up with reasons to dispute that, but "you need moderators to do the thing you say is no longer necessary" doesn't add to the discussion.
The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
Same here. The power-tripping of mods ruins reddit. Most don't care about the community as much as they care about exercising their absolute power over users.
And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action).
It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
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 old accounts on the same network as the devices associated with your new account. And that includes devices only seen by association.
It happens to all new accounts. It's known that new account are shadowbanned almost everywhere until they are 30 days old and farmed some karma on a very small set of subreddits that don't shadowban new accounts. It's shocking they ever get any new users, really; as far as a non-technical new user knows, nobody ever reads their comments for some reason.
It's full of bot slop pushing political propaganda, it's possible those bot farms have monetary agreements with Reddit to allow them to create accounts.
It's either some personal unquenched thirst for power or he thought that new digg will be as popular as these ~20 years ago, and that he'll be able to control content submitted and get paid for "promoting" it.
I've seen something similar over the last ~17 years: a bunch of same terminally online accounts uploading content from our local media outlets on country-related subs and local digg-like sites - both active and long defunct for 10 years now. Some of those users even appeared on mastodon and bsky.
The social link aggregators were created for people to share their favorite links, places from the Internet so others could see these and have fun, expand their knowledge and so on. For me it was the cherry on top of the web2.0 period where everything was fresh, beta and innocent. That lasted for a while up until other people, entities figured out that such sites can be used to promote their content, insert ads. The next stage was and remains till today opinion control by "curating" the content and/or reactions in discussions - still done by humans but more prevalent presence of convincing bots.
Reddit itself lost its impartial and independent status a while ago. Big subs related to media franchises or big corporations are heavily controlled to the point it's impossible to submit content that's critical. It's all happy world seen by pink glasses, or as some say toxic positivity.
There are still niche places where moderation is limited but as I said last time, from my own experiences: such subs were targeted by bad actors who by submitting forbidden content tried to impose lockouts so later they could take these in their control.
hn isn't free of some of these issues either. while discussions still remain on good levels (tho degradation to reddit levels already happens), there's no control over content: there are accounts who do nothing but upload links every few minutes, hours.
I'm not sure if it's possible to have link aggregators or multi-thematic forums that could be free of such... issues. The similar problem with establishing "real estates" happened on lemmy when some part of userbase decided to abandon reddit due to controversial changes.
A well moderated forum (like HN) is great. I don't have time for the signal-to-noise ratio of X.
IMHO Reddit would be better if it had AI moderators that strictly follow a sub's policies. Users could read the policies upfront before deciding whether to join. new subs could start with some neutral default policy, and users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
I've always thought than on Reddit (or Digg, or Lemmy or others) common words, brands, names... should be broad "topics" or categories that nobody can claim (first come, first served). You should be able to add a sub/community under a topic, but just like everyone else, and then users interested in said topic could add and exclude different subs to taste.
>> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country.
Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.
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 traffic.
Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?
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.
This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch?
There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?
The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.
That didn't last long. I'm not sure I want to invest my time again if/when they relaunch.
I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.
It's a shame, the intention is still there, if they decide to come back I'll give it another shot.
Btw, why are we publishing simple static pages at ~2.84 MB compressed.
This kind of makes the Digg team look like a joke. Rebuilding was always going to be hard, but I think this kills any chance of building it up a third time since no one can take it seriously.
More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.
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.
> None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on.
I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read.
I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.
The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.
At some point websites will just have to start charging an entry fee just to make it so if you really are yet another bot, at least you are paying for your stay. If you're not rate limiting your websites in 2026 on a per user level, you really need to, and figure out how to do it meaningfully. Raise limits for known human power users, especially if they pay to use your website.
I wonder if the "short-term" "fix" is people will start to migrate off the web and into mobile, though none of this stops agents from using phone emulators, so kind of pointless, but I imagine crawling the web is easier for AI.
Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.
To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.
Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.
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.
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.
You really gotta wonder how much value the "Digg" brand actually has, because the number of people that remember/care about the site from its original glory days is ever dwindling.
I was excited about a Reddit alternative. I signed up months before the public beta. When I tried the public beta the new Digg website turned out to be a terribly bloated and slow NextJS app. Used it once and never again.
477 comments
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
Also, honestly, with AI/LLMs now, do we even need human moderators anywhere anymore
Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.
The comments above you are suggesting that global guidelines are unnecessary. Instead, they suggest you don't need moderation at all when LLMs now give us the technology to filter out the stuff individual users don't want to see based own their own personal policies. I am sure you can come up with reasons to dispute that, but "you need moderators to do the thing you say is no longer necessary" doesn't add to the discussion.
It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
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 old accounts on the same network as the devices associated with your new account. And that includes devices only seen by association.
> and acquire a new phone number
> Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts
That’s… well, that’s just not how tcp/ip works. Your phone number has nothing to do with your device IP…
I've seen something similar over the last ~17 years: a bunch of same terminally online accounts uploading content from our local media outlets on country-related subs and local digg-like sites - both active and long defunct for 10 years now. Some of those users even appeared on mastodon and bsky.
The social link aggregators were created for people to share their favorite links, places from the Internet so others could see these and have fun, expand their knowledge and so on. For me it was the cherry on top of the web2.0 period where everything was fresh, beta and innocent. That lasted for a while up until other people, entities figured out that such sites can be used to promote their content, insert ads. The next stage was and remains till today opinion control by "curating" the content and/or reactions in discussions - still done by humans but more prevalent presence of convincing bots.
Reddit itself lost its impartial and independent status a while ago. Big subs related to media franchises or big corporations are heavily controlled to the point it's impossible to submit content that's critical. It's all happy world seen by pink glasses, or as some say toxic positivity. There are still niche places where moderation is limited but as I said last time, from my own experiences: such subs were targeted by bad actors who by submitting forbidden content tried to impose lockouts so later they could take these in their control.
hn isn't free of some of these issues either. while discussions still remain on good levels (tho degradation to reddit levels already happens), there's no control over content: there are accounts who do nothing but upload links every few minutes, hours.
I'm not sure if it's possible to have link aggregators or multi-thematic forums that could be free of such... issues. The similar problem with establishing "real estates" happened on lemmy when some part of userbase decided to abandon reddit due to controversial changes.
IMHO Reddit would be better if it had AI moderators that strictly follow a sub's policies. Users could read the policies upfront before deciding whether to join. new subs could start with some neutral default policy, and users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
Most places can hide posts and block users at the user level, so why not select which mods can do that for you?
>> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country.
Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.
It was just a copy of reddit. How useful?
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 traffic.
Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?
Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments)
Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments)
Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments)
Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments)
Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)
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.
There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?
I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.
> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem.
Am I completely off base or did they use AI to write the post complaining about AI?
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.
> None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on.
What is HN doing differently then?
I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.
The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.
I wonder if the "short-term" "fix" is people will start to migrate off the web and into mobile, though none of this stops agents from using phone emulators, so kind of pointless, but I imagine crawling the web is easier for AI.
To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.
Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.
We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.
I don’t understand what kind of shenanigans transpired. But it seems there’s more to in than “bots”
If it truly is bots, maybe a private invite only social network is the way to go.