Text article from The Verge (if you prefer reading to watching like I do). Highlights (emphasis mine): ... ... ... ... It makes me laugh a bit when they emphasize "doing what users want and...
Rose and a group of what he calls “brainstorming partners,” which included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, design and product exec Justin Mezzell, and even folks like Blogger and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, started to talk about whether AI might be able to help them build a better social platform.
...
Now, Digg is making a comeback. Rose will be its chair, Mezzell its CEO, and Ohanian an adviser. (Both Rose and Ohanian are also venture capitalists now, and their firms are investing in the new venture.) They bought the domain and other assets from Money Group for a price they wouldn’t disclose and are bringing it back. The site is relaunching today, but only in a limited form. Its ultimate ambitions, however, are enormous: Digg aims to build the kind of community-first social platform that basically no longer exists on the internet. And its new founding team thinks AI could be the secret to pulling it off.
...
Rose says he and Ohanian are both convinced — and both learned the hard way — that the real trick, the thing nobody has yet done properly, is to give the communities the tools they actually need to operate. This is where AI comes in. So much of a moderator’s job, Rose says, is just grunt work: fighting spam, reviewing obvious policy violations, litigating pointless fights. “How can we remove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers,” he says, “and convert what they do every day into more of a kind of ‘director of vibes, culture and community’ than someone that is just sitting there doing the laborious crappy stuff that comes in through the front door?”
The new Digg, Rose says, will include lots of AI-forward ways to sort through and make decisions on content. He also hopes AI can be used for fun. “I’m just making stuff up here, but there’s everything from an AI agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon, to another one where you don’t allow a certain type of profanity and that’s automatically auto-moderated.” Users will be able to tap AI models to build stuff right in their communities, too.
...
The new Digg, if the team does it right, should feel more like a community-driven art project than an old-school internet forum. But Rose and Mezzell both say the whole thing depends on doing what users want — and nothing else.
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One big challenge, Mezzell says, is figuring out how to reward and promote users for doing good work. Digg won’t show how many followers you have because that creates bad incentives; same with competing to be the most-“Dugg” person on the platform.
It makes me laugh a bit when they emphasize "doing what users want and nothing else" while also pushing AI use, not just for moderation, but "for fun."
The problem is they will demand their capital provide a return and will have a hard time seeing how to do that in a people-respecting way. My fuzzy memory doesn't give Ohanian or Williams much...
The problem is they will demand their capital provide a return and will have a hard time seeing how to do that in a people-respecting way. My fuzzy memory doesn't give Ohanian or Williams much credit for making good decisions in this area.
Digg (new) will probably be nice until more people start using it. Meta tried so-called AI forward moderation and it was a disaster for user experience.
Pretty much everything they said makes me want to stay far away from the site.
Yes, but. If they do it the traditional way, trying to build an actually good platform and do what the users want, run it at a loss for a few years and then monetize and turn it to shit, I'll take...
The problem is they will demand their capital provide a return and will have a hard time seeing how to do that in a people-respecting way. My fuzzy memory doesn't give Ohanian or Williams much credit for making good decisions in this area.
Yes, but.
If they do it the traditional way, trying to build an actually good platform and do what the users want, run it at a loss for a few years and then monetize and turn it to shit, I'll take it, because for those few years we're going to have something decent that we don't have now. In my opinion reddit is beyond saving and I would prefer it to just die, so if there's decent competition at least for a while, that would be nice.
I've visited it a few times recently to see if there was anything interesting about a couple of TV shows I like, and I was genuinely shocked by how much it has deteriorated. Leaving aside...
In my opinion reddit is beyond saving
I've visited it a few times recently to see if there was anything interesting about a couple of TV shows I like, and I was genuinely shocked by how much it has deteriorated. Leaving aside subjective aspects like quality of discourse, I noticed that very few comments had even a single up- or downvote, and there were many fewer comments per thread than there used to be. It seems like engagement has really gone downhill.
I haven't abandoned reddit yet, simply because I don't have an alternative. I like this place, but it's slow, and doesn't have some of the communities I'm interested in. In time, I hope. I tried...
I haven't abandoned reddit yet, simply because I don't have an alternative. I like this place, but it's slow, and doesn't have some of the communities I'm interested in. In time, I hope.
I tried Mastadon, and it seems too focused on individuals, rather than topics. Possibly, I'm just not using it right.
Discord is not really the same. Too fast, no archives, no focus.
I'd love a good reddit alternative. Plus, I came from Digg. I suppose that to digg I shall return.
It's not you, it's the Twitter model of important or would-be important people making pronouncements, and everyone else admiring their sagacity. I never used Twitter, but I started to use a few of...
I tried Mastadon, and it seems too focused on individuals, rather than topics. Possibly, I'm just not using it right.
It's not you, it's the Twitter model of important or would-be important people making pronouncements, and everyone else admiring their sagacity. I never used Twitter, but I started to use a few of its clones a while back, and while there is some interesting content there, and some people are genuinely important, with worthwhile things to tell the rest of us, I really don't like the fundamentally hierarchical model.
I was used to Reddit, and at first I tried using Mastodon, etc., the same way. It was quite disappointing when someone would say something, and I would respond, and they wouldn't engage back. After a little while I realized that they didn't post something to start a conversation, they just wanted to pontificate. So now I just use microblogging platforms passively, purely as reading matter.
Yeah, the inevitable squeeze will ruin the site even if they came up with a user friendly way to make the site relatively profitable. Because we all know that nothing is never enough when we are...
Yeah, the inevitable squeeze will ruin the site even if they came up with a user friendly way to make the site relatively profitable. Because we all know that nothing is never enough when we are talking about venture capitalism.
The only good revenue stream is if the site is user funded instead of ad supported. But it’ll never recruit users if it’s a paid service. So it’ll be the loop of ads and selling user data again.
The only good revenue stream is if the site is user funded instead of ad supported. But it’ll never recruit users if it’s a paid service. So it’ll be the loop of ads and selling user data again.
I believe in using AI for things like this. Having transparent and good faith AI contributors and UI elements that help to deescalate conflict could be huge. I'm not sure if that's what they're...
I believe in using AI for things like this. Having transparent and good faith AI contributors and UI elements that help to deescalate conflict could be huge. I'm not sure if that's what they're thinking, but I'm intrigued to see more.
I'll laugh at the irony if everybody leaves reddit and goes back to digg.
I also support AI, and am curious for what they have planned, but I'm skeptical it will work. The problem with current AI is that a lot of tasks that seem like "grunt work", but couldn't be solved...
I also support AI, and am curious for what they have planned, but I'm skeptical it will work. The problem with current AI is that a lot of tasks that seem like "grunt work", but couldn't be solved by pre-LLM algorithms, actually require critical thinking that current AI doesn't have.
AI has been used to artificially grow communities and help moderators before. In particular, the problem with community-building is that the vast majority of AI-generated content is bland (see: AI-generated images), and the problem with moderation is that AI struggles with nuance and is very suggestible (see: jailbreaks). I suspect Digg will try to make the AI a tool, but I don't see how that will avoid the problems. For example, if they make the AI moderator only flag posts and provide context for the human moderators to review, they will run into 1) posts not being flagged (easy to imagine with code words and dog whistles), and 2) context sometimes being inaccurate (see: Apple Intelligence news and text summaries).
Right now my opinion is that we need to develop fundamentally new architectures to handle these tasks. LLMs are very good at some tasks, including code completion and giving summary answers to questions that have been discussed online. But creative media generation and nuanced alignment/moderation are tasks they have never been good at, ChatGPT was released >2 years ago and almost immediately people were trying to use it for them, and I suspect further progress will only be made after another big advancement.
That's my big problem here. You can barely have many quality, transparent, good faith human contributors. Adding AI just amplies those qualities that give mods a bad reputation.
Having transparent and good faith AI contributors
That's my big problem here. You can barely have many quality, transparent, good faith human contributors. Adding AI just amplies those qualities that give mods a bad reputation.
I guess I am willing for them to give it a try, I signed up. What have I got to lose? AI is here; it's in use on all social media websites. Either fully automated through API use, or at the least...
I guess I am willing for them to give it a try, I signed up. What have I got to lose?
AI is here; it's in use on all social media websites. Either fully automated through API use, or at the least by users who are generating content and posts through AI and posting it to their accounts manually. I don't think it's too pervasive on Tildes, but that is likely more due to the size of the community than anything else.
Reddit already runs automod on most subs. One of the problems is that people learn how to work around it. They can use dog-whistles or substitute letters in spelling to subvert the basic tools and post a comment that otherwise wouldn't be allowed. There's also a number of false positives. For those, it's been notoriously difficult for a decade to get a hold of a decent mod or admin to counter a decision the algorithms make. If you do reach someone it's notoriously difficult to get someone with the time to actually look into your appeal.
The only question really is: will AI really be better than a manually written algorithm at any of this?
Time and sanity. A good part of why I'm here is precisely so there's a higher chance I'm making meaningful discussion with curious people. automating out the social element as people are doing in...
What have I got to lose?
Time and sanity. A good part of why I'm here is precisely so there's a higher chance I'm making meaningful discussion with curious people. automating out the social element as people are doing in the wild west kill whatever little incentive I have left to bother talking on the internet. I already keep my social media accounts extremely limited so I'm not really beholden to social pressures when it comes to my browsing.
Reddit already runs automod on most subs. One of the problems is that people learn how to work around it.
Yes, because you can't rely on bots to understand a context-free grammar. Just like AI in the future, these tools of the past work best complimenting a proper mod, not as some way to offset 99% of all judgement. It gives the mod a bad reputation because the latter usage is the quality of a poor mod. But so far the future seems to be taking the poor mod route.
I think the tool will be worse off than an automod for that reason. It's going to be assumed as a black box to leave even more judgement onto. A poor mod who can't update an automod isn't going to update an AI mod.
The trick is to give users what they want and run the site at a loss for a few years, then slowly dial the enshittifaction up to increase profits and hope the whole project becomes net profit...
The trick is to give users what they want and run the site at a loss for a few years, then slowly dial the enshittifaction up to increase profits and hope the whole project becomes net profit before it dies.
Rose could just say "we want to make Digg into Reddit back when Reddit was the good Digg again," and then Reddit and Digg can just poop back and forth forever. Wait, did I just reinvent the...
Rose could just say "we want to make Digg into Reddit back when Reddit was the good Digg again," and then Reddit and Digg can just poop back and forth forever.
Wait, did I just reinvent the concept of market competition?
What they need to do is: Ban problematic content from day one. No incest, jailbait, morbid gore videos, racial hate speech, medical disinformation, etc. Don't do what Reddit did to "justify"...
What they need to do is:
Ban problematic content from day one. No incest, jailbait, morbid gore videos, racial hate speech, medical disinformation, etc. Don't do what Reddit did to "justify" banning these communities by plucking out bullshit vote manipulation statistics out of their sphincter. Or by only making a content policy change when your name is already being dragged through the dirt on national news.
Robust guidelines for community moderators and an appeals process that is fair, rather than building a cabal of power users to rule with an iron fist. Anything to stop turning Digg v5 into the partisan shithole that Reddit currently is.
If they allow porn, allow strictly amateur and exhibitionist content only. Reddit is astroturfed by e-girls plugging links to their OnlyFans and it's made more niche fetish subs unusable.
Ban AI generated content and vow to protect user data from being used to train LLMs.
The ability to post anonymously without the need to create throwaway accounts.
Decent search function, website and app from day one. And if the app is shit, don't do what Reddit did and charge a fucktonne for third party devs to use the API.
I agree with most of these. I'd soften 4 to say AI content should be labeled. I draw a big line between a bit account and a guy going "look at this cool picture I made with AI." I don't see 5...
I agree with most of these.
I'd soften 4 to say AI content should be labeled. I draw a big line between a bit account and a guy going "look at this cool picture I made with AI."
I don't see 5 helping. That basically just leads to 4chan which is like the king of problematic communities.
Best run community I've been in, is still Something Awful, which had both draconian mods and a paid barrier to entry. But I don't know how much you could scale that up.
Brainstorming: what about the ability to post under a throwaway name but allow a ban/moderator action on that throwaway to remove the underlying accounts ability to post with new throwaways. I...
Brainstorming: what about the ability to post under a throwaway name but allow a ban/moderator action on that throwaway to remove the underlying accounts ability to post with new throwaways. I think there are interesting topics where throwaways are useful but I agree that it shouldn't be a mechanism for ban evasion or be the default.
The new Digg, Rose says, will include lots of AI-forward ways to sort through and make decisions on content. He also hopes AI can be used for fun. “I’m just making stuff up here, but there’s everything from an AI agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon, to another one where you don’t allow a certain type of profanity and that’s automatically auto-moderated.” Users will be able to tap AI models to build stuff right in their communities, too.
I should clarify my position. AI done right can be very effective (look at Nvidia DLSS 4 for a good example), but it absolutely shouldn't be the main driver of the site's content, nor should it be...
I should clarify my position. AI done right can be very effective (look at Nvidia DLSS 4 for a good example), but it absolutely shouldn't be the main driver of the site's content, nor should it be the judge, jury & executioner of content moderation decisions.
A lot of the short and long form content I consume on YouTube and Facebook are videos that regurgitate Reddit stories, often with ASMR or gameplay footage playing in the background. There was a running joke years ago that a lot of the stories posted to these advice subs are more like elaborate creative writing projects than anything grounded in reality, but I'd say it's gotten worse these days. I'm no English major and I'm an Aspie who struggles with socializing, but even I can see the tell-tale signs that a lot of the more recent trending stories featured in these videos are entirely hallucinated by AI (the wording, the story strucutre, the language used and some of the formulaic patterns.) I state this because Reddit has well and truly been enshittified with AI astroturfing and I do not want to see Digg go down that same path.
Want a good example of what I mean? Start watching videos from channels like Reddit Family Tales and take a shot every time you hear the phrase "said I was being disrespectful." You'll probably be hospitalized with severe alcohol poisoning after a few hours.
Honestly, a "new" link aggregator site could just ban porn. That side of reddit feels really disconnected from non-porn subreddits. And if they want to make moderation easier, not having to worry...
Honestly, a "new" link aggregator site could just ban porn. That side of reddit feels really disconnected from non-porn subreddits. And if they want to make moderation easier, not having to worry about porn moderation will contribute quite a bit to that goal.
I think the real answer here might be to stop trying. Ever since Facebook, everyone seems to be trying to be a community for everyone. So Twitter and reddit are full of serious political...
I think the real answer here might be to stop trying.
Ever since Facebook, everyone seems to be trying to be a community for everyone. So Twitter and reddit are full of serious political discourse, memes, shitposts, pictures of what they ate for dinner and pretty much anything else. Then all these people who came to the platform for different reasons and use it in different ways, are all being thrown into the same giant room to get all annoyed at eachother.
When I think of good communication I was part of, they all had a common theme. Like a comedy board that maybe had a movie subsection. Or a forum for video games that also had a current events section.
Even if the topics varied, the people who joined the board all came for the same general reason, or had some sort of common interest.
I just don't think you can find that in a giant one size fits all site.
Imo the key is natural gatekeeping that keeps out the most mainstream of the mainstream. Which niche hobby boards do naturally, but there are other ways to do it. I'm a long time member of a local...
Imo the key is natural gatekeeping that keeps out the most mainstream of the mainstream. Which niche hobby boards do naturally, but there are other ways to do it.
I'm a long time member of a local discussion board that has a scope of topics about as broad as reddit, though it's of course dramatically smaller (730 people are currently online, at 22:30 local time), including offensive humor, porn, videogames, music, philosophy, epidemiology or foreign policy and wars. And it has by far the highest average quality of all "social media" I visit, because at the very beginning (not sure if that's 20 or 25 years ago now) you had to know the owner personally to join, then you had to fill out a form saying "who are you and why should we accept you", which is when it became known as a home of annoying elitists, and soon after each user occassionally received an invite they could use to invite a friend in, which is how it's been since then. This suppressed eternal september and kept smart people in.
Though I wonder if even this type of gatekeeping or niche interest gatekeeping is enough nowadays and whether the fact that all those places worked well or still do is just a result of the fact that many of them were created when internet itself was younger and less prevalent, and they've been continually populated by the same kinds of people since then. That would make creating new places like that difficult.
When you look at the biggest and most profitable social media websites, how many of them fit what you are describing? And how many are "giant one size fits all" sites? Comments like yours remind...
When you look at the biggest and most profitable social media websites, how many of them fit what you are describing? And how many are "giant one size fits all" sites?
Comments like yours remind me of cinephiles claiming that for movie theaters to be profitable again, they need to stop doing big IP movies, sequels and remakes, and instead show obscure indie films from bumfuck nowhere. I find the whole thing pretty silly. Maybe that's what would personally make you happy, and that's fine, but unless you are obscenely wealthy and willing to throw lots of money at it just for the heck of it, it's obviously going to be a financial failure.
On one hand I've really enjoyed the return of DiggNation. Watching Alex and Kevin be slightly drunk, pretentious goobers is still enjoyable to me. On the other, I continue to have zero faith in...
On one hand I've really enjoyed the return of DiggNation. Watching Alex and Kevin be slightly drunk, pretentious goobers is still enjoyable to me. On the other, I continue to have zero faith in Kevin to not fuck this up...either initially or get greedy a few years down the road and ruin it for a quick buck.
And then there's Alexis Ohanian, who oversaw a much slower rotting of reddit.
So I don't have too much faith in this at all long-term, but will likely check it out when it launches.
Alexis Ohanian makes me less inclined to support a Digg revival. If there's anything I've learned from following the history of Reddit, it's that he's a fucking weasel that will throw other people...
Alexis Ohanian makes me less inclined to support a Digg revival. If there's anything I've learned from following the history of Reddit, it's that he's a fucking weasel that will throw other people under the bus to safeguard his image.
Remember the time when Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and made sure then-CEO Ellen Pao got the blame? Or when he resigned from Reddit in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and acted like he never agreed with the racist and hateful direction Reddit went down, even though he had been part of Reddit's board for the years that a load of hate-filled subs (many of which I can't even name here) were at their peak?
Kevin Rose is just a naive wannabe Silicon Valley tech-bro with a lot of failed side projects, the worst I recall being Pownce which was a lame microblogging social network service that advertised the ability to share small files of up to 10MB as one of its core features, even though there was already a perfectly acceptable medium for sharing small files that existed for years before that... and it's fucking called email!
Digg v4 was certainly Rose's biggest failure and was such a spectacular misstep that it nuked his once-successful site overnight, but Digg was already in decline at that point with people joking that it was just a repository for posts they saw on Reddit the day before. But his other failures have just been half-arsed attempts at reinventing the wheel by comparison.
"Popcorn tastes good" - Alexis Ohanian, 2015, responding to complaints about firing of an employee Spez being the sole leader since kn0thing's withdrawal has done wonders for Ohanian's image, but...
"Popcorn tastes good" - Alexis Ohanian, 2015, responding to complaints about firing of an employee
Spez being the sole leader since kn0thing's withdrawal has done wonders for Ohanian's image, but he had his share of community upsets too.
Stated it in my comment. Alexis Ohanian is kn0thing, I don't think I made that clear. The claim that Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and threw Ellen Pao under the bus came from the previous CEO,...
Stated it in my comment. Alexis Ohanian is kn0thing, I don't think I made that clear.
The claim that Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and threw Ellen Pao under the bus came from the previous CEO, Yishan Wong. Even kn0thing himself confirmed that he was the one who fired her, which he was all too eager to reveal once the community had already pulled out their pitchforks and rallied against Pao, forcing her to resign.
As for kn0thing's resignation, it feels disingenous when someone who was part of Reddit's board of directors and clearly had enough sway to go behind a CEO's back and fire an employee because he personally didn't like how AMAs were being organized, allowed hateful content to proliferate for years yet did nothing to acknowledge this nor take any responsibility.
How this man managed to woo Serena Williams of all people despite the state Reddit was in for years baffles me.
I mean, at this point most people who remember Digg are not the demographic that generally has as much time or desire to hang out on the internet as they used to. That means that for all the...
I mean, at this point most people who remember Digg are not the demographic that generally has as much time or desire to hang out on the internet as they used to. That means that for all the nostalgic vibes it has for those people it still is pretty much a new platform for the rest of the world. Which is going to be difficult I think.
Gift link to a NYT on the same topic https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/digg-alexis-ohanian-kevin-rose.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1k4.LdSz.XbnBiAY9sdpw&smid=em-share
I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. It really just seems like they want to do "Reddit but AI" and I don't think they'll get anywhere with that unless Reddit increases the shoot-self-in-foot per...
I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. It really just seems like they want to do "Reddit but AI" and I don't think they'll get anywhere with that unless Reddit increases the shoot-self-in-foot per second speed even more drastically than they have been these past few years. And even if they do succeed I can't see a venture capital-funded techbro startup social media panning out in a way that ends up being pro-user.
Rose says he and Ohanian are both convinced — and both learned the hard way — that the real trick, the thing nobody has yet done properly, is to give the communities the tools they actually need to operate. This is where AI comes in. So much of a moderator’s job, Rose says, is just grunt work: fighting spam, reviewing obvious policy violations, litigating pointless fights. “How can we remove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers,” he says, “and convert what they do every day into more of a kind of ‘director of vibes, culture and community’ than someone that is just sitting there doing the laborious crappy stuff that comes in through the front door?”
This take confuses me. As someone who's done a lot of internet moderating I really don't think there's anything wrong with the system Reddit uses, outside of the inherently hierarchical modteam structure which AI doesn't do anything to rectify. And I certainly don't think that insufficient mod tools affect the end user in any meaningful way. Mods are perfectly capable of being ‘directors of vibes, culture and community’ with whatever tools are given as long as they have the freedom to choose content, which again, AI doesn't really affect much. I'm skeptical that this pitch has any more substance than what they needed to sell to investors.
do you solo mod? Most of my time spent with my subs (biggest being about ~1.8m) is clearing the two unmoderated queues. Almost all of the easy stuff is covered by automoderator, but I still check...
do you solo mod? Most of my time spent with my subs (biggest being about ~1.8m) is clearing the two unmoderated queues. Almost all of the easy stuff is covered by automoderator, but I still check for OC and some other tasks that could easily be automated with a better bot.
If this is the sort of thing their AI is going to do, it'd be great. I have a lot of things I want to do for my subs, but I just don't have the time.
Its a neat idea and reddit needs more competition.
I've moderated subs as large as 18m and some as small as a few thousand; at the higher sub counts clearing the unmoderated queue simply stops being something feasible, and pretty much all focus is...
I've moderated subs as large as 18m and some as small as a few thousand; at the higher sub counts clearing the unmoderated queue simply stops being something feasible, and pretty much all focus is pointed towards the modqueue instead. The theory being that good posts generally won't get reported, most bad posts will be, and if any bad posts don't get reported it's probably because they're sitting at 1 downvote and 0 comments and will stay that way forever. I don't know of any subs above maybe 200k which actively clear the unmoderated queue so I'm actually quite surprised that you're able to keep on top of it for a sub with nearly 2 million subscribers.
The effort involved in clearing modqueue varies depending on the sub, but in general for my larger subs, with a dozen or so active mods each mod might expect to do a page of reports or so (1 page being 25 posts/comments, on old.reddit at least). Maybe 10 or so minutes a day per sub. Automod can help a great deal in a lot of circumstances too; in most big subs I mod the automod does more monthly actions than the rest of the team combined, which is a double-edged sword for sure. I think if any mod is having to actively work their ass off to keep the sub afloat, it's a strong indicator that the sub needs a lot more mods. This moderating thing isn't supposed to be strenuous, not as a volunteer hobby. At my most active I was maybe hitting an hour a day on moderating and was able to keep up with ~50 subreddits with over 10k subscribers apiece. But I digress.
All that being said, my main point here would be that I simply don't think any of that should impede a modteam's ability to do other interesting things with their subs. Ultimately queue-cleaning isn't difficult, it's just busywork, and I've always found that I'm just as able to come up with cool ideas for events and such after the busywork is done. And my broader point is that I don't think getting rid of that busywork would necessarily translate to mods being able to make their subs more interesting, or going further with that, making them higher quality. Perhaps I'm simply a bit jaded from having to spend so much time in dysfunctional mod teams, but most big subs I've been in have ended up with a divide between the queue-cleaning mods and the "old guard" who largely steer clear of queues in favour of high-level decisions. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, sometimes it is, but in either case one might expect that old guard, now with their hands free of having to do queue work, to be able to take charge and work on bettering their communities through "vibes" or whatnot. But that doesn't usually happen. Subs stagnate more due to their userbases and less because of the mods in my experiences. I've had subs absolutely blow up and gain hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a month, with me being the sole mod and without even having an actual written ruleset. And I've had subs with the most passionate mods you can imagine working their asses off each day for months making quality content, only for said content to get noticed by less than 0.1% of the subscriber base. A moderator's job is to curate, not to control absolutely. If there's nothing good to curate, then there's not much the mod can do to fix things.
I'm not against implementing AI into modtools. I think it's one of the few wholly positive ways that AI could be used, provided it's not substituting real human review in serious situations (which meme forums certainly do not qualify as). But I don't think it's something that'll fundamentally change the face of social media, nor do I think it's something worth centering an entire tech startup around. Reddit has been testing out AI modtools for months now, along with all sorts of new non-AI ones, and feedback from mods has been very positive overall (I've honestly not used them myself, I was auto-enrolled in a bunch of beta tests for some reason but I sorta just ignore all their messages because I don't give a shit). Now if the Digg people have other ideas in store also then perhaps they have a shot, and I really hope they do something. But the fact that they spent so much of their PR talking about AI and... Not really anything else, doesn't give me much hope. If that's all they have then I think they're going to get outdone by others without much trouble. But still, kn0thing is a cool guy from all I've seen from him. Maybe I'll be wrong.
I've been toying with an idea of having the community itself mod the sub. I was thinking it would be based off of community karma --- even just to cover the basics like removing shitty comments...
I've been toying with an idea of having the community itself mod the sub. I was thinking it would be based off of community karma --- even just to cover the basics like removing shitty comments and low-effort posts. I've got a few folks who can remove posts with !bot -- it filters the post and their comment. This isn't far off what stackexchange and some other communities have, but I can't figure out a way to get a list of the people with x+ karma.
Anyway, I absolutely will never add anything more to my mod / op list. One reason I love tildes is that I am absolutely powerless here :)
I was a Digg to Reddit migrant, and I would gladly go back to Digg if becomes a decent platform. But how is it even possible? I feel there's a fundamental disconnect between what the owners of a...
I was a Digg to Reddit migrant, and I would gladly go back to Digg if becomes a decent platform. But how is it even possible? I feel there's a fundamental disconnect between what the owners of a site like that want (profit), and what the users want (discussion). Call me jaded, but it will probably start off fun and refreshing, and then it will slowly get worse and collapse under its own weight.
One thing I agree with is the need to stop rewarding users based on popularity/followers or any of that bullshit. We don't want it to be full of bots and spammy content just to get likes. And also, how do you stop it from becoming too politically biased? It seems like everything eventually becomes either ultra right or ultra left once the feedback loop begins.
Perhaps we should reconsider our unspoken assumption that a social media site should remain good forever. Maybe if we just accepted that good sites are ephemeral, we'd be more amenable to pulling...
Perhaps we should reconsider our unspoken assumption that a social media site should remain good forever. Maybe if we just accepted that good sites are ephemeral, we'd be more amenable to pulling up stakes when the enshittification begins in earnest and there'd actually be market forces opposing the process.
Those of us who've been bouncing around various fora and aggregators for decades have just kind of accepted this implicitly, but in my experience, we wait far too long to flee the ship as a general thing. The Network Effect is a big part of this of course, but I don't think our unexamined desire for permanence is helping much.
Y'know, I think you're onto something here. People seem to get so resistant to change, especially as we got older, but it's ultimately a fool's errands to stop change. It's a part of life and...
Y'know, I think you're onto something here. People seem to get so resistant to change, especially as we got older, but it's ultimately a fool's errands to stop change. It's a part of life and there's no reason we shouldn't expect it in our communities and media.
Yeah, I think this is a valid point. There’s no reason that online spaces should be any different than physical ones. Most people over the age of, say, 25 have probably had the experience of...
Yeah, I think this is a valid point. There’s no reason that online spaces should be any different than physical ones. Most people over the age of, say, 25 have probably had the experience of having a cool dive bar or other hangout ruined when the general public finds out about it. It’s a drag, but it’s not like your life is over. You just find somewhere else to hang out.
Very good point. I guess the requirement is that we want something good enough to migrate to once something has enshittified. It would be a shame if there is no decent replacement and you're left...
Very good point. I guess the requirement is that we want something good enough to migrate to once something has enshittified. It would be a shame if there is no decent replacement and you're left with nothing. Perhaps Reddit will become good again once Digg has crappified, and the cycle continues...
I used Digg, and moved to Reddit awhile before the famous V4 fiasco, because the quality of discourse was better. They worked in a similar way: you had a small, predefined list of categories you...
I used Digg, and moved to Reddit awhile before the famous V4 fiasco, because the quality of discourse was better.
They worked in a similar way: you had a small, predefined list of categories you could submit links to, users would vote on links, and there were comments. Digg's comments strayed closer to YouTube quality though, with more flaming and trolling.
One interesting difference was the button to vote a story up was very prominent, if the "bury" button was located in a different spot and required a reason, such as "in in accurate" or "spam." Not that it seemed to do much to alter user behavior.
I can't because I was a Farker instead. And this is why I think this doesn't work, idk that you can revive Digg for the people that were there and hook folks who are younger and never used it...
I can't because I was a Farker instead. And this is why I think this doesn't work, idk that you can revive Digg for the people that were there and hook folks who are younger and never used it without pissing off both.
I might have been one of the last people who still visited Digg semi-regularly, like maybe weekly. I didn’t mind what it turned into, it was just a place I peeked at and occasionally found...
I might have been one of the last people who still visited Digg semi-regularly, like maybe weekly. I didn’t mind what it turned into, it was just a place I peeked at and occasionally found interesting content on. I mostly don’t use algorithmically fed media anymore and the stuff I do use (Mastodon and BlueSky) is focused on just follower feeds and my follower lists don’t pick up much of the general “internet culture.” So stuff like Digg was really my main way of knowing what the trends are on TikTok and Twitter aside from various group chats and discords I’m on.
I wish the internet had more places that you check on once or twice a day or week (which is basically how I use Tildes now as well). It definitely did not have any sort of community anymore though, so it’ll be interesting to see how this “director of vibes” thing will go. Community features do tend to make a site more sticky and encourage more visits and interaction. Which also leads to moderator headaches sine people will also step out of line then. But my impression of a lot of people who go out seeking mod powers often can’t help themselves but to get hyper-focused on those sorts of exhausting nitpicky stuff. Like yeah the janitorial duties are annoying, but the parts about intervening in pointless arguments type things seem to be what drives much of the mod drama in communities I’ve seen in the first place. This would sort of select for a completely different psychological profile around what sort of person would want to moderate a community.
But that all assumes this is anything different from the sorts of mod tools Reddit already provides. I’ve seen some pretty thorough automod configurations in the past that can get very particular about what sorts of participation they permit. Why wouldn’t you be able to build many such features into a site like Reddit? The main things Reddit mods can’t control is the algorithm, so if something hits All they can get overwhelmed. They can try to hide the upvote/downvote buttons or do some CSS to remind people about downvote reddiquette. But these are all small potatoes workarounds for the fact that what shows up on the feed is a consequence of mass votes and that sets the vibes ultimately. I think what you’d actually need to curate vibes would be granular controls over what sorts of content are promoted by the feed. But that’s in tension with the need to sling ads in people’s faces, so how well can it ever really work?
Text article from The Verge (if you prefer reading to watching like I do).
Highlights (emphasis mine):
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It makes me laugh a bit when they emphasize "doing what users want and nothing else" while also pushing AI use, not just for moderation, but "for fun."
The problem is they will demand their capital provide a return and will have a hard time seeing how to do that in a people-respecting way. My fuzzy memory doesn't give Ohanian or Williams much credit for making good decisions in this area.
Digg (new) will probably be nice until more people start using it. Meta tried so-called AI forward moderation and it was a disaster for user experience.
Pretty much everything they said makes me want to stay far away from the site.
Yes, but.
If they do it the traditional way, trying to build an actually good platform and do what the users want, run it at a loss for a few years and then monetize and turn it to shit, I'll take it, because for those few years we're going to have something decent that we don't have now. In my opinion reddit is beyond saving and I would prefer it to just die, so if there's decent competition at least for a while, that would be nice.
I'm not holding my breath though.
I've visited it a few times recently to see if there was anything interesting about a couple of TV shows I like, and I was genuinely shocked by how much it has deteriorated. Leaving aside subjective aspects like quality of discourse, I noticed that very few comments had even a single up- or downvote, and there were many fewer comments per thread than there used to be. It seems like engagement has really gone downhill.
I haven't abandoned reddit yet, simply because I don't have an alternative. I like this place, but it's slow, and doesn't have some of the communities I'm interested in. In time, I hope.
I tried Mastadon, and it seems too focused on individuals, rather than topics. Possibly, I'm just not using it right.
Discord is not really the same. Too fast, no archives, no focus.
I'd love a good reddit alternative. Plus, I came from Digg. I suppose that to digg I shall return.
It's not you, it's the Twitter model of important or would-be important people making pronouncements, and everyone else admiring their sagacity. I never used Twitter, but I started to use a few of its clones a while back, and while there is some interesting content there, and some people are genuinely important, with worthwhile things to tell the rest of us, I really don't like the fundamentally hierarchical model.
I was used to Reddit, and at first I tried using Mastodon, etc., the same way. It was quite disappointing when someone would say something, and I would respond, and they wouldn't engage back. After a little while I realized that they didn't post something to start a conversation, they just wanted to pontificate. So now I just use microblogging platforms passively, purely as reading matter.
Yeah, the inevitable squeeze will ruin the site even if they came up with a user friendly way to make the site relatively profitable. Because we all know that nothing is never enough when we are talking about venture capitalism.
The only good revenue stream is if the site is user funded instead of ad supported. But it’ll never recruit users if it’s a paid service. So it’ll be the loop of ads and selling user data again.
I believe in using AI for things like this. Having transparent and good faith AI contributors and UI elements that help to deescalate conflict could be huge. I'm not sure if that's what they're thinking, but I'm intrigued to see more.
I'll laugh at the irony if everybody leaves reddit and goes back to digg.
I also support AI, and am curious for what they have planned, but I'm skeptical it will work. The problem with current AI is that a lot of tasks that seem like "grunt work", but couldn't be solved by pre-LLM algorithms, actually require critical thinking that current AI doesn't have.
AI has been used to artificially grow communities and help moderators before. In particular, the problem with community-building is that the vast majority of AI-generated content is bland (see: AI-generated images), and the problem with moderation is that AI struggles with nuance and is very suggestible (see: jailbreaks). I suspect Digg will try to make the AI a tool, but I don't see how that will avoid the problems. For example, if they make the AI moderator only flag posts and provide context for the human moderators to review, they will run into 1) posts not being flagged (easy to imagine with code words and dog whistles), and 2) context sometimes being inaccurate (see: Apple Intelligence news and text summaries).
Right now my opinion is that we need to develop fundamentally new architectures to handle these tasks. LLMs are very good at some tasks, including code completion and giving summary answers to questions that have been discussed online. But creative media generation and nuanced alignment/moderation are tasks they have never been good at, ChatGPT was released >2 years ago and almost immediately people were trying to use it for them, and I suspect further progress will only be made after another big advancement.
That's my big problem here. You can barely have many quality, transparent, good faith human contributors. Adding AI just amplies those qualities that give mods a bad reputation.
I guess I am willing for them to give it a try, I signed up. What have I got to lose?
AI is here; it's in use on all social media websites. Either fully automated through API use, or at the least by users who are generating content and posts through AI and posting it to their accounts manually. I don't think it's too pervasive on Tildes, but that is likely more due to the size of the community than anything else.
Reddit already runs automod on most subs. One of the problems is that people learn how to work around it. They can use dog-whistles or substitute letters in spelling to subvert the basic tools and post a comment that otherwise wouldn't be allowed. There's also a number of false positives. For those, it's been notoriously difficult for a decade to get a hold of a decent mod or admin to counter a decision the algorithms make. If you do reach someone it's notoriously difficult to get someone with the time to actually look into your appeal.
The only question really is: will AI really be better than a manually written algorithm at any of this?
Time and sanity. A good part of why I'm here is precisely so there's a higher chance I'm making meaningful discussion with curious people. automating out the social element as people are doing in the wild west kill whatever little incentive I have left to bother talking on the internet. I already keep my social media accounts extremely limited so I'm not really beholden to social pressures when it comes to my browsing.
Yes, because you can't rely on bots to understand a context-free grammar. Just like AI in the future, these tools of the past work best complimenting a proper mod, not as some way to offset 99% of all judgement. It gives the mod a bad reputation because the latter usage is the quality of a poor mod. But so far the future seems to be taking the poor mod route.
I think the tool will be worse off than an automod for that reason. It's going to be assumed as a black box to leave even more judgement onto. A poor mod who can't update an automod isn't going to update an AI mod.
This has no chance of working, when what users want will always be fundamentally not profitable
The trick is to give users what they want and run the site at a loss for a few years, then slowly dial the enshittifaction up to increase profits and hope the whole project becomes net profit before it dies.
I was cautiously optimistic until I saw "AI". I should have known better.
Rose could just say "we want to make Digg into Reddit back when Reddit was the good Digg again," and then Reddit and Digg can just poop back and forth forever.
Wait, did I just reinvent the concept of market competition?
You certainly just invented a new sub-genre of porn (mainly the forever part, not just the pooping back and forth, that's been done to bits already).
https://youtu.be/KQoJo81lujk
It's an older meme, sir, but it checks out.
Jesus, I am amazed I missed this. I thought I knew all the memes.
Chocolate rain, Fallout Boy (wrong) lyrics, mushroom song, etc.
It's like 20 years old at this point. This is archeomemeology.
Hahaha, good term.
What they need to do is:
Ban problematic content from day one. No incest, jailbait, morbid gore videos, racial hate speech, medical disinformation, etc. Don't do what Reddit did to "justify" banning these communities by plucking out bullshit vote manipulation statistics out of their sphincter. Or by only making a content policy change when your name is already being dragged through the dirt on national news.
Robust guidelines for community moderators and an appeals process that is fair, rather than building a cabal of power users to rule with an iron fist. Anything to stop turning Digg v5 into the partisan shithole that Reddit currently is.
If they allow porn, allow strictly amateur and exhibitionist content only. Reddit is astroturfed by e-girls plugging links to their OnlyFans and it's made more niche fetish subs unusable.
Ban AI generated content and vow to protect user data from being used to train LLMs.
The ability to post anonymously without the need to create throwaway accounts.
Decent search function, website and app from day one. And if the app is shit, don't do what Reddit did and charge a fucktonne for third party devs to use the API.
I agree with most of these.
I'd soften 4 to say AI content should be labeled. I draw a big line between a bit account and a guy going "look at this cool picture I made with AI."
I don't see 5 helping. That basically just leads to 4chan which is like the king of problematic communities.
Best run community I've been in, is still Something Awful, which had both draconian mods and a paid barrier to entry. But I don't know how much you could scale that up.
Brainstorming: what about the ability to post under a throwaway name but allow a ban/moderator action on that throwaway to remove the underlying accounts ability to post with new throwaways. I think there are interesting topics where throwaways are useful but I agree that it shouldn't be a mechanism for ban evasion or be the default.
It's not looking good for #4...
I should clarify my position. AI done right can be very effective (look at Nvidia DLSS 4 for a good example), but it absolutely shouldn't be the main driver of the site's content, nor should it be the judge, jury & executioner of content moderation decisions.
A lot of the short and long form content I consume on YouTube and Facebook are videos that regurgitate Reddit stories, often with ASMR or gameplay footage playing in the background. There was a running joke years ago that a lot of the stories posted to these advice subs are more like elaborate creative writing projects than anything grounded in reality, but I'd say it's gotten worse these days. I'm no English major and I'm an Aspie who struggles with socializing, but even I can see the tell-tale signs that a lot of the more recent trending stories featured in these videos are entirely hallucinated by AI (the wording, the story strucutre, the language used and some of the formulaic patterns.) I state this because Reddit has well and truly been enshittified with AI astroturfing and I do not want to see Digg go down that same path.
Want a good example of what I mean? Start watching videos from channels like Reddit Family Tales and take a shot every time you hear the phrase "said I was being disrespectful." You'll probably be hospitalized with severe alcohol poisoning after a few hours.
Honestly, a "new" link aggregator site could just ban porn. That side of reddit feels really disconnected from non-porn subreddits. And if they want to make moderation easier, not having to worry about porn moderation will contribute quite a bit to that goal.
I think the real answer here might be to stop trying.
Ever since Facebook, everyone seems to be trying to be a community for everyone. So Twitter and reddit are full of serious political discourse, memes, shitposts, pictures of what they ate for dinner and pretty much anything else. Then all these people who came to the platform for different reasons and use it in different ways, are all being thrown into the same giant room to get all annoyed at eachother.
When I think of good communication I was part of, they all had a common theme. Like a comedy board that maybe had a movie subsection. Or a forum for video games that also had a current events section.
Even if the topics varied, the people who joined the board all came for the same general reason, or had some sort of common interest.
I just don't think you can find that in a giant one size fits all site.
Imo the key is natural gatekeeping that keeps out the most mainstream of the mainstream. Which niche hobby boards do naturally, but there are other ways to do it.
I'm a long time member of a local discussion board that has a scope of topics about as broad as reddit, though it's of course dramatically smaller (730 people are currently online, at 22:30 local time), including offensive humor, porn, videogames, music, philosophy, epidemiology or foreign policy and wars. And it has by far the highest average quality of all "social media" I visit, because at the very beginning (not sure if that's 20 or 25 years ago now) you had to know the owner personally to join, then you had to fill out a form saying "who are you and why should we accept you", which is when it became known as a home of annoying elitists, and soon after each user occassionally received an invite they could use to invite a friend in, which is how it's been since then. This suppressed eternal september and kept smart people in.
Though I wonder if even this type of gatekeeping or niche interest gatekeeping is enough nowadays and whether the fact that all those places worked well or still do is just a result of the fact that many of them were created when internet itself was younger and less prevalent, and they've been continually populated by the same kinds of people since then. That would make creating new places like that difficult.
When you look at the biggest and most profitable social media websites, how many of them fit what you are describing? And how many are "giant one size fits all" sites?
Comments like yours remind me of cinephiles claiming that for movie theaters to be profitable again, they need to stop doing big IP movies, sequels and remakes, and instead show obscure indie films from bumfuck nowhere. I find the whole thing pretty silly. Maybe that's what would personally make you happy, and that's fine, but unless you are obscenely wealthy and willing to throw lots of money at it just for the heck of it, it's obviously going to be a financial failure.
On one hand I've really enjoyed the return of DiggNation. Watching Alex and Kevin be slightly drunk, pretentious goobers is still enjoyable to me. On the other, I continue to have zero faith in Kevin to not fuck this up...either initially or get greedy a few years down the road and ruin it for a quick buck.
And then there's Alexis Ohanian, who oversaw a much slower rotting of reddit.
So I don't have too much faith in this at all long-term, but will likely check it out when it launches.
Alexis Ohanian makes me less inclined to support a Digg revival. If there's anything I've learned from following the history of Reddit, it's that he's a fucking weasel that will throw other people under the bus to safeguard his image.
Remember the time when Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and made sure then-CEO Ellen Pao got the blame? Or when he resigned from Reddit in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and acted like he never agreed with the racist and hateful direction Reddit went down, even though he had been part of Reddit's board for the years that a load of hate-filled subs (many of which I can't even name here) were at their peak?
Kevin Rose is just a naive wannabe Silicon Valley tech-bro with a lot of failed side projects, the worst I recall being Pownce which was a lame microblogging social network service that advertised the ability to share small files of up to 10MB as one of its core features, even though there was already a perfectly acceptable medium for sharing small files that existed for years before that... and it's fucking called email!
Digg v4 was certainly Rose's biggest failure and was such a spectacular misstep that it nuked his once-successful site overnight, but Digg was already in decline at that point with people joking that it was just a repository for posts they saw on Reddit the day before. But his other failures have just been half-arsed attempts at reinventing the wheel by comparison.
Kn0thing on the other hand is poison.
"Popcorn tastes good" - Alexis Ohanian, 2015, responding to complaints about firing of an employee
Spez being the sole leader since kn0thing's withdrawal has done wonders for Ohanian's image, but he had his share of community upsets too.
I recognize the username, but I don't know the backstory. Why is kn0thing poison?
Stated it in my comment. Alexis Ohanian is kn0thing, I don't think I made that clear.
The claim that Ohanian fired Victoria Taylor and threw Ellen Pao under the bus came from the previous CEO, Yishan Wong. Even kn0thing himself confirmed that he was the one who fired her, which he was all too eager to reveal once the community had already pulled out their pitchforks and rallied against Pao, forcing her to resign.
As for kn0thing's resignation, it feels disingenous when someone who was part of Reddit's board of directors and clearly had enough sway to go behind a CEO's back and fire an employee because he personally didn't like how AMAs were being organized, allowed hateful content to proliferate for years yet did nothing to acknowledge this nor take any responsibility.
How this man managed to woo Serena Williams of all people despite the state Reddit was in for years baffles me.
Oh. This is like finding out Dwayne Johnson and The Rock are the same person.
I mean, at this point most people who remember Digg are not the demographic that generally has as much time or desire to hang out on the internet as they used to. That means that for all the nostalgic vibes it has for those people it still is pretty much a new platform for the rest of the world. Which is going to be difficult I think.
Gift link to a NYT on the same topic https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/technology/digg-alexis-ohanian-kevin-rose.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1k4.LdSz.XbnBiAY9sdpw&smid=em-share
I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. It really just seems like they want to do "Reddit but AI" and I don't think they'll get anywhere with that unless Reddit increases the shoot-self-in-foot per second speed even more drastically than they have been these past few years. And even if they do succeed I can't see a venture capital-funded techbro startup social media panning out in a way that ends up being pro-user.
This take confuses me. As someone who's done a lot of internet moderating I really don't think there's anything wrong with the system Reddit uses, outside of the inherently hierarchical modteam structure which AI doesn't do anything to rectify. And I certainly don't think that insufficient mod tools affect the end user in any meaningful way. Mods are perfectly capable of being ‘directors of vibes, culture and community’ with whatever tools are given as long as they have the freedom to choose content, which again, AI doesn't really affect much. I'm skeptical that this pitch has any more substance than what they needed to sell to investors.
do you solo mod? Most of my time spent with my subs (biggest being about ~1.8m) is clearing the two unmoderated queues. Almost all of the easy stuff is covered by automoderator, but I still check for OC and some other tasks that could easily be automated with a better bot.
If this is the sort of thing their AI is going to do, it'd be great. I have a lot of things I want to do for my subs, but I just don't have the time.
Its a neat idea and reddit needs more competition.
I've moderated subs as large as 18m and some as small as a few thousand; at the higher sub counts clearing the unmoderated queue simply stops being something feasible, and pretty much all focus is pointed towards the modqueue instead. The theory being that good posts generally won't get reported, most bad posts will be, and if any bad posts don't get reported it's probably because they're sitting at 1 downvote and 0 comments and will stay that way forever. I don't know of any subs above maybe 200k which actively clear the unmoderated queue so I'm actually quite surprised that you're able to keep on top of it for a sub with nearly 2 million subscribers.
The effort involved in clearing modqueue varies depending on the sub, but in general for my larger subs, with a dozen or so active mods each mod might expect to do a page of reports or so (1 page being 25 posts/comments, on old.reddit at least). Maybe 10 or so minutes a day per sub. Automod can help a great deal in a lot of circumstances too; in most big subs I mod the automod does more monthly actions than the rest of the team combined, which is a double-edged sword for sure. I think if any mod is having to actively work their ass off to keep the sub afloat, it's a strong indicator that the sub needs a lot more mods. This moderating thing isn't supposed to be strenuous, not as a volunteer hobby. At my most active I was maybe hitting an hour a day on moderating and was able to keep up with ~50 subreddits with over 10k subscribers apiece. But I digress.
All that being said, my main point here would be that I simply don't think any of that should impede a modteam's ability to do other interesting things with their subs. Ultimately queue-cleaning isn't difficult, it's just busywork, and I've always found that I'm just as able to come up with cool ideas for events and such after the busywork is done. And my broader point is that I don't think getting rid of that busywork would necessarily translate to mods being able to make their subs more interesting, or going further with that, making them higher quality. Perhaps I'm simply a bit jaded from having to spend so much time in dysfunctional mod teams, but most big subs I've been in have ended up with a divide between the queue-cleaning mods and the "old guard" who largely steer clear of queues in favour of high-level decisions. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, sometimes it is, but in either case one might expect that old guard, now with their hands free of having to do queue work, to be able to take charge and work on bettering their communities through "vibes" or whatnot. But that doesn't usually happen. Subs stagnate more due to their userbases and less because of the mods in my experiences. I've had subs absolutely blow up and gain hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a month, with me being the sole mod and without even having an actual written ruleset. And I've had subs with the most passionate mods you can imagine working their asses off each day for months making quality content, only for said content to get noticed by less than 0.1% of the subscriber base. A moderator's job is to curate, not to control absolutely. If there's nothing good to curate, then there's not much the mod can do to fix things.
I'm not against implementing AI into modtools. I think it's one of the few wholly positive ways that AI could be used, provided it's not substituting real human review in serious situations (which meme forums certainly do not qualify as). But I don't think it's something that'll fundamentally change the face of social media, nor do I think it's something worth centering an entire tech startup around. Reddit has been testing out AI modtools for months now, along with all sorts of new non-AI ones, and feedback from mods has been very positive overall (I've honestly not used them myself, I was auto-enrolled in a bunch of beta tests for some reason but I sorta just ignore all their messages because I don't give a shit). Now if the Digg people have other ideas in store also then perhaps they have a shot, and I really hope they do something. But the fact that they spent so much of their PR talking about AI and... Not really anything else, doesn't give me much hope. If that's all they have then I think they're going to get outdone by others without much trouble. But still, kn0thing is a cool guy from all I've seen from him. Maybe I'll be wrong.
I've been toying with an idea of having the community itself mod the sub. I was thinking it would be based off of community karma --- even just to cover the basics like removing shitty comments and low-effort posts. I've got a few folks who can remove posts with
!bot-- it filters the post and their comment. This isn't far off what stackexchange and some other communities have, but I can't figure out a way to get a list of the people with x+ karma.Anyway, I absolutely will never add anything more to my mod / op list. One reason I love tildes is that I am absolutely powerless here :)
I was a Digg to Reddit migrant, and I would gladly go back to Digg if becomes a decent platform. But how is it even possible? I feel there's a fundamental disconnect between what the owners of a site like that want (profit), and what the users want (discussion). Call me jaded, but it will probably start off fun and refreshing, and then it will slowly get worse and collapse under its own weight.
One thing I agree with is the need to stop rewarding users based on popularity/followers or any of that bullshit. We don't want it to be full of bots and spammy content just to get likes. And also, how do you stop it from becoming too politically biased? It seems like everything eventually becomes either ultra right or ultra left once the feedback loop begins.
Perhaps we should reconsider our unspoken assumption that a social media site should remain good forever. Maybe if we just accepted that good sites are ephemeral, we'd be more amenable to pulling up stakes when the enshittification begins in earnest and there'd actually be market forces opposing the process.
Those of us who've been bouncing around various fora and aggregators for decades have just kind of accepted this implicitly, but in my experience, we wait far too long to flee the ship as a general thing. The Network Effect is a big part of this of course, but I don't think our unexamined desire for permanence is helping much.
Y'know, I think you're onto something here. People seem to get so resistant to change, especially as we got older, but it's ultimately a fool's errands to stop change. It's a part of life and there's no reason we shouldn't expect it in our communities and media.
Yeah, I think this is a valid point. There’s no reason that online spaces should be any different than physical ones. Most people over the age of, say, 25 have probably had the experience of having a cool dive bar or other hangout ruined when the general public finds out about it. It’s a drag, but it’s not like your life is over. You just find somewhere else to hang out.
Very good point. I guess the requirement is that we want something good enough to migrate to once something has enshittified. It would be a shame if there is no decent replacement and you're left with nothing. Perhaps Reddit will become good again once Digg has crappified, and the cycle continues...
Or as I put it in another comment, "Reddit and Digg can just poop back and forth forever."
I'm probably too much of a zoomer, I've never used digg, can someone tell what it was like ? if you've used it. was it similar to reddit?
I used Digg, and moved to Reddit awhile before the famous V4 fiasco, because the quality of discourse was better.
They worked in a similar way: you had a small, predefined list of categories you could submit links to, users would vote on links, and there were comments. Digg's comments strayed closer to YouTube quality though, with more flaming and trolling.
One interesting difference was the button to vote a story up was very prominent, if the "bury" button was located in a different spot and required a reason, such as "in in accurate" or "spam." Not that it seemed to do much to alter user behavior.
Both sites are derivative of Slashdot.
I can't because I was a Farker instead. And this is why I think this doesn't work, idk that you can revive Digg for the people that were there and hook folks who are younger and never used it without pissing off both.
I might have been one of the last people who still visited Digg semi-regularly, like maybe weekly. I didn’t mind what it turned into, it was just a place I peeked at and occasionally found interesting content on. I mostly don’t use algorithmically fed media anymore and the stuff I do use (Mastodon and BlueSky) is focused on just follower feeds and my follower lists don’t pick up much of the general “internet culture.” So stuff like Digg was really my main way of knowing what the trends are on TikTok and Twitter aside from various group chats and discords I’m on.
I wish the internet had more places that you check on once or twice a day or week (which is basically how I use Tildes now as well). It definitely did not have any sort of community anymore though, so it’ll be interesting to see how this “director of vibes” thing will go. Community features do tend to make a site more sticky and encourage more visits and interaction. Which also leads to moderator headaches sine people will also step out of line then. But my impression of a lot of people who go out seeking mod powers often can’t help themselves but to get hyper-focused on those sorts of exhausting nitpicky stuff. Like yeah the janitorial duties are annoying, but the parts about intervening in pointless arguments type things seem to be what drives much of the mod drama in communities I’ve seen in the first place. This would sort of select for a completely different psychological profile around what sort of person would want to moderate a community.
But that all assumes this is anything different from the sorts of mod tools Reddit already provides. I’ve seen some pretty thorough automod configurations in the past that can get very particular about what sorts of participation they permit. Why wouldn’t you be able to build many such features into a site like Reddit? The main things Reddit mods can’t control is the algorithm, so if something hits All they can get overwhelmed. They can try to hide the upvote/downvote buttons or do some CSS to remind people about downvote reddiquette. But these are all small potatoes workarounds for the fact that what shows up on the feed is a consequence of mass votes and that sets the vibes ultimately. I think what you’d actually need to curate vibes would be granular controls over what sorts of content are promoted by the feed. But that’s in tension with the need to sling ads in people’s faces, so how well can it ever really work?