Well that's disappointing. I really would like an alternative to reddit. Less politically charged conversations, basically pre-2016 reddit. Perhaps that's not possible with how the Internet has...
Well that's disappointing. I really would like an alternative to reddit. Less politically charged conversations, basically pre-2016 reddit. Perhaps that's not possible with how the Internet has changed.
I was surprised to hear bots were the biggest reason it's shutting down. I've always heard the Internet is mostly made up of bots but you never truly know without transparency from these platforms.
I don’t think it’s possible with big communities. I tried Lemmy and piefed and honestly they are the same BS as Reddit but smaller (with some of their own unique quirks, but generally, same...
I don’t think it’s possible with big communities. I tried Lemmy and piefed and honestly they are the same BS as Reddit but smaller (with some of their own unique quirks, but generally, same toxicity)
I’m convinced that the only places that are worth it are small and niche communities, small enough where community members can remember each other nicknames
I guess the plans they had to combat that didn't pan out. I had no interest in using it personally (given the personalities of the founders) but I am a bit disappointed in how hard it is to get...
We faced an unprecedented bot problem
This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.
I guess the plans they had to combat that didn't pan out. I had no interest in using it personally (given the personalities of the founders) but I am a bit disappointed in how hard it is to get people to use a variety of platforms instead of the incumbent silos.
Which means it's probably not a smart idea to light your existing userbase on fire with massively unpopular, poorly-thought-out changes. I'll never forgive them for completely erasing years of...
The loyalty users have to the communities they've already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely.
We're also announcing something we're excited about: Kevin Rose, Digg's founder who started the company back in 2004, is returning to join the team full-time.
Oh, the guy who oversaw the redesign that killed the site in the first place? Yeah, I'm sure that will go great.
That's funny. Especially considering I did add it to my daily scroll rotation, and while it was never reddit at it's peak, it was pretty good in terms of engagement. Let's see if they want $4...
That's funny. Especially considering I did add it to my daily scroll rotation, and while it was never reddit at it's peak, it was pretty good in terms of engagement.
Let's see if they want $4 again when they reopen it.
They blame LLM spammers, yet the shutdown post is riddled with "it's not X, it's Y" and other LLM tropes. (They also blame lack of organic attention. Nobody wants another social media, especially...
They blame LLM spammers, yet the shutdown post is riddled with "it's not X, it's Y" and other LLM tropes.
(They also blame lack of organic attention. Nobody wants another social media, especially one without any clear advantages.)
It is not strange for formal business press releases/statements to be very deliberately crafted (and run through legal) and thus use many of these "tropes" in the interest of specificity and...
the shutdown post is riddled with "it's not X, it's Y
It is not strange for formal business press releases/statements to be very deliberately crafted (and run through legal) and thus use many of these "tropes" in the interest of specificity and clarity, less they be misinterpreted. Also some people write like that, with parenthetical phrases nestled into commas, because we're neurodivergent and particular and trying to make very sure we're understood.
That said this doesn't read AI to me. I could be wrong of course but several times I've seen this said about these sort of statements that just read "formal" rather than particularly AI generated. I think it would be very unwise not to at least pass it back through human editing, and I guarantee their legal team reviewed it, but again, maybe I'm wrong.
LLMs were trained on human writing, so all its tropes are things that can appear in human writing. I can't rule out that an LLM was used here, but you're going to get way too many false positives...
LLMs were trained on human writing, so all its tropes are things that can appear in human writing. I can't rule out that an LLM was used here, but you're going to get way too many false positives by accusing anything that contains a very common English grammatical construction of being AI. Absent things that unambiguously indicate AI use like leaving prompts in and the like, you are probably worse at judging whether someone is AI-generated than you think you are, because your assessment of your own accuracy is going to be cherry-picked af and, honestly, it's genuinely hard to tell in a lot of cases. This is especially true when it comes to this type of "corporate-esque serious-but-not-overly-formal statement"-style writing, where the tone it's aiming for is naturally the closest to what LLM chatbots are trained to use for purely utilitarian reasons -- they have similar "people-pleasing"-type goals and thus use a lot of the same tactics in their language use, which is to be expected. Part of the reason LLMs often exhibit certain quirks in their writing style to begin with is because they already appeared often in certain styles of human writing that were used train the underlying model.
Yeah seems like they had launched purely as "an alternative to (x)" (not to be confused with X or Twitter), which probably hurt them. I remember all the alternative Reddit sites that popped up...
Yeah seems like they had launched purely as "an alternative to (x)" (not to be confused with X or Twitter), which probably hurt them. I remember all the alternative Reddit sites that popped up following the API changes in June 2023 and looking at my saved logins, I think the only one that seems to be doing decently well is Lemmy World. Seems like all the others have just become breeding grounds for super right wing content or have died.
I feel like I read it differently? The site was still up in a alpha/beta phase right? It was never "ready" (though I didn't keep up with it so I dunno if they actually did go "live"). Even so, I'm...
I feel like I read it differently?
The site was still up in a alpha/beta phase right? It was never "ready" (though I didn't keep up with it so I dunno if they actually did go "live").
Even so, I'm reading this as they tried something and considered it a failure, so they are regrouping (with a smaller team) to try something new. Not that it's completely dead.
That said, I'm still not particularly interested personally. Tildes has proved the exact kind of online social experiment I needed for the most part.
The only thing that would get me going would be a social media platform that tried to emulate early Facebook and MySpace. Mostly just a social media space where you are friends with your actual friends and your feed is people you actually know. It'd need to do some thing pretty smart though in 2026 to not end up an Instagram cesspit of meme pages and influences.
Anyone who participated in the beta: how bad was the bot problem? I’m wondering if the blame is being shifted towards bots so they can relaunch as a “human-verified” platform when their actual...
Anyone who participated in the beta: how bad was the bot problem? I’m wondering if the blame is being shifted towards bots so they can relaunch as a “human-verified” platform when their actual problem was not enough people cared.
Lasted less than a year.
Well that's disappointing. I really would like an alternative to reddit. Less politically charged conversations, basically pre-2016 reddit. Perhaps that's not possible with how the Internet has changed.
I was surprised to hear bots were the biggest reason it's shutting down. I've always heard the Internet is mostly made up of bots but you never truly know without transparency from these platforms.
I don’t think it’s possible with big communities. I tried Lemmy and piefed and honestly they are the same BS as Reddit but smaller (with some of their own unique quirks, but generally, same toxicity)
I’m convinced that the only places that are worth it are small and niche communities, small enough where community members can remember each other nicknames
I guess the plans they had to combat that didn't pan out. I had no interest in using it personally (given the personalities of the founders) but I am a bit disappointed in how hard it is to get people to use a variety of platforms instead of the incumbent silos.
Which means it's probably not a smart idea to light your existing userbase on fire with massively unpopular, poorly-thought-out changes. I'll never forgive them for completely erasing years of contributions without any warning.
Oh, the guy who oversaw the redesign that killed the site in the first place? Yeah, I'm sure that will go great.
That's funny. Especially considering I did add it to my daily scroll rotation, and while it was never reddit at it's peak, it was pretty good in terms of engagement.
Let's see if they want $4 again when they reopen it.
Didn't even get to 09 F9 post one last time. Bummer.
They blame LLM spammers, yet the shutdown post is riddled with "it's not X, it's Y" and other LLM tropes.
(They also blame lack of organic attention. Nobody wants another social media, especially one without any clear advantages.)
It is not strange for formal business press releases/statements to be very deliberately crafted (and run through legal) and thus use many of these "tropes" in the interest of specificity and clarity, less they be misinterpreted. Also some people write like that, with parenthetical phrases nestled into commas, because we're neurodivergent and particular and trying to make very sure we're understood.
That said this doesn't read AI to me. I could be wrong of course but several times I've seen this said about these sort of statements that just read "formal" rather than particularly AI generated. I think it would be very unwise not to at least pass it back through human editing, and I guarantee their legal team reviewed it, but again, maybe I'm wrong.
LLMs were trained on human writing, so all its tropes are things that can appear in human writing. I can't rule out that an LLM was used here, but you're going to get way too many false positives by accusing anything that contains a very common English grammatical construction of being AI. Absent things that unambiguously indicate AI use like leaving prompts in and the like, you are probably worse at judging whether someone is AI-generated than you think you are, because your assessment of your own accuracy is going to be cherry-picked af and, honestly, it's genuinely hard to tell in a lot of cases. This is especially true when it comes to this type of "corporate-esque serious-but-not-overly-formal statement"-style writing, where the tone it's aiming for is naturally the closest to what LLM chatbots are trained to use for purely utilitarian reasons -- they have similar "people-pleasing"-type goals and thus use a lot of the same tactics in their language use, which is to be expected. Part of the reason LLMs often exhibit certain quirks in their writing style to begin with is because they already appeared often in certain styles of human writing that were used train the underlying model.
Yeah seems like they had launched purely as "an alternative to (x)" (not to be confused with X or Twitter), which probably hurt them. I remember all the alternative Reddit sites that popped up following the API changes in June 2023 and looking at my saved logins, I think the only one that seems to be doing decently well is Lemmy World. Seems like all the others have just become breeding grounds for super right wing content or have died.
I feel like I read it differently?
The site was still up in a alpha/beta phase right? It was never "ready" (though I didn't keep up with it so I dunno if they actually did go "live").
Even so, I'm reading this as they tried something and considered it a failure, so they are regrouping (with a smaller team) to try something new. Not that it's completely dead.
That said, I'm still not particularly interested personally. Tildes has proved the exact kind of online social experiment I needed for the most part.
The only thing that would get me going would be a social media platform that tried to emulate early Facebook and MySpace. Mostly just a social media space where you are friends with your actual friends and your feed is people you actually know. It'd need to do some thing pretty smart though in 2026 to not end up an Instagram cesspit of meme pages and influences.
The economy has become so efficient that an idea can launch, crash and burn in no time flat.
Anyone who participated in the beta: how bad was the bot problem? I’m wondering if the blame is being shifted towards bots so they can relaunch as a “human-verified” platform when their actual problem was not enough people cared.