lol, I got mildly curious, signed up for an invite but had it sitting in my inbox for months since I realized it was only an “app” and not a website and I was like… uh… not doing that. Guess I can...
lol, I got mildly curious, signed up for an invite but had it sitting in my inbox for months since I realized it was only an “app” and not a website and I was like… uh… not doing that. Guess I can delete that invite now.
The other person said the "desktop" version was just a website. Are you just making a cynical guess because you seem like you're not speaking from experience?
The other person said the "desktop" version was just a website. Are you just making a cynical guess because you seem like you're not speaking from experience?
Cynical guess. I dug up the email with the invite and this is the instruction to activate: Didn’t know how else to interpret this other than the app being a requirement. I first opened this email...
Cynical guess. I dug up the email with the invite and this is the instruction to activate:
Download the Digg app on iOS or Android first. Once it’s installed, come back and tap the button below to sign up. That’ll make sure your invite opens directly in the app!
Didn’t know how else to interpret this other than the app being a requirement. I first opened this email in Firefox on a desktop and it was immediately put off.
Gotcha. Yeah I asked since I didn't know. Seems like the website worked but they were pushing folks toward mobile/assuming mobile access would be primary
Gotcha. Yeah I asked since I didn't know. Seems like the website worked but they were pushing folks toward mobile/assuming mobile access would be primary
The first thing to launch was the app, and then the website for desktop came after, if memory serves. It was just a regular website. I used both, but yes, they pushed the app hard, and didn't make...
The first thing to launch was the app, and then the website for desktop came after, if memory serves. It was just a regular website. I used both, but yes, they pushed the app hard, and didn't make web accessible for mobile.
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.
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’m more optimistic that it’s possible with larger communities. It just takes effort and moderation, which cut into margins. I also think federated social networks have a place but are also...
I’m more optimistic that it’s possible with larger communities. It just takes effort and moderation, which cut into margins. I also think federated social networks have a place but are also fundamentally flawed.
You’d need to de-commercialize those spaces. Add some friction and splinter up communities with no easy way to find each other. That’s what I miss most about the classic forum style communities of...
You’d need to de-commercialize those spaces. Add some friction and splinter up communities with no easy way to find each other. That’s what I miss most about the classic forum style communities of the past where each niche interest had like 50 forums and you had to try and see which had people on it whose in-jokes you liked and house rules you found appropriate.
Discord is probably the closest modern equivalent but chat is so ephemeral, it can not really produce a lasting source of information. Plus discord, again, is a commercialized space that inevitably drifts towards connecting everything into one mega-community, that’s where the money is because the size of the community creates this user vortex. It’s inevitable.
I don’t buy the “bot” reason, btw. They just needed to hit some number to make it commercially feasible and if they had hit it, that “bot problem” would have been addressed in a different way than shutting everything down.
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.
Tildes is still invite only which cuts the vast majority already and this is such a low volume site that any that do squeeze through would get noticed and banned pretty much immediately....
Tildes is still invite only which cuts the vast majority already and this is such a low volume site that any that do squeeze through would get noticed and banned pretty much immediately. Anecdotally I've never seen a bot here (or at least never seen what I realized was a bot).
Edit: nice username!
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.
There is a platform that completely mimics MySpace, it’s called spacehey. You can have an HTML profile and everything. It’s been a few years since I used it, so I can’t speak on how the community...
There is a platform that completely mimics MySpace, it’s called spacehey. You can have an HTML profile and everything.
It’s been a few years since I used it, so I can’t speak on how the community is or how active it is still.
Yeah, they have more than enough investment to keep going. They seemed to have shut the gates before it started to become more than they could handle. At this point most large sites are just...
Yeah, they have more than enough investment to keep going. They seemed to have shut the gates before it started to become more than they could handle. At this point most large sites are just filled with bots.
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.
There was a real bot problem with user created communities. I checked periodically after they opened to the public. The main feed was fine however—probably was being moderated for most...
There was a real bot problem with user created communities. I checked periodically after they opened to the public. The main feed was fine however—probably was being moderated for most posts/comments reaching the front page. There were often questionable but inoffensive comments that seemed potentially written by LLM, including ones praising the site itself despite being off-topic to the post, but that wasn't the problem.
The problem was when I looked at the full list of communities, I didn't count them, but it seemed like hundreds of spammy/empty communities. Some communities themselves were blatant spam with names/descriptions about getting rich or with product names. Many communities were empty with squatted high-value names like brand names. Posts and comments in these newly created communities were often blatant spam, not even well-worded questionable LLM spam but just the classic low effort links.
Essentially there were no protections at all around user created communities. IMO they opened that feature up too broadly and too soon.
Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking. Launching community creation at the same time as opening up to a public beta with no restrictions on brand new accounts creating communities...
Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking. Launching community creation at the same time as opening up to a public beta with no restrictions on brand new accounts creating communities immediately. Plus the existing user base was barely able to keep the default communities looking active. It's not their first rodeo, so I don't know how they didn't see this coming.
I think that was the biggest mistake. They should have had multiple phases in beta. Kept beta as invite still, open communities in a more calculated approach first with people that had been active...
I think that was the biggest mistake. They should have had multiple phases in beta. Kept beta as invite still, open communities in a more calculated approach first with people that had been active 6 months, then 3 months, then 1 month, 1 week, etc. That would also have reduced the number of squatters. Then once the immediate kinks had been worked out, open beta more publicly.
I know that not having user-created groups has been a friction point for some on Tildes, but I think what you mentioned is a good example of how a free-for-all can end up drowning a site rather...
I know that not having user-created groups has been a friction point for some on Tildes, but I think what you mentioned is a good example of how a free-for-all can end up drowning a site rather than building it.
Somewhat relatedly, it's amazing to see how the foundations and vision that @Deimos laid out years ago for Tildes have become increasingly more relevant by the day. He correctly called the shots on so many different aspects of privacy and online communities, and those choices get increasingly validated every time another platform tries to launch and runs into issues that Deimos expertly designed against or navigated around.
This was my experience as well. I was a groundbreaker and enjoyed the platform during the groundbreaker only phase, granted I made heavy use of the "block user" function. It became very strange...
This was my experience as well. I was a groundbreaker and enjoyed the platform during the groundbreaker only phase, granted I made heavy use of the "block user" function. It became very strange seeing "Blocked User" comments in line on almost every post, but I guess it makes sense as there were only ~20,000 users in the beginning.
When the public beta started on the same day communities were allowed to be made, it created a landgrab of people parking community names, waiting for the community to arrive. In most cases, the communities never did arrive and they just sat there empty.
This was about the time I started bouncing off the platform. I would check it periodically, but not daily like I was during the groundbreaker only alpha.
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.
Honestly, the more that internet social platforms devolve, the more I think that SomethingAwful had it right by charging $10 dollars for forum access. Having an up front money gate might be the...
Honestly, the more that internet social platforms devolve, the more I think that SomethingAwful had it right by charging $10 dollars for forum access. Having an up front money gate might be the only way to temper the onslaught of bot accounts. Not a reoccurring subscription, just an up front payment for access. At some point, it becomes prohibitively expensive to keep making bot accounts that can be banned.
Diggv5, following ever so closely in the steps of Diggv4 So when is v6 launching and how long will it take to fail? A spam bot problem eh? Have they not used the internet before? This has been a...
Diggv5, following ever so closely in the steps of Diggv4
So when is v6 launching and how long will it take to fail?
A spam bot problem eh? Have they not used the internet before? This has been a battle of forums and similar platforms for many years. How did they not go into this better prepared?
I am being snarky but given who is behind it all it's both surprising yet expected to me at the same time. It's not their first attempt at making things online and it's also not their first failure. Is Digg and Co just a shining example of "we never learn" at this point?
They should just pack it up and go home. Another rich techbro-funded platform attempting to recapture an earlier excitement and trying to run on the fuel of nostalgia without paying any attention to the current landscape and learning from decades of social and technical problems was destined for this outcome
Kinda feels like there should be an equation to work out optimal numbers for a social media site to gain traction, over what period and then what is the limit before it degrades to some sort of...
Kinda feels like there should be an equation to work out optimal numbers for a social media site to gain traction, over what period and then what is the limit before it degrades to some sort of lowest common denominator. As it is, I’m a very happy lurker on Tildes and used Digg for all of a few days before giving up.
I trust content on Reddit less and less every day, and it honestly feels like a lot of the real users feel the same but can’t quite extricate themselves from it. There are some very useful subreddits I still follow, but anything big is pointless.
I make an effort to post here on the F1 discussions, where there are normally up to a dozen comments, because I like talking about F1. But I can't get away from the fact that the F1 subreddit has...
I make an effort to post here on the F1 discussions, where there are normally up to a dozen comments, because I like talking about F1. But I can't get away from the fact that the F1 subreddit has a depth and breadth of discussion that nowhere else that I've found can touch. It also definitely suffers from the dross meme comments and posts that plague any huge community where attention spans are short and in-group references are prized.
If you don't know what digg "needs" to become, maybe it doesn't need to become anything? This reads like a mission statement of "we tried doing what we wanted and that didn't pan out, so next...
He'll continue as an advisor to True Ventures, but Digg will be his primary focus. We couldn't think of a better person to help figure out what Digg needs to become.
If you don't know what digg "needs" to become, maybe it doesn't need to become anything? This reads like a mission statement of "we tried doing what we wanted and that didn't pan out, so next we'll try anything we can to survive". I'm curious to see what the next iteration looks like.
Oh the irony. Digg were the ones who were trying to innovate with AI slop and ultimately created a dead platform with only a few dozen active users. I think it was AI overviews being pushed upon a...
Oh the irony. Digg were the ones who were trying to innovate with AI slop and ultimately created a dead platform with only a few dozen active users. I think it was AI overviews being pushed upon a Reddit clone that had no competitive edge and fewer features compared to it, Lemmy, Snapzu, even Tildes.
I kinda feel bad for Kevin Rose. He became the poster-child for Silicon Valley during Digg's peak, and part of me thinks this led to him making bad decision after bad decision, like rejecting buyout proposals from bigger tech firms, or trying to innovate with new platforms like Revision3, TechTV and my persional favourite Pownce - a Twitter clone focused around filesharing which had worse filesize limitations than a certain technology that had existed for nearly two decades at that point called email.
I did hang around there and use it for a while but basically everything they said about the issues, and then some, was definitely an evident problem. Even beyond the bot traffic issue, the quality...
I did hang around there and use it for a while but basically everything they said about the issues, and then some, was definitely an evident problem. Even beyond the bot traffic issue, the quality of discussions and content was basically on the floor. It was full of people trying to recreate our own Reddit with blackjack and hookers rather than a concerted effort to do anything new. And the rest was just content mill slop. It is not an issue of just bot traffic, there’s plenty of actual people trying to get their content off the ground by just posting like commercial marketers. It’s a cultural problem with the internet as a whole now. The dream used to be to make enough money by building an loyal audience to quit your job. But I think as soon as the expectation became being able to get “fuck you” money the game just changed. Everyone is traffic farming by posting optimized slop now and it drowns out sincere contributions by people who just want to interact with a community. I’m not sure the problem can be solved any way besides intentionally keeping a community small and curating it, as Tildes does.
And as is usual when the entire site ethos is purely reactionary to something else, almost all the discussions pivoted back to complaining about Reddit. No funny memes, the current events discussion was performative liberal engagement/rage bait combined with barely veiled Nazis thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy getting all their takes downvoted and yelled at rather than them just sucking. There was absolutely ZERO “look at this cool thing I did” which is what the “golden age” of these sites was about.
All that said, I don’t really hold it against them that they took a swing and missed but the fact that this stuff they’re saying is some kind of surprise to them should, frankly, be extremely embarrassing and sounds like they didn’t do any actual research into the problem domain AT ALL. This is all stuff tech and culture writers, and basically every online publication with a comment section (that hasn’t devolved into a PE acquisition slopfest) could have told them. Like they didn’t have a conversation with anyone who produces content on the modern internet before locking in their business strategy? They just had an idea and then dove in with a bunch of money to do what’s functionally a hackathon?
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.
People seem to forget the corpi LLMs were trained on were (at least initially) written by humans which includes a lot of corporate press releases and more formal blog posts. Those tropes had to...
People seem to forget the corpi LLMs were trained on were (at least initially) written by humans which includes a lot of corporate press releases and more formal blog posts. Those tropes had to come from somewhere; it wasn't a figment of every LLM's imagination.
The em-dash thing has been particularly fascinating to me, as I had no idea what one was until people started calling out LLMs for overusing them. But as you said, they had to have come from...
The em-dash thing has been particularly fascinating to me, as I had no idea what one was until people started calling out LLMs for overusing them. But as you said, they had to have come from somewhere...
They aren't all that uncommon in published writing or writing that's intended to be formal -- you'll find them on Wikipedia, which has a section of its style guide for various kinds of dashes....
They aren't all that uncommon in published writing or writing that's intended to be formal -- you'll find them on Wikipedia, which has a section of its style guide for various kinds of dashes. They're also reasonably common in fiction and thus fanfiction -- published fiction will be deliberately typeset with them, but word processors also typically automatically convert the multiple-hyphen kind that I use when I type into proper em-dashes. I used a bunch of (pseudo) em dashes in this comment without trying bc that's how I generally write, and I'm deliberately not going back to edit them into sentence breaks the way I would if I'd noticed how many I used in a comment that isn't about them lol
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.
Is that lemmy.world or something like that? I found the duplication of communities on lemmy was the dealbreaker for me. I wanted to read about something like flower arranging (just for example)...
Is that lemmy.world or something like that? I found the duplication of communities on lemmy was the dealbreaker for me. I wanted to read about something like flower arranging (just for example) and there'd be 3 or 4 "versions" of subs for that topic on different instances and I'd have to subscribe to them all, and ugh, it was just too much hassle. Often, different versions would feel like they were sometimes only established because some people love being king of their domain (even if that domain is all of a dozen users).
Yeah something like that. I also experienced that same issue of duplicated communities. Each one had like 95% of the same content but each varied slightly and in my opinion weren't different...
Yeah something like that. I also experienced that same issue of duplicated communities. Each one had like 95% of the same content but each varied slightly and in my opinion weren't different enough to keep up with. I tried these alternatives for about a month and Tildes eventually won me over.
Lasted less than a year.
lol, I got mildly curious, signed up for an invite but had it sitting in my inbox for months since I realized it was only an “app” and not a website and I was like… uh… not doing that. Guess I can delete that invite now.
They actually had a desktop version and app version. They would update desktop first and then app a few weeks later.
A desktop application or a website?
A regular website viewable on a desktop. On mobile they forced usage of an app
Got it, the language used didn't make sense to me as a website vs mobile app.
I‘m sure both were actually websites running in some wrapper so you don’t get any of the advantages of your own browser.
The other person said the "desktop" version was just a website. Are you just making a cynical guess because you seem like you're not speaking from experience?
Cynical guess. I dug up the email with the invite and this is the instruction to activate:
Didn’t know how else to interpret this other than the app being a requirement. I first opened this email in Firefox on a desktop and it was immediately put off.
Gotcha. Yeah I asked since I didn't know. Seems like the website worked but they were pushing folks toward mobile/assuming mobile access would be primary
The first thing to launch was the app, and then the website for desktop came after, if memory serves. It was just a regular website. I used both, but yes, they pushed the app hard, and didn't make web accessible for mobile.
Gotcha, so that also would influence what was available in those invites. Thanks. This is definitely more than I cared about it but ah well.
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.
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’m more optimistic that it’s possible with larger communities. It just takes effort and moderation, which cut into margins. I also think federated social networks have a place but are also fundamentally flawed.
You’d need to de-commercialize those spaces. Add some friction and splinter up communities with no easy way to find each other. That’s what I miss most about the classic forum style communities of the past where each niche interest had like 50 forums and you had to try and see which had people on it whose in-jokes you liked and house rules you found appropriate.
Discord is probably the closest modern equivalent but chat is so ephemeral, it can not really produce a lasting source of information. Plus discord, again, is a commercialized space that inevitably drifts towards connecting everything into one mega-community, that’s where the money is because the size of the community creates this user vortex. It’s inevitable.
I don’t buy the “bot” reason, btw. They just needed to hit some number to make it commercially feasible and if they had hit it, that “bot problem” would have been addressed in a different way than shutting everything down.
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.
Regarding the bot problem, does anyone around here know how big of a problem is it for Tildes? Does Tildes deal with bots at all?
Tildes is still invite only which cuts the vast majority already and this is such a low volume site that any that do squeeze through would get noticed and banned pretty much immediately. Anecdotally I've never seen a bot here (or at least never seen what I realized was a bot).
Edit: nice username!
Yup, not sure I saw any bot users on Tildes either. I have seen some spam incidentally, but even that is rare.
The problem is inexistent for users. I never saw anything resembling a bot here. I'm sure Deimos has to ban bots sometimes, but probably not much.
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.
There is a platform that completely mimics MySpace, it’s called spacehey. You can have an HTML profile and everything.
It’s been a few years since I used it, so I can’t speak on how the community is or how active it is still.
Yeah, they have more than enough investment to keep going. They seemed to have shut the gates before it started to become more than they could handle. At this point most large sites are just filled with bots.
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.
There was a real bot problem with user created communities. I checked periodically after they opened to the public. The main feed was fine however—probably was being moderated for most posts/comments reaching the front page. There were often questionable but inoffensive comments that seemed potentially written by LLM, including ones praising the site itself despite being off-topic to the post, but that wasn't the problem.
The problem was when I looked at the full list of communities, I didn't count them, but it seemed like hundreds of spammy/empty communities. Some communities themselves were blatant spam with names/descriptions about getting rich or with product names. Many communities were empty with squatted high-value names like brand names. Posts and comments in these newly created communities were often blatant spam, not even well-worded questionable LLM spam but just the classic low effort links.
Essentially there were no protections at all around user created communities. IMO they opened that feature up too broadly and too soon.
Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking. Launching community creation at the same time as opening up to a public beta with no restrictions on brand new accounts creating communities immediately. Plus the existing user base was barely able to keep the default communities looking active. It's not their first rodeo, so I don't know how they didn't see this coming.
I think that was the biggest mistake. They should have had multiple phases in beta. Kept beta as invite still, open communities in a more calculated approach first with people that had been active 6 months, then 3 months, then 1 month, 1 week, etc. That would also have reduced the number of squatters. Then once the immediate kinks had been worked out, open beta more publicly.
I know that not having user-created groups has been a friction point for some on Tildes, but I think what you mentioned is a good example of how a free-for-all can end up drowning a site rather than building it.
Somewhat relatedly, it's amazing to see how the foundations and vision that @Deimos laid out years ago for Tildes have become increasingly more relevant by the day. He correctly called the shots on so many different aspects of privacy and online communities, and those choices get increasingly validated every time another platform tries to launch and runs into issues that Deimos expertly designed against or navigated around.
This was my experience as well. I was a groundbreaker and enjoyed the platform during the groundbreaker only phase, granted I made heavy use of the "block user" function. It became very strange seeing "Blocked User" comments in line on almost every post, but I guess it makes sense as there were only ~20,000 users in the beginning.
When the public beta started on the same day communities were allowed to be made, it created a landgrab of people parking community names, waiting for the community to arrive. In most cases, the communities never did arrive and they just sat there empty.
This was about the time I started bouncing off the platform. I would check it periodically, but not daily like I was during the groundbreaker only alpha.
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.
Honestly, the more that internet social platforms devolve, the more I think that SomethingAwful had it right by charging $10 dollars for forum access. Having an up front money gate might be the only way to temper the onslaught of bot accounts. Not a reoccurring subscription, just an up front payment for access. At some point, it becomes prohibitively expensive to keep making bot accounts that can be banned.
It also means bans can have teeth because doing something ban-worthy is functionally getting you slapped with a fine.
Diggv5, following ever so closely in the steps of Diggv4
So when is v6 launching and how long will it take to fail?
A spam bot problem eh? Have they not used the internet before? This has been a battle of forums and similar platforms for many years. How did they not go into this better prepared?
I am being snarky but given who is behind it all it's both surprising yet expected to me at the same time. It's not their first attempt at making things online and it's also not their first failure. Is Digg and Co just a shining example of "we never learn" at this point?
They should just pack it up and go home. Another rich techbro-funded platform attempting to recapture an earlier excitement and trying to run on the fuel of nostalgia without paying any attention to the current landscape and learning from decades of social and technical problems was destined for this outcome
Kinda feels like there should be an equation to work out optimal numbers for a social media site to gain traction, over what period and then what is the limit before it degrades to some sort of lowest common denominator. As it is, I’m a very happy lurker on Tildes and used Digg for all of a few days before giving up.
I trust content on Reddit less and less every day, and it honestly feels like a lot of the real users feel the same but can’t quite extricate themselves from it. There are some very useful subreddits I still follow, but anything big is pointless.
Niche is best.
I make an effort to post here on the F1 discussions, where there are normally up to a dozen comments, because I like talking about F1. But I can't get away from the fact that the F1 subreddit has a depth and breadth of discussion that nowhere else that I've found can touch. It also definitely suffers from the dross meme comments and posts that plague any huge community where attention spans are short and in-group references are prized.
If you don't know what digg "needs" to become, maybe it doesn't need to become anything? This reads like a mission statement of "we tried doing what we wanted and that didn't pan out, so next we'll try anything we can to survive". I'm curious to see what the next iteration looks like.
Oh the irony. Digg were the ones who were trying to innovate with AI slop and ultimately created a dead platform with only a few dozen active users. I think it was AI overviews being pushed upon a Reddit clone that had no competitive edge and fewer features compared to it, Lemmy, Snapzu, even Tildes.
I kinda feel bad for Kevin Rose. He became the poster-child for Silicon Valley during Digg's peak, and part of me thinks this led to him making bad decision after bad decision, like rejecting buyout proposals from bigger tech firms, or trying to innovate with new platforms like Revision3, TechTV and my persional favourite Pownce - a Twitter clone focused around filesharing which had worse filesize limitations than a certain technology that had existed for nearly two decades at that point called email.
I did hang around there and use it for a while but basically everything they said about the issues, and then some, was definitely an evident problem. Even beyond the bot traffic issue, the quality of discussions and content was basically on the floor. It was full of people trying to recreate our own Reddit with blackjack and hookers rather than a concerted effort to do anything new. And the rest was just content mill slop. It is not an issue of just bot traffic, there’s plenty of actual people trying to get their content off the ground by just posting like commercial marketers. It’s a cultural problem with the internet as a whole now. The dream used to be to make enough money by building an loyal audience to quit your job. But I think as soon as the expectation became being able to get “fuck you” money the game just changed. Everyone is traffic farming by posting optimized slop now and it drowns out sincere contributions by people who just want to interact with a community. I’m not sure the problem can be solved any way besides intentionally keeping a community small and curating it, as Tildes does.
And as is usual when the entire site ethos is purely reactionary to something else, almost all the discussions pivoted back to complaining about Reddit. No funny memes, the current events discussion was performative liberal engagement/rage bait combined with barely veiled Nazis thinking there’s some kind of conspiracy getting all their takes downvoted and yelled at rather than them just sucking. There was absolutely ZERO “look at this cool thing I did” which is what the “golden age” of these sites was about.
All that said, I don’t really hold it against them that they took a swing and missed but the fact that this stuff they’re saying is some kind of surprise to them should, frankly, be extremely embarrassing and sounds like they didn’t do any actual research into the problem domain AT ALL. This is all stuff tech and culture writers, and basically every online publication with a comment section (that hasn’t devolved into a PE acquisition slopfest) could have told them. Like they didn’t have a conversation with anyone who produces content on the modern internet before locking in their business strategy? They just had an idea and then dove in with a bunch of money to do what’s functionally a hackathon?
This is no way to run a business man!
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.
People seem to forget the corpi LLMs were trained on were (at least initially) written by humans which includes a lot of corporate press releases and more formal blog posts. Those tropes had to come from somewhere; it wasn't a figment of every LLM's imagination.
And the em-dashes came from AO3 and other fanfic (among other places). Yeah it's repeating the things people say.
The em-dash thing has been particularly fascinating to me, as I had no idea what one was until people started calling out LLMs for overusing them. But as you said, they had to have come from somewhere...
They aren't all that uncommon in published writing or writing that's intended to be formal -- you'll find them on Wikipedia, which has a section of its style guide for various kinds of dashes. They're also reasonably common in fiction and thus fanfiction -- published fiction will be deliberately typeset with them, but word processors also typically automatically convert the multiple-hyphen kind that I use when I type into proper em-dashes. I used a bunch of (pseudo) em dashes in this comment without trying bc that's how I generally write, and I'm deliberately not going back to edit them into sentence breaks the way I would if I'd noticed how many I used in a comment that isn't about them lol
Dialogue markers (instead of quotation marks) for fanfic is one popular source
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.
Is that lemmy.world or something like that? I found the duplication of communities on lemmy was the dealbreaker for me. I wanted to read about something like flower arranging (just for example) and there'd be 3 or 4 "versions" of subs for that topic on different instances and I'd have to subscribe to them all, and ugh, it was just too much hassle. Often, different versions would feel like they were sometimes only established because some people love being king of their domain (even if that domain is all of a dozen users).
Yeah something like that. I also experienced that same issue of duplicated communities. Each one had like 95% of the same content but each varied slightly and in my opinion weren't different enough to keep up with. I tried these alternatives for about a month and Tildes eventually won me over.
The economy has become so efficient that an idea can launch, crash and burn in no time flat.