Yeah, same. I left a bit before the mass exodus, just like I did with Reddit -> Lemmy. I also joined IRC a bit before the Eternal September.
I feel like some sort of herald of Eternal September. So if your social media site is suddenly full of clueless morons, you can just blame me.
Sorry, I've been hearing about this for some time and I don't know the story behind it. Can someone please explain the enshittification that happened with digg? How good was it before and how bad was it after?
I knew about the migration but this line on that article is super ironic
Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian posted on his personal blog an open letter to Rose[17], where he speculated that "this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling", and that it is "cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg
Yeah the parallels are pretty hilarious
Thanks. Power to the people.
✊
Rose invested $6,000 into the site that was meant to be a down payment on a house
Was this in the 1920s?
It was amazing but I was young and it was wonderful to discover. I think people have fond memories for it really.
It’s very similar to Lemmy, if not just the same thing done a different way. I think there were only upvotes (I can Digg it).
For young people discovering Lemmy, as it is now, and discovering Linux subreddits etc, they probably get the same enjoyment/attachment etc.
The redesign of Digg downplayed it’s communities and put mainstream media first (as if Kbins magazine tool was restricted to famous newspapers) and thus it immediately felt like the community had been fractured. Reddit was growing with peoples own blogs and it felt way more community oriented. This is where I think and hope Lemmy will also find its own community.
Thanks for sharing.
Same. Digg was the first site I frequented, then migrated to reddit with the v4 exodus.
Same. This all feels so similar, but different at the same time. In a good way tho.
Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.
I think StumbleUpon was between Slashdot and Digg. But my timeline may be off.
I went from StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit and now here …
I skipped Digg. It seems like it was a primarily American thing, right? Anyways, I went 4chan -> stumbledupon -> 9gag -> reddit -> lemmy
Similar, but I was scared off of the toxic dumps like 4chan early on so really just started with StumbleUpon -> reddit -> lemmy.
Wow I completely forgot about out StumbleUpom, I used to use that allot.
Me too, but I’d put Usenet in there before Slashdot.
BBS
From the back of Computer Shopper magazine, we would get a list of phone #'s to call which then connected us to various Wildcat BBS's that were filled with interesting & squirrelly information and people. Usually 1 at a time could connect, but the fancy ones had multiple phone-lines.
College/Telnet/Usenet
Went to college and got access to a telnet account, which let me run Lynx and open a Usenet reader. From there we bounced all around text-based sites (using the book above) because there were no search engines. You had a big list of all the places you liked to visit, and you visited those. Sometimes, someone told you about another spot, or you played whack-a-mole with various .edu domains. A lot of kids started hosting sites on their dorm-room machines. Usenet opened up a whole world of discussion about topics far outside the scope of my tiny little town.
Next up was a PPoE connection using Trumpet Winsock and suddenly I could load NCSA Mosaic and mIRC and that opened up a graphical web with the easy ability to download software and more communication. Then Businesses all decided they needed to try "internet" for themselves, and you started seeing the rise of commercial endeavors. So early PCMag and other adopters showed up.
Slashdot came along and was primarily a Linux site, with some tech news sprinkled in. I still remember following the threads there for Columbine (when school shootings were still a novelty) and then on 9/11 when just about every site ground to a halt, there was lots of speculation and word-of-mouth, but at least information was still moving. It then expanded its audience with tags so that all sorts of news topics could open up and you could follow specific ones.
Ran with an RSS feed for a while around this point and subbed to all the different sites I liked, so I could get my fix in one place.
Fark came along and was an irreverent alternative to Slashdot. Somewhere between twitter performance art with everyone trying to make the catchiest title for their headline, but also just a lot of goofing off in the comments. Totalfark was $5 a month and worth the money to get at the un-curated content.
Then, just as Tech TV was going south and becoming some sort of wrestling-based channel, Kevin Rose mentions at the end of The Screen Savers about "This new website, Digg!" which in hindsight he was shamelessly plugging. That site offered the upvote/downvote concept allowing the community to create a constant stream of content. Somewhere along those lines Slashdot lost its luster, presumably because all of its content was curated by a handful of people who were in the process of selling out to other investors.
Reddit came along, and further customized the upvote/downvote/commenting experience. It also allowed you to create your own communities/subreddits and follow those. Because its audience was basically "anyone" it allowed for tons of creative content. Right as it started to take off, Digg made a huge faux pas on how they moderated content, which annoyed all the content creators and they moved to reddit as well.
I loved what Reddit could have been without the enshitification taking over. If you look at that list, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit all suffered from busily trying to monetize their users, and all of them died (or are dying) a slow, sad death. Fark is still owned by Drew Curtis, and as far as I can tell, still has a similar feel & userbase.
Lemmy honestly feels like finding Usenet, IRC & Lynx again. There's a learning curve you have to get over, and then you have to be willing to hunt for your information. But the quality of the content is higher than reddit, and each one of those other services went through the same decline as we jumped ship to the new one.
In a world where every new "service" just annoys me now, because I know it's going to be frustrating to use, and will likely just steal my data, turn into a content/ad mill and eventually turn to shit Lemmy feels like a big middle finger to those sites. And I'm here for it.
I was in a computer class during 9/11. Not fully understanding the magnitude of the events, we basically checked kazaa over and over to see how long it took for a clip from CNN to get uploaded. It was about 5 minutes. We also played tribes (2?) a lot in that class. It's also where I saw my first beheading on the Internet 😢
Oh man this are the types of comments I miss from the other site. Thank you Mr mwknight
Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. Back then, web servers didn't have a lot of resources. So if a Digg post was popular, it could slow the site to a crawl. Then we all knew the site was being "Digged".
I still have my slashdot account but don't use it much other than niche interest stuff. But otherwise same path for me.
And before that, sites got slash dotted
I switched from slashdot to Digg. Digg to Reddit when Digg started censoring the Blu-Ray decryption key (before v4), then was on Reddit until RIF shut down. I'm scheduled to get my 16 year badge this year I think. I haven't posted or commented since RIF shut down though.
I'm debating whether to sell my account or delete it. $75 could buy a lot of printer filament.
Where can you get $75 for your Reddit account?
16-year Reddit account here. It was the HD-DVD encryption key leak in early 2007.
Also a 16 yr acct. also a Jeff lol.
Hah! 🙌 what was your Reddit handle?
Lol I found you and sent a howdy your way hahahah both of us May 2nd 2007 too. Same Bishop handle I had on Digg too, and … really everything back to my Fidonet handle. I’m old.
Weird!!
censoring the Blu-Ray decryption key
Interesting. I remembered the key being used for HD DVD, but apparently it was both.
That’s when I left as well and watched their v4 transition from afar.
“How many of you were using Digg during it is prime?”
Fine! I'll change it
Put it this way, I still remember the drama around MrBabyMan and other power users!
OMG we all hated him so much. Every single post on the front page was from him. Then v4 came along and that was it, everyone left.
Yes, and also watched the Diggnation netcast.
The glory days!
Me! I was a huge fan of Kevin Rose due to TechTV and jumped on board as soon as he released it.
I'm in a similar boat. I used slashdot occasionally (still do), but once I heard Kevin Rose was involved with digg, I started using the site heavily. I only stopped when digg v4 dropped.
I'll have to see what he's up to these days.
Although I think his heart is in the right place, he is essentially peddling bird NFTs.
I listen the "Classical Sprouts" podcast with my kids, hosted by Kate Botello. I think they get tired of my saying "I knew of her when she was a dorky co-host of a tech support tv show!"
Oh shoot. I gotta check this out.
Yeah I came in from the TechTV days too.
Sara Lane had a download of the day about the Synergy network kvm thing. "It works for both windows and linux."
That's how I ended up installing Linux for the first time.. I didn't know anything about it other that I hated windows and that was something different. 20+ years later I basically haven't been without a Linux box ever since.
I went Stumble->Fark->Digg->Reddit->Lemmy. Fuck I’m getting old.
Same route but I skipped fark
I went from stumbleupon/fark, slashdot/google reader, digg, reddit, lemmy.
My account on reddit is pretty old. Like in the 17 years old area.
Digg i was on until the first exodus. (It wasnt just one migration, it happened in 2-3 waves). I actually like G4TechTV and diggnations show (amongst a few others like Hak5 etc)
Fark -> reddit -> Lemmy. Before that I checked in on ebaums every Friday lol. Before that I wrote down long af links to dbz pics on post it notes at the library, went home, saw my handwriting, threw them away.
I think my reddit account was 16 years old. You got me beat.
Fark is still around. I did a video interview with Drew Curtis a few months back for Another Website, and he says it's actually been gaining members!
I used Digg and it was great while it lasted.
I am not sure how many years I used Digg. In the rear-view mirror, it feels like a temporary gig between Slashdot and Reddit.
I was a casual lurker of Digg. I would open it up and scroll through for a bit, never spending more than 20 minutes or so just looking for something interesting to read. I don’t think I even knew it “died.”
In 2013 I joined Reddit, and somehow began spending hours reading posts and comments, and then becoming a poster/commenter myself.
I remember visiting Reddit and StumbledUpon and thinking to myself how ugly these sites were compared to my beloved Digg
I found it through StumbleUpon, which until reading comments here I always thought was just a sweet browser plugin. Never knew it had a site beyond a landing page and download button. Stayed at Digg until a friend showed me Reddit after Digg started sucking.
Same..
Stumbleupon -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
I don't recall why I went away from SU but both the others were as a protest
For me it just became cumbersome stumbling over and over, finding useful or novel sites less and less often
Imgur added user accounts just prior to Digg v4 going live.
Imgur having a community in itself always feels so funny to me. Like a group of forgotten humans feeding off the scraps of the rest of society that don't even know they exist.
I switched to Reddit when I realized I was basically one of those Futurama sewer mutants.
I left shortly after the HD-DVD fiasco. When people talk about the Digg migration, this is what I think of. Looks like there was another mass migration years afterwards
What’s the story behind this? It’s new to me.
Going from memory, people started posting the HD-DVD decryption key and Digg started removing all references to it to comply with take down orders.
There was a fair amount of controversy around it.
I was using Digg and Reddit both at the height of Digg. I had already mostly moved over to Reddit at the time of the migration but still was on Digg some. But I was among those that abandoned Digg then.
Me!
I loved Digg back in the day. I had a reddit account too, but preferred Digg by a lot. Then the enshittification of Digg via v4 came along and I hopped wholesale over to reddit and never looked back.
I used to lurk on digg a long time ago, when the itnernet was good :(
Fark man myself. We watched the Digg implosion with great smugness. Then everyone left for Reddit.
I was on Fark, went to digg, then reddit.
BEER
BOOBIES
ASININE
I skipped right past Digg and went from 4chan to Reddit
How was it? "Reddit is like 4Chan but with a condom" or something like that they used to say.
Never used digg. I went directly from Slashdot to Reddit.
Same, I heard about Digg but never went there. Usenet->Slashdot->Reddit.
I still have a low 4-digit Slashdot account I never use. I felt sad when it got sour. In the the beginning when people announced passion projects on Slashdot the comments were "That's so cool, it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. Not something I'll be needing but I wish them the best of luck.". In late stage Slashdot it would be "Why! What a waste of time. They should all focus on what I use". Unfortunately that self centered type of negativity is everywhere these days.
I went back when I quit reddit. Immediately found racist shit complaining about equality in schools and some concerning comments about vaccines.
Fell far from the site that basically dripped Demon Haunted World to me.
I was and used to watch the Diggnation podcast all the time. Loved Digg in its heyday, and it was sad when it went downhill. Reddit ended up being excellent though, and better than Digg ended up being. Sucks that it died too, but hopefully the Fediverse ends up finally being the chosen one.
Remember when podcasts were just audio? I guess I'm old.
Remember when there weren’t podcasts at all and you would have to get on a radio station to broadcast stuff?
Oh man, a few months ago my kid found an old boombox in the garage. It was awesome showing him "ok, here's the knob and how you change stations" and explaining why he couldn't just pick the song he wanted lol.
Raises hand
I was one of a group of power users alongside mrbabyman and a few others that probably collectively amounted to 90% of the frontpage of the site.
mrbabyman is a name I haven't thought of in a long time
how did the power user payola compare to xi bucks?
It was trash I didn't even get mentioned in an Old Spice ad.
I discovered Digg about a year before the Digg Exodus to Reddit, so I don't know if I'd call it the "prime" but I was there just in time to watch it fall.
I never used Digg, but I discovered Reddit around the time just after the Digg exodus happened.
Yeah I moved from Digg to Reddit around 2008/2009. Was also a fairly low numbered user of Slashdot.
StumbleUpon and RSS feeds were my go to for internet aggregation before I ended up on Reddit.
Not only Digg, but I also watched Tech TV and was on forums I can't even remember the names of. I'm still using IRC.
TechTV is how I found slashdot, then digg to reddit and now here.
Comcast was to blame for the enshittification of TechTV.
I was a Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy (and actually quite a bit of imgur) wanderer.
I did do some local/regional dialup boards before that too.
I was reading /. when they opened up account registration and my friends got 4 digit ids, but I didn't sign up right away and have a 5 digit one. At the time it was of great import. I tried it last year. Still works.
I moved to Reddit from Digg with the great pre v4 exodus.
I used message boards well into the 2010s. Digg and reddit were a curiosity that I mostly lurked.
I remember I got downvoted on Digg for anecdote about how the climate had been changing over the years in my area. The comments in those types of posts were primarily deniers saying there wasn't scientific evidence of climate change.
Learned about digg and started using it only for it to die a few months later. Discovered Reddit back in the 2010s while searching for Bodyweight fitness advice and stayed till the API fiasco.
Digging Lemmy now (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
Hah, this almost my exact same experience. Got into Digg only to watch it die shortly after. Went and checked out Reddit but didn't really like the look and feel of it at the time. It wasn't until the 2010s that I was bored at work and looking for something to read and stumbled on a Reddit thread that caught my attention. I was on Reddit after that until the API killed my 3rd party app and made the switch to Lemmy.
Watching diggnation now is such a trip. It kinda feels like an era of the internet that simultaneously never existed and continues to thrive.
I was active on the snopes message board before Reddit. Snopes went all to hell right around the time I switched. Now the message boards are gone and the site itself is mostly the owner asking for money.
Most of the time, I have been a lurker without an account and only bothered to make an account or even log in with said account whenever I had to ask a question or answer something I knew about well.
I like forums and sites where you don't have to have an account to post/reply. However, with the growing issues with bots/sockpuppets/trolls and general troublemaker those beautiful vestige of an old trusting era are getting rarer and rarer (still lively, vibrant and growing as they and new services transitions to local networks/intranet though).
In any case, the internet has always been in constant flux. Nevertheless, I have always adapted myself with the changes and try not to put too many eggs in a single or few services. I usually prefer systems and services I can run/host myself for family, friends and myself.
Slashdot(still alive 😃)
Define, "alive." I pretty much considered it dead after Rob Malda left.
Okay, somewhat alive and on crutches. 😓
There are still some rare yet ephemeral sparks of good insights left dwelling and lurking over there.
During the reddit blackout I almost automatically/unconsciously went back there to see what's up like I used to back then.
It's still alive. The anonymous racist trolls are still there, but amazingly there are still some intelligent people with insightful comments to make. The signal to noise ratio is not what it was though.
Even though I was in the prime age group for Digg, I shockingly never even heard of it until after I became a Reddit user and heard tales of its demise.
StumbleUpon was my main Internet resource during those years. I still miss it.
Good ole stumbleupon. I sure miss that site.
not quite stumbleupon but I've found the Marginalia search engine's "random" feature pretty cool. it specifically only returns small/niche websites.
I was really active Digg user and later HackerNews when it was really about hacking and not startups bs.
I joined Digg sometime around 2008 when the first videos of those crazy Russians climbing giant cranes first hit the web. I was over the moon with Digg but around 2010 one of my college roommates started yammering about this site Reddit and how much better it was. I don't think I actually visited Reddit until 2011, and even then I lurked for a year before I even made an account and started commenting on things. But the downfall of Digg and rise of Reddit was swift, and back then when Aaron was alive it really was a great site.
I even went to Diggnation Live, here in London.
I used it a little bit, not extensively. I watched Diggnation with Kevin and Alex though semi-regularly, as I used to watch TechTV prior to that.
Yeah it was a huge event, felt like a giant online protest, and from my perspective it was the beginning of the end for Digg, and signaled it's decline.
Almost never did, to be honest, but I'm sure I missed out on a lot of interesting stuff because of it.
I was on digg as well as reddit. I always liked reddit a lot better and was always baffled as to why digg was so much more popular. Reddit always felt more diverse (in topics) and organic (user driven) to me. I guess others had a different view.
Sadly, no one no one seems to remember kuro5hin. Barely even me. It had its moments though.
I wasn't a fan of reddit in digg's heyday because the site looked rough compared to digg and I was more interested in the discussions on digg at the time.
I only started using reddit heavily when digg rolled out digg v4. Weirdly enough, reddit seemed to look better afterward, like they improved their ux since my last visit.
Interesting perspective. I had not considered the aesthetic angle.
kiro5hin
I seem to recall spending time on there, but that's about all I remember about it.
I used to use my Blackberry to read Digg every morning in college while waiting for classes to start. It was great in its heyday, but maybe that's just nostalgia or that I'd not experienced anything quite like it prior.
I'd love to have diggnation back
What is Digg?
Digg was essentially a site for sharing and discussing various links across the internet. It used to be extremely popular before the rise of Reddit, but it declined heavily after a controversial redisign (the infamous Digg v4) with most of it's users fleeing to Reddit.
IIRC it turned into a SEO brigaded mess there when I switched.
I'm too young for Digg.
I wasn't. Before Reddit I was on IRC.
I never used Digg at all. Before the Internet consisted almost exclusively of "social media", I was mainly on topic-specific web forums run on software like phpBB and SMF.
I miss those days, but I know it's not coming back.
My history would be: BBSs>various forums>Slashdot>SomethingAwful>Digg>reddit>StumbleUpon>4chan>HackerNews>voat.co>Lemmy
I wasn't a heavy Digg user, but it was fun.
I still use Digg.
I was a member for promoting my blogs
I used digg a fair amount before the v4 revamp
Haven't a clue what Digg and the other one are. I've just found Sync.
Website that changed stuff for the worse and pretty much died when people moved to reddit. Still going on, but no one knows what its about.
I couldn't speak English at that time, I can't speak now, though. :)
Me fail English? Unpossible!
Never used it.
I was most active on Slashdot and Fark back then.
And then I migrated to Reddit.
I was on Digg but never much more than a super casual lurker. Like maybe hitting it up at work a few times a month. I was still on USENET most of the time so there wasn't much of a need.
👋
I was a user of StumbleUpon at one point. I don't think I ever had an account on Digg.
Omg I loved Digg so much. Watched diggnation every single week too, via my softmodded original Xbox with navi x. I was so mad when they sold out lol at the time I had a little tech blog and I was talking so much shit about the buyout that someone from the new team personally messaged me to call me out on my bullshit 😂 it took me forever to figure out reddit when I finally made the switch and I never really felt at home over there. Lemmy feels much better
I did, I was in high school at the time and I had just discovered Firefox. I remember it was a while before it was possible to have nested replies. Before Digg I think I just used StumbleUpon. Good times!
i used it a lot, and actually loved Leo Laporte... but the remake forced it down my throat to the point i was forced to leave.
I miss The Screen Savers and TechTV. Somehow podcasts and streams are not the same. I tried to follow Laporte on TWiT but I eventually gave up. TechTV is probably also how I learned about Digg because Rose worked there for a while.
I kinda dabbled in most of them, except 4chan. In no particular order: Various webrings, usenet, tumblr, stumbleupon, digg, kiro5hin, reddit, slashdot, twitter, lots of rss. More reading than posting.
Yup
For me it was aimlessly wandering around -> 9gag -> imgur -> reddit. Never heard about digg before the API discussion.
It was my primary internet procrastination tool. It’s been over a decade since using it though so I don’t remember it too well.
nah i lurked on /. for like 15 years and then made a reddit account that later got banned for being anti-white
I used Plime before reddit, around 2008. Hard to even find info on it these days, not that it was anything special; same general setup as digg or reddit or lemmy.
I was part of the digg migration to Reddit
Yeah, same. I left a bit before the mass exodus, just like I did with Reddit -> Lemmy. I also joined IRC a bit before the Eternal September.
I feel like some sort of herald of Eternal September. So if your social media site is suddenly full of clueless morons, you can just blame me.
Sorry, I've been hearing about this for some time and I don't know the story behind it. Can someone please explain the enshittification that happened with digg? How good was it before and how bad was it after?
This seems like a good overview of what happened https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/digg-v4
I knew about the migration but this line on that article is super ironic
Yeah the parallels are pretty hilarious
Thanks. Power to the people.
✊
Was this in the 1920s?
It was amazing but I was young and it was wonderful to discover. I think people have fond memories for it really.
It’s very similar to Lemmy, if not just the same thing done a different way. I think there were only upvotes (I can Digg it).
For young people discovering Lemmy, as it is now, and discovering Linux subreddits etc, they probably get the same enjoyment/attachment etc.
The redesign of Digg downplayed it’s communities and put mainstream media first (as if Kbins magazine tool was restricted to famous newspapers) and thus it immediately felt like the community had been fractured. Reddit was growing with peoples own blogs and it felt way more community oriented. This is where I think and hope Lemmy will also find its own community.
Thanks for sharing.
Same. Digg was the first site I frequented, then migrated to reddit with the v4 exodus.
Same. This all feels so similar, but different at the same time. In a good way tho.
Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.
I think StumbleUpon was between Slashdot and Digg. But my timeline may be off.
I went from StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit and now here …
I skipped Digg. It seems like it was a primarily American thing, right? Anyways, I went 4chan -> stumbledupon -> 9gag -> reddit -> lemmy
Similar, but I was scared off of the toxic dumps like 4chan early on so really just started with StumbleUpon -> reddit -> lemmy.
Wow I completely forgot about out StumbleUpom, I used to use that allot.
Me too, but I’d put Usenet in there before Slashdot.
Not AOL Keywords between those two?
That was me, but I also had Facebook between Digg and Reddit.
Anyone remember Fark?
I never found slashdot, and I wish I had. I’m a LUE to Gen[M]ay to YTMND to /b/ to Digg to Reddit to here person-thing.
I am this old:
BBS's -> College's Telnet -> .edu sites over lynx -> Usenet -> IRC -> commercial websites -> Slashdot -> Fark -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
BBS From the back of Computer Shopper magazine, we would get a list of phone #'s to call which then connected us to various Wildcat BBS's that were filled with interesting & squirrelly information and people. Usually 1 at a time could connect, but the fancy ones had multiple phone-lines.
College/Telnet/Usenet Went to college and got access to a telnet account, which let me run Lynx and open a Usenet reader. From there we bounced all around text-based sites (using the book above) because there were no search engines. You had a big list of all the places you liked to visit, and you visited those. Sometimes, someone told you about another spot, or you played whack-a-mole with various .edu domains. A lot of kids started hosting sites on their dorm-room machines. Usenet opened up a whole world of discussion about topics far outside the scope of my tiny little town.
Next up was a PPoE connection using Trumpet Winsock and suddenly I could load NCSA Mosaic and mIRC and that opened up a graphical web with the easy ability to download software and more communication. Then Businesses all decided they needed to try "internet" for themselves, and you started seeing the rise of commercial endeavors. So early PCMag and other adopters showed up.
Slashdot came along and was primarily a Linux site, with some tech news sprinkled in. I still remember following the threads there for Columbine (when school shootings were still a novelty) and then on 9/11 when just about every site ground to a halt, there was lots of speculation and word-of-mouth, but at least information was still moving. It then expanded its audience with tags so that all sorts of news topics could open up and you could follow specific ones.
Ran with an RSS feed for a while around this point and subbed to all the different sites I liked, so I could get my fix in one place.
Fark came along and was an irreverent alternative to Slashdot. Somewhere between twitter performance art with everyone trying to make the catchiest title for their headline, but also just a lot of goofing off in the comments. Totalfark was $5 a month and worth the money to get at the un-curated content.
Then, just as Tech TV was going south and becoming some sort of wrestling-based channel, Kevin Rose mentions at the end of The Screen Savers about "This new website, Digg!" which in hindsight he was shamelessly plugging. That site offered the upvote/downvote concept allowing the community to create a constant stream of content. Somewhere along those lines Slashdot lost its luster, presumably because all of its content was curated by a handful of people who were in the process of selling out to other investors.
Reddit came along, and further customized the upvote/downvote/commenting experience. It also allowed you to create your own communities/subreddits and follow those. Because its audience was basically "anyone" it allowed for tons of creative content. Right as it started to take off, Digg made a huge faux pas on how they moderated content, which annoyed all the content creators and they moved to reddit as well.
I loved what Reddit could have been without the enshitification taking over. If you look at that list, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit all suffered from busily trying to monetize their users, and all of them died (or are dying) a slow, sad death. Fark is still owned by Drew Curtis, and as far as I can tell, still has a similar feel & userbase.
Lemmy honestly feels like finding Usenet, IRC & Lynx again. There's a learning curve you have to get over, and then you have to be willing to hunt for your information. But the quality of the content is higher than reddit, and each one of those other services went through the same decline as we jumped ship to the new one.
In a world where every new "service" just annoys me now, because I know it's going to be frustrating to use, and will likely just steal my data, turn into a content/ad mill and eventually turn to shit Lemmy feels like a big middle finger to those sites. And I'm here for it.
I was in a computer class during 9/11. Not fully understanding the magnitude of the events, we basically checked kazaa over and over to see how long it took for a clip from CNN to get uploaded. It was about 5 minutes. We also played tribes (2?) a lot in that class. It's also where I saw my first beheading on the Internet 😢
Oh man this are the types of comments I miss from the other site. Thank you Mr mwknight
Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. Back then, web servers didn't have a lot of resources. So if a Digg post was popular, it could slow the site to a crawl. Then we all knew the site was being "Digged".
I still have my slashdot account but don't use it much other than niche interest stuff. But otherwise same path for me.
And before that, sites got slash dotted
I switched from slashdot to Digg. Digg to Reddit when Digg started censoring the Blu-Ray decryption key (before v4), then was on Reddit until RIF shut down. I'm scheduled to get my 16 year badge this year I think. I haven't posted or commented since RIF shut down though.
I'm debating whether to sell my account or delete it. $75 could buy a lot of printer filament.
Where can you get $75 for your Reddit account?
16-year Reddit account here. It was the HD-DVD encryption key leak in early 2007.
Also a 16 yr acct. also a Jeff lol.
Hah! 🙌 what was your Reddit handle?
Lol I found you and sent a howdy your way hahahah both of us May 2nd 2007 too. Same Bishop handle I had on Digg too, and … really everything back to my Fidonet handle. I’m old.
Weird!!
Interesting. I remembered the key being used for HD DVD, but apparently it was both.
That’s when I left as well and watched their v4 transition from afar.
When did you leave slashdot to Digg?
Its* prime.
Well, I know this guy was on reddit.
At least we can edit post titles here
grammar nazi
“How many of you were using Digg during it is prime?”
Fine! I'll change it
Put it this way, I still remember the drama around MrBabyMan and other power users!
OMG we all hated him so much. Every single post on the front page was from him. Then v4 came along and that was it, everyone left.
Yes, and also watched the Diggnation netcast.
The glory days!
Me! I was a huge fan of Kevin Rose due to TechTV and jumped on board as soon as he released it.
I'm in a similar boat. I used slashdot occasionally (still do), but once I heard Kevin Rose was involved with digg, I started using the site heavily. I only stopped when digg v4 dropped.
I'll have to see what he's up to these days.
Although I think his heart is in the right place, he is essentially peddling bird NFTs.
https://youtu.be/VA-jwncEA3M
There will never be someone as cool as Kate awkwardly dancing and saying "it's menus a-poppin today on windows tips"
Leo Laporte was the bomb.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/VA-jwncEA3M
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I listen the "Classical Sprouts" podcast with my kids, hosted by Kate Botello. I think they get tired of my saying "I knew of her when she was a dorky co-host of a tech support tv show!"
Oh shoot. I gotta check this out.
Yeah I came in from the TechTV days too.
Sara Lane had a download of the day about the Synergy network kvm thing. "It works for both windows and linux."
That's how I ended up installing Linux for the first time.. I didn't know anything about it other that I hated windows and that was something different. 20+ years later I basically haven't been without a Linux box ever since.
I went Stumble->Fark->Digg->Reddit->Lemmy. Fuck I’m getting old.
Same route but I skipped fark
I went from stumbleupon/fark, slashdot/google reader, digg, reddit, lemmy.
My account on reddit is pretty old. Like in the 17 years old area.
Digg i was on until the first exodus. (It wasnt just one migration, it happened in 2-3 waves). I actually like G4TechTV and diggnations show (amongst a few others like Hak5 etc)
Fark -> reddit -> Lemmy. Before that I checked in on ebaums every Friday lol. Before that I wrote down long af links to dbz pics on post it notes at the library, went home, saw my handwriting, threw them away.
I think my reddit account was 16 years old. You got me beat.
Fark is still around. I did a video interview with Drew Curtis a few months back for Another Website, and he says it's actually been gaining members!
I used Digg and it was great while it lasted.
I am not sure how many years I used Digg. In the rear-view mirror, it feels like a temporary gig between Slashdot and Reddit.
I was a casual lurker of Digg. I would open it up and scroll through for a bit, never spending more than 20 minutes or so just looking for something interesting to read. I don’t think I even knew it “died.”
In 2013 I joined Reddit, and somehow began spending hours reading posts and comments, and then becoming a poster/commenter myself.
I remember visiting Reddit and StumbledUpon and thinking to myself how ugly these sites were compared to my beloved Digg
I found it through StumbleUpon, which until reading comments here I always thought was just a sweet browser plugin. Never knew it had a site beyond a landing page and download button. Stayed at Digg until a friend showed me Reddit after Digg started sucking.
Same.. Stumbleupon -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
I don't recall why I went away from SU but both the others were as a protest
For me it just became cumbersome stumbling over and over, finding useful or novel sites less and less often
Weirdly enough for me: Digg -> Imgur -> Reddit -> Lemmy.
Imgur added user accounts just prior to Digg v4 going live.
Imgur having a community in itself always feels so funny to me. Like a group of forgotten humans feeding off the scraps of the rest of society that don't even know they exist.
I switched to Reddit when I realized I was basically one of those Futurama sewer mutants.
I left shortly after the HD-DVD fiasco. When people talk about the Digg migration, this is what I think of. Looks like there was another mass migration years afterwards
What’s the story behind this? It’s new to me.
Going from memory, people started posting the HD-DVD decryption key and Digg started removing all references to it to comply with take down orders.
There was a fair amount of controversy around it.
I was using Digg and Reddit both at the height of Digg. I had already mostly moved over to Reddit at the time of the migration but still was on Digg some. But I was among those that abandoned Digg then.
Me!
I loved Digg back in the day. I had a reddit account too, but preferred Digg by a lot. Then the enshittification of Digg via v4 came along and I hopped wholesale over to reddit and never looked back.
I used to lurk on digg a long time ago, when the itnernet was good :(
Fark man myself. We watched the Digg implosion with great smugness. Then everyone left for Reddit.
I was on Fark, went to digg, then reddit.
BEER
BOOBIES
ASININE
I skipped right past Digg and went from 4chan to Reddit
How was it? "Reddit is like 4Chan but with a condom" or something like that they used to say.
Never used digg. I went directly from Slashdot to Reddit.
Same, I heard about Digg but never went there. Usenet->Slashdot->Reddit.
I still have a low 4-digit Slashdot account I never use. I felt sad when it got sour. In the the beginning when people announced passion projects on Slashdot the comments were "That's so cool, it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. Not something I'll be needing but I wish them the best of luck.". In late stage Slashdot it would be "Why! What a waste of time. They should all focus on what I use". Unfortunately that self centered type of negativity is everywhere these days.
I went back when I quit reddit. Immediately found racist shit complaining about equality in schools and some concerning comments about vaccines.
Fell far from the site that basically dripped Demon Haunted World to me.
I was and used to watch the Diggnation podcast all the time. Loved Digg in its heyday, and it was sad when it went downhill. Reddit ended up being excellent though, and better than Digg ended up being. Sucks that it died too, but hopefully the Fediverse ends up finally being the chosen one.
Remember when podcasts were just audio? I guess I'm old.
Remember when there weren’t podcasts at all and you would have to get on a radio station to broadcast stuff?
Oh man, a few months ago my kid found an old boombox in the garage. It was awesome showing him "ok, here's the knob and how you change stations" and explaining why he couldn't just pick the song he wanted lol.
Raises hand
I was one of a group of power users alongside mrbabyman and a few others that probably collectively amounted to 90% of the frontpage of the site.
mrbabyman is a name I haven't thought of in a long time
Andrew Sorcini. They're ok for such a massive
how did the power user payola compare to xi bucks?
It was trash I didn't even get mentioned in an Old Spice ad.
I discovered Digg about a year before the Digg Exodus to Reddit, so I don't know if I'd call it the "prime" but I was there just in time to watch it fall.
I never used Digg, but I discovered Reddit around the time just after the Digg exodus happened.
Yeah I moved from Digg to Reddit around 2008/2009. Was also a fairly low numbered user of Slashdot.
StumbleUpon and RSS feeds were my go to for internet aggregation before I ended up on Reddit.
Not only Digg, but I also watched Tech TV and was on forums I can't even remember the names of. I'm still using IRC.
TechTV is how I found slashdot, then digg to reddit and now here.
Comcast was to blame for the enshittification of TechTV.
I was a Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy (and actually quite a bit of imgur) wanderer.
I did do some local/regional dialup boards before that too.
I was reading /. when they opened up account registration and my friends got 4 digit ids, but I didn't sign up right away and have a 5 digit one. At the time it was of great import. I tried it last year. Still works.
I moved to Reddit from Digg with the great pre v4 exodus.
I used message boards well into the 2010s. Digg and reddit were a curiosity that I mostly lurked.
I remember I got downvoted on Digg for anecdote about how the climate had been changing over the years in my area. The comments in those types of posts were primarily deniers saying there wasn't scientific evidence of climate change.
Learned about digg and started using it only for it to die a few months later. Discovered Reddit back in the 2010s while searching for Bodyweight fitness advice and stayed till the API fiasco.
Digging Lemmy now (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
Hah, this almost my exact same experience. Got into Digg only to watch it die shortly after. Went and checked out Reddit but didn't really like the look and feel of it at the time. It wasn't until the 2010s that I was bored at work and looking for something to read and stumbled on a Reddit thread that caught my attention. I was on Reddit after that until the API killed my 3rd party app and made the switch to Lemmy.
DIGGnation!
https://piped.video/watch?v=_opTc2grG60
Watching diggnation now is such a trip. It kinda feels like an era of the internet that simultaneously never existed and continues to thrive.
I was active on the snopes message board before Reddit. Snopes went all to hell right around the time I switched. Now the message boards are gone and the site itself is mostly the owner asking for money.
Forums/Slashdot(still alive 😃)/digg/newground »» Reddit/facebook/twitter (all dead) »» fediverse »» [the cycle continues] »» ∞
Most of the time, I have been a lurker without an account and only bothered to make an account or even log in with said account whenever I had to ask a question or answer something I knew about well.
I like forums and sites where you don't have to have an account to post/reply. However, with the growing issues with bots/sockpuppets/trolls and general troublemaker those beautiful vestige of an old trusting era are getting rarer and rarer (still lively, vibrant and growing as they and new services transitions to local networks/intranet though).
In any case, the internet has always been in constant flux. Nevertheless, I have always adapted myself with the changes and try not to put too many eggs in a single or few services. I usually prefer systems and services I can run/host myself for family, friends and myself.
Define, "alive." I pretty much considered it dead after Rob Malda left.
Okay, somewhat alive and on crutches. 😓
There are still some rare yet ephemeral sparks of good insights left dwelling and lurking over there.
During the reddit blackout I almost automatically/unconsciously went back there to see what's up like I used to back then.
It's still alive. The anonymous racist trolls are still there, but amazingly there are still some intelligent people with insightful comments to make. The signal to noise ratio is not what it was though.
Even though I was in the prime age group for Digg, I shockingly never even heard of it until after I became a Reddit user and heard tales of its demise.
StumbleUpon was my main Internet resource during those years. I still miss it.
Good ole stumbleupon. I sure miss that site.
not quite stumbleupon but I've found the Marginalia search engine's "random" feature pretty cool. it specifically only returns small/niche websites.
https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
Digg was amazing till they ruined it. =\
I was really active Digg user and later HackerNews when it was really about hacking and not startups bs.
I joined Digg sometime around 2008 when the first videos of those crazy Russians climbing giant cranes first hit the web. I was over the moon with Digg but around 2010 one of my college roommates started yammering about this site Reddit and how much better it was. I don't think I actually visited Reddit until 2011, and even then I lurked for a year before I even made an account and started commenting on things. But the downfall of Digg and rise of Reddit was swift, and back then when Aaron was alive it really was a great site.
I even went to Diggnation Live, here in London.
I used it a little bit, not extensively. I watched Diggnation with Kevin and Alex though semi-regularly, as I used to watch TechTV prior to that.
Yeah it was a huge event, felt like a giant online protest, and from my perspective it was the beginning of the end for Digg, and signaled it's decline.
Almost never did, to be honest, but I'm sure I missed out on a lot of interesting stuff because of it.
I was on digg as well as reddit. I always liked reddit a lot better and was always baffled as to why digg was so much more popular. Reddit always felt more diverse (in topics) and organic (user driven) to me. I guess others had a different view.
Sadly, no one no one seems to remember kuro5hin. Barely even me. It had its moments though.
I wasn't a fan of reddit in digg's heyday because the site looked rough compared to digg and I was more interested in the discussions on digg at the time.
I only started using reddit heavily when digg rolled out digg v4. Weirdly enough, reddit seemed to look better afterward, like they improved their ux since my last visit.
Interesting perspective. I had not considered the aesthetic angle.
I seem to recall spending time on there, but that's about all I remember about it.
I used to use my Blackberry to read Digg every morning in college while waiting for classes to start. It was great in its heyday, but maybe that's just nostalgia or that I'd not experienced anything quite like it prior.
I'd love to have diggnation back
What is Digg?
Digg was essentially a site for sharing and discussing various links across the internet. It used to be extremely popular before the rise of Reddit, but it declined heavily after a controversial redisign (the infamous Digg v4) with most of it's users fleeing to Reddit.
IIRC it turned into a SEO brigaded mess there when I switched.
I'm too young for Digg.
I wasn't. Before Reddit I was on IRC.
I never used Digg at all. Before the Internet consisted almost exclusively of "social media", I was mainly on topic-specific web forums run on software like phpBB and SMF.
I miss those days, but I know it's not coming back.
My history would be: BBSs>various forums>Slashdot>SomethingAwful>Digg>reddit>StumbleUpon>4chan>HackerNews>voat.co>Lemmy
I wasn't a heavy Digg user, but it was fun.
I still use Digg.
I was a member for promoting my blogs
I used digg a fair amount before the v4 revamp
Haven't a clue what Digg and the other one are. I've just found Sync.
Website that changed stuff for the worse and pretty much died when people moved to reddit. Still going on, but no one knows what its about.
I couldn't speak English at that time, I can't speak now, though. :)
Me fail English? Unpossible!
Never used it.
I was most active on Slashdot and Fark back then.
And then I migrated to Reddit.
I was on Digg but never much more than a super casual lurker. Like maybe hitting it up at work a few times a month. I was still on USENET most of the time so there wasn't much of a need.
👋
I was a user of StumbleUpon at one point. I don't think I ever had an account on Digg.
Omg I loved Digg so much. Watched diggnation every single week too, via my softmodded original Xbox with navi x. I was so mad when they sold out lol at the time I had a little tech blog and I was talking so much shit about the buyout that someone from the new team personally messaged me to call me out on my bullshit 😂 it took me forever to figure out reddit when I finally made the switch and I never really felt at home over there. Lemmy feels much better
EDIT: Also, this song will forever live in my heart https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XLLRsn_nr6s
Yo
I was using Stumbleupon back in Digg's day
I did, I was in high school at the time and I had just discovered Firefox. I remember it was a while before it was possible to have nested replies. Before Digg I think I just used StumbleUpon. Good times!
i used it a lot, and actually loved Leo Laporte... but the remake forced it down my throat to the point i was forced to leave.
I miss The Screen Savers and TechTV. Somehow podcasts and streams are not the same. I tried to follow Laporte on TWiT but I eventually gave up. TechTV is probably also how I learned about Digg because Rose worked there for a while.
I kinda dabbled in most of them, except 4chan. In no particular order: Various webrings, usenet, tumblr, stumbleupon, digg, kiro5hin, reddit, slashdot, twitter, lots of rss. More reading than posting.
Yup
For me it was aimlessly wandering around -> 9gag -> imgur -> reddit. Never heard about digg before the API discussion.
It was my primary internet procrastination tool. It’s been over a decade since using it though so I don’t remember it too well.
nah i lurked on /. for like 15 years and then made a reddit account that later got banned for being anti-white
I used Plime before reddit, around 2008. Hard to even find info on it these days, not that it was anything special; same general setup as digg or reddit or lemmy.