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?
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.
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.
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 😢
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 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.
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 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!"
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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!