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Comment by ahmedfromtunis

1 day ago

I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read.

I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.

The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.

7 comments

ahmedfromtunis

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probably_wrong  7 hours ago

I've been sharing this HN comment with anyone who mentions how good the articles in digg V2 were:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046023

Apparently the reason why their articles were interesting was because... they copied all of their content from DamnInteresting. Once they were called out they stopped, and the quality went downhill.

bink  1 day ago

One of the things I always disliked about the original Digg was their threading. The slashdot like feed where the oldest comments were at the top and there was only one level of replies tended to encourage the "first" comments and harmed the quality of the discussion. I was glad to see it use a reddit-like comment thread for the new site, but it also meant there wasn't much reason to use it over reddit.

I'm a bit surprised with Alexis' involvement they didn't anticipate the bot problem. Alexis left reddit several years ago but I'm sure he's still in touch with the folks who run the place. It would've been worth it to talk to them about the threats they currently face and how they deal with them.

  • PaulHoule  8 hours ago

    Wasn’t part of the Reddit story was that they bootstrapped it with fake content?

    • bink  5 hours ago

      Absolutely. They kinda brag about it now. But I think it was just the founders making multiple accounts. It sounds like the new Digg was worried about bots scaring people away from the site with thinly disguised ads.

rchaud  6 hours ago

I was a big user of Pocket between 2015-19, which also curated interesting long-form articles. The problem with that model was that paywalls were coming up everywhere, so the free articles that remained came from low-quality sites (Forbes, The Inc, FastCompany) full of long-form hustle culture or self-improvement stuff loaded with affiliate links. Maybe Digg v2 had the same issue.