At the beginning of the year, Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian announced they would be teaming up to bring the social news aggregator Digg back to life. At first, early access was available to those willing to pay a fee, but eventually free beta invites began to roll out, and the most recent wave finally sent my invite. I quickly signed up.
Now that I’ve had a few days to explore the site and Android app, I have to say the results aren’t all that surprising. Digg is already filled with power users endlessly posting the same old slop from mainstream media that you’ll find on every other aggregator, with all of the political infighting you’d expect to see on social media like Reddit or Facebook. That’s to say, thanks to the users, Digg’s beta is off to a pretty lackluster start, doing very little to differentiate itself from the sites that already compile the mass of corporate-approved content the web is slathered with.
Sick of traditional social media? So far, Digg isn’t the answer
The fact of the matter is, Reddit has become a cesspit of hatred, spam, and bots, with some of the worst moderation the internet has ever seen. Over the last decade, many Reddit users have sought to find greener pastures, whether that’s the Lemmy migration of 2023, spurred by Reddit’s API controversy, or the short-lived Voat migration of 2015 after several subreddits got hit with the banhammer. So far, no single service has been able to offer a full-fledged lifeboat for those looking to leave Reddit’s grip on the internet and its user-created content.
Digg’s website offers a clean UI, but it’s also pretty sparse and a little buggy
This is why Digg’s announced return had many Reddit users hopeful that it could build an alternative news aggregator devoid of the pitfalls of Reddit and its endless hate parade, where a single dissenting opinion can easily see your account banned by mods and even admins.
Digg is repeating the same mistakes as Reddit
Sadly, many of Digg’s issues are familiar ones that could have been easily sidestepped. First off, Digg incentivizes power users with a leaderboard, the process of contributing has been gamefied to encourage users to post so that the service looks busy, which has resulted in a handful of power users posting hundreds to thousands of posts on their accounts over the last few months, and as you can guess, the vast majority of these posts are from mainstream content mills, often political in nature, and they are absolutely flooding the feed.
I’m not the only one who has noticed the overabundance of political posts
Then there is the comment system, and of course, political infighting is already happening thanks to the excess of political posts. It doesn’t even matter what sub you are in — be it Politics, Entertainment, News, heck, even Science and Offbeat — they’re not immune to political posts, which has led to the latest wave of beta users creating posts in the Digg sub asking for admins to contain this abuse. So far, nothing is being done, but you have to remember the service is in beta with development progress moving somewhat slowly.
Basically, Digg’s beta feels like Reddit lite, with the exact same content and opinions you’d expect, with plenty of unwelcoming comments should you dare point out the one-sidedness, just on a smaller scale since access to the app and site is part of an invite-only beta, resulting in a low user count.
A blocked user (one of many, some even calling going so far to call people nazis), and downvotes for anyone who notices the political content
Ultimately, Digg is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The most likely reason it gamified user contributions is because a social site like Digg lives or dies by the number of users it can convince to post content; the churn can never end, just like every other social media site. But the problem is, the handful of power users Digg is awarding in its Leaderboards are the same users who are flooding the platform with the same irresponsible clickbait you can find anywhere else. The content gets engagement, sure, for the same reason it does elsewhere: by using our opinions and nature against ourselves, which is about as unhealthy as it gets — otherwise known as dark patterns.
I don’t need Digg or Reddit — or any other social media — to tell me what the mainstream thinks about anything, and, more to the point, I’m utterly uninterested. The days of giving a shit what content mills think about any subject are long gone, which means Digg’s content is not only stale and boring, not to mention predictable, but it’s interlaced with so much political slop that the feed is rather distasteful, especially for those of us looking for something new rather than more of the same in a prettier package. In other words, Digg is failing to be fun or inviting, a death sentence for social media, especially for a service aiming to do it better than the status quo. So far, Digg is the status quo. Yuck.
There are tools that can help you tame your feed, but it’s still early days, and they don’t help enough
Despite the many self-posts going up on the Digg sub asking for politics to be quarantined to the Politics sub, so far, it’ll be up to you to clean your feed. You can choose which subs to belong to, but when there are so few to choose from, with no ability for users to create their own subs, it’s challenging to avoid the junk that power users are clogging the feed with. This means you will have to resort to banning users, which also hides their posts and replies.
Simply block the top posters to avoid their slop, and dial in your subs
The good news is that Digg has made it very easy to locate the people flooding the service with mainstream slop, thanks to the leaderboard. Banning these users cleans up the feed exponentially, but since there are so few topics, your feed ends up mainly consisting of content from Photography, Art, Food, Books, Gaming, and Lifestyle. You essentially have to hobble your feed of topics to avoid the mass spamming of political rage-bait. Not fun.
Digg needs to quickly get a grip on rewarding unique and original content before it’s too late
There is no shortage of sites that regurgitate corporate talking points, now that corporations have taken over the internet. Case in point: all the major blogs guilty of aggressive content farming are owned by large corporations, all the while Google is busy silently killing privately owned sites by hiding them from Search results, replaced by dangerous AI hallucinations. If there was ever a time internet users needed a space that rewards unique and original content, that time is now, and Digg could be the perfect platform to share it. Instead, Digg is currently busy rewarding the same old, same old, leaving little for users to discuss, especially when it’s obvious you’ll get dogpiled for daring to have a different opinion, just like on Reddit.
The fix is simple: create a system that rewards original, unique user-driven content, rather than rewarding an endless parade of corporate-approved garbage. Countless independently owned sites on the web would be more than happy to fill the gap, but in the end, since it comes down to users posting this content, it’s the service’s responsibility to steer them in the right direction. So instead of taking the easy path to traffic by rewarding divisive trash that makes the internet a worse place to be, Digg could enact the change that is very much needed, a change that Digg users are currently begging for as they continue to complain about divisive politics leaking into every sub.
Social media needs to evolve
Is this Reddit or Digg? It’s hard to tell
Encouraging unique content will clearly come at the cost of traffic (hence my earlier mention of a rock-and-a-hard-place), not to mention the ire of the corporations that would be boxed out of the feed. Whether Digg has the balls to do what’s needed remains to be seen, but if I were a betting man, I would not bet on Digg’s success, not in its current state, where it offers the same bullshit and opinions I can see in any number of news, RSS, and social feeds (the exact same complaint I have for Kagi’s news feed). We don’t need more of the same; we need an evolution, and so far, Digg’s beta is failing to do anything worthwhile or different.
