I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.

I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.

Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.

And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.

Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?

At some point websites will just have to start charging an entry fee just to make it so if you really are yet another bot, at least you are paying for your stay. If you're not rate limiting your websites in 2026 on a per user level, you really need to, and figure out how to do it meaningfully. Raise limits for known human power users, especially if they pay to use your website.

I wonder if the "short-term" "fix" is people will start to migrate off the web and into mobile, though none of this stops agents from using phone emulators, so kind of pointless, but I imagine crawling the web is easier for AI.

> None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

What is HN doing differently then?

This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch?

There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?

I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.

Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.

Related - others?

Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments)

Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments)

Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments)

Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments)

Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)

Digg's death in 2010 was essentially the original case study for how to destroy platform trust overnight. The v4 redesign wasn't just bad UX — it was a signal that the company had fundamentally changed its relationship with users. When Kevin Rose tried to "fix" the front page by giving power users less influence, he accidentally revealed that the whole value of Digg was those power users.

What's interesting is that every subsequent attempt to revive Digg has been a bet that brand nostalgia outlasts institutional memory of why it failed. It doesn't.

The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.

The patterns were there if you knew to look for them.

The original Digg excepted, Kevin Rose's attention span is extremely limited. He will give something ~3-4 months of attention before (apparently) getting bored and wanting to move on to something else.

Up until that point, he will be an unrelenting hype man of whatever his attention is lasered on at that moment.

Then the hype posts start to drift. They show up once every few days, then once a week, then stop entirely. Any criticism or skepticism is considered a buzz kill in the cloud of good vibes only.

A few months later, a dramatic explainer post arrives (underestimating the cold start problem? Really??), outlining why the idea didn't work and why the next one will be better, for sure, for real.

This (AI generated) note from the current CEO paints an optimistic picture, but the most likely outcome will be that Digg simply doesn't launch. It's sustained on the nostalgic vapors of the old guard, not renewed by a replenished sense of purpose, or connection.

I'd say I'd love to be proven wrong, but I personally question the utility of a Web 2.0 social network phoenixing itself. We have endured a decade+ of originality being buffed out of web products, most now resembling variations of Bootstrap and shadcn in service of dev convenience and getting rich quicker.

Surely in the age of vibe coding, we can afford to take creative risks again, and think of something new.

This kind of makes the Digg team look like a joke. Rebuilding was always going to be hard, but I think this kills any chance of building it up a third time since no one can take it seriously.

> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem.

Am I completely off base or did they use AI to write the post complaining about AI?

I was excited about a Reddit alternative. I signed up months before the public beta. When I tried the public beta the new Digg website turned out to be a terribly bloated and slow NextJS app. Used it once and never again.

That didn't last long. I'm not sure I want to invest my time again if/when they relaunch.

I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.

It's a shame, the intention is still there, if they decide to come back I'll give it another shot. Btw, why are we publishing simple static pages at ~2.84 MB compressed.

I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.

You really gotta wonder how much value the "Digg" brand actually has, because the number of people that remember/care about the site from its original glory days is ever dwindling.

- I am amazed that nobody has managed to come up with some revolutionary patented tech yet that can keep all the bots out or atleast 99% of them

The problem seems to be identify, a real problem, and looks like it will only get worse. Would creating a zero knowledge digital identity service (maybe centralized, maybe decentralized idk), where you prove you're human via your government id, passport, driver license, whatever, and the service can then attest you're a real person? So if I'm Digg, I would ask for some form of OAuth, the system would simply verify that you are in fact a human, and you would go on to create your account, forever verified. This way the identity service only does identity, it does not keep a record of where you are attesting, no logs, nothing, just your identity and basically saying yes/no, no sharing of ids or any other data.

So people would go through one hurdle in life, to get this id, and reuse it for every service.

Is this a worthwhile idea? I know many have tried, so help me poke holes in it.

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.

More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.

Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.

To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.

Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.

The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem.

We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.

Who wants to join me in writing an AGPL "antisocial network", which would be basically a convenient interface over rss-bridge, gnus, and deltachat?

I'm somewhat relieved. I didn't invest much effort into my community, but I had an amazing, top-level name and over 1000 members.

Moderation was really hard. We didn't have AI posters, but there were persistent posters who were extremely annoying (mostly in their post volume and long-windedness) while still following the rules. I was really trying a hands-off approach with moderation, and it seemed to be working for the most part. It's all moot now though.

Make it $1 to register you’ll cut the audience by 90% and 95+ percent of those will be real people. Just a guess but based on some professional experience.

They literally just went public in Jan. Building it back up was going to take years

I don’t understand what kind of shenanigans transpired. But it seems there’s more to in than “bots”

If it truly is bots, maybe a private invite only social network is the way to go.

I stopped using Digg a long long time ago. It just felt too slow to get the news I care about.

I was an avid Slashdot user way back in the day, but the site was basically the same throughout the day, and I wanted faster updates. Digg did this perfectly for a time, but eventually I migrated entirely to Reddit (even before whatever that drama was that caused a big exodus from Digg).

I think Reddit right now is the sweet spot: up to date information, longer-term articles to read, and easy to catch up on things I missed. I was recently pressured to sign up for X (or Twitter or whatever), and I had to turn off all of the notifications since I was constantly spammed with "BREAKING: X RESPONDS TO Y ABOUT Z!!!!"

Right now having Reddit for scrolling and Hackernews for articles+discussion feels like it works for me.

How many more times is it going to be rebuilt before they grasp the obvious bit - it's dead Dave.

>When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

This 1000x times

Remember when Reddit sold to Conde Nast for peanuts because Digg was going to win? :D

From the article, verbatim:

> We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away.

Post title is misleading.

I downloaded the mobile app, and now it's just a login screen that doesn't work

Ah just let it go already, why keep ruining peoples memories...

Soon hacker news will be gone. Way too many bots and chinese/russian trolls.

Cheapest four letter domain on Earth at this point, given the negative value of the business and brand.

Community /books helped me track down a book I've been dying to reread for almost ten years now. Reddit failed the task, so did all other places I turned to. Cheers for that, and rip.

There strategy did not make any sense: only a few pre-approved broad-and-shallow forums about everything instead of trying to attract niche communities from Reddit or even FB Groups.

Is that the whole story? Why isn't reddit overrun by bots then (or are they?), and why wouldn't basic proof-of-work techniques fence against bots? Since they started out just in January, isn't it plausible to assume they didn't meet their target user figures and investors jumped ship?

I can appreciate how "building social is hard" in 2026, but is trying to be social on the internet still a worthy goal? The world has such problems with isolation and distrust that I'm not sure "online" is the solution. If Digg can do something different and help heal the world, more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. That's not a slight to Digg, but more a comment on the slipping mental health of the world.

Damn. I still have faith that what a lot of us that migrated to new Digg envision is possible. Post pandemic Internet has choppier waters than before, but I'm going to try and keep a positive outlook and I look forward to their followup emails.

Thanks for the fun this past year Digg.

> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.

Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.

Much like the vouch system mitchellh is working on for open source contributors, the wider web needs a trust layer that can vouch for a poster's status as human or AI, along with a "quality" score that can travel from site to site.

They fired significant number of people on a Friday.

Subreply.com is working just fine, no AI agents. Spam accounts get deleted.

https://flipso.com might be an alternative.

> We're not giving up. Digg isn't going away.

I think the HN title needs adjusted

"Morbius" of social news aggregators

I am very curious where people who complain about the bots really get to see them.

The only website which became totally useless for me after the general availability of LLMs is OkCupid. It's indeed dead. The rest are fine.

What am I doing differently compared to everyone else?

I'm regularly using: telegram, whatsapp, wechat, hackernews, lobsters, reddit, opennet.ru, vk.com, pornhub, youtube, odysee, libera.chat, arxiv, gmail, github, gitlab, sourcehut, codeberg, thepiratebay, rutracker, Anna's archive, xda-developers.

facebook and twitter became broken for me, but not because of bots, rather because of the "smart feed" ("the algorithm"), which is hiding all posts of my friends and promotes incendiary garbage.

In other words, I am seeing enshittification full-scale, but not the bots.

Wait, digg was back?

Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.

This is why identity verification is going to become mandatory for anyone who wants to participate in these kinds of sites. If you want to blame someone for it, blame humanity. I reluctantly will say that I welcome it if it would bring the dead internet back to life.

Didn't Kevin Rose re-acquire Digg in the last year or so?

Everyone here seems focused on bots, as does the author of the post. The bigger problem (as also stated in the latter half of the post) is straight-forward: there product wasn't very good. Who is asking for digg to return, save for a very (very) tiny community of nostalgic diehards? Digg is irrelevant. That doesn't mean the internet is dead. It just means digg is.

> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.

Hmm...

> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.

What does this even mean? How many metaphors can it mix up in one paragraph? Can't they write a blog post the old fashioned way, with feeling? Imagine reading a corporate blog post about being laid off which the founder couldn't even be bothered to write.

Amazing how close to corporate newspeak chatgpt can get (prompt was the headings of this blog post), it has the same sort of blank say-nothing feeling of this blog post: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_69b4890e54ac819193f221351ea900a7

lol

100% that entire page was written by an LLM. So fucking obvious and I’m so tired of reading the same awful writing style with all these corporate spiel rants. If you don’t care enough to write something yourself, just don’t even bother.

god damn it

i really enjoyed the new digg

That was fast.

Did they have a working business plan?

Step 1: Copy Reddit

Step 2: ?

Step 3: Profit!

Surprised anyone took the revive attempt seriously frankly.

"It may be that the purpose of your existence is merely to serve as a warning to others"

Really annoying, I was starting to use it for a few niche communities instead of Reddit.

If they relaunch, I hope they develop something integrated with the fediverse. I believe the time to build walled gardens is over, plugging with the fediverse might give them a running start to build something g together with the wide fediverse community, maybe something easier to use for non-techies and well moderated.

We will see I guess…

Digg may have a bot problem but Reddit isn't far behind. So many subreddits are full of slop that they've become useless and/ or completely unreliable.

What's an actual viable solution to this kind of thing?

CATPCHAs aren't it. Maybe micro-fees to actually post things would discourage bot posting? I really don't know.

Seems like it's just dead internet all over the place these days.

Registration by snail mail coming soon to most of the Internet?

The title doesn’t capture the mood of page. Maybe:

Dead internet theory confirmed, Digg the latest victim

Whatever happened to MrBabyMan?

Did you know it was back? They are blaming bots.

> We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall. 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.

This. So much This.

So as predicted it wasn't really worth eyeballs or the inevitable forced media coverage 6 months ago.

And I will continue to die on the will die on the hill that Reddit only survived/became "successful" because of the legendary Digg slip up and exodus. Alexis Ohanian still doesn't seem to have any clue that it was right-place-right-time and Kevin Rose seems to have not learned much either. Can we stop giving either anymore credibility? As with any social site it's the user base/community that helps pull thru darkness. And no one was really asking for this.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

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I think the [dupe] is a false alarm in the sense that they just put up a banner saying it is shut down and I think they were starting it up again back then.

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