I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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Not on my wholesome christian server /s
Their tolerance of racism and bigotry was why I left
It seemed like every shitty person wanted to make it a far-right safe place
I'm glad it failed
Dead internet ~~theory~~ reality
When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.
I love how the SEO industry pretends they’re anything but a caustic cancer leeching off literally everything.
“Oh, but discoverability of small business!” Yeah… I’d punch you if I saw you, SEO jerks. The Futurama movie was right.
SEO is like CGI. What you don't like is bad CGI. What you don't notice is good CGI.
There's many abuses of SEO and many ways it's used quite badly. What you don't notice is when it's done very well. It's one reason that these days, a large part of the time the thing you search for is on the first page of results. If you know how to search well, SEO helps you find the things you're searching for.
I know people will disagree and probably ridicule, but i'm not talking out my ass. I've been on the internet since 1994, and I remember a time when finding things involved sometimes scouring mange many pages of search results. SEO is one reason that's less common. And I will say that search did indeed reach a peak and has come down a bit from there thanks to AI bullshit and things like Google's bullshit about returning ads and prioritizing revenue over usefulness. But it's still better with SEO than it was without.
Add that to the fact that best practices for SEO has of course changed over the years in ways that have also gotten better for end users in finding content.
And this is again not a full defense of SEO at all. There are many MANY bad actors out there trying to abuse SEO. But, again, that's the bad SEO that you notice, not the good SEO that you do not notice. So THAT part of the "SEO industry" is absolutely caustic cancer, sure.
SEO is one reason that's less common.
No it isn't. SEO is about gaming the search engines to place their data ahead of everything whether relevant or not.
Yahoo was fantastic in it's time because it was human curated. No SEO could bullshit a person reading the page and categorizing it.
Google was fantastic at the start because SEO couldn't game the system. Google was famous in the early days for maintaining quality by keeping their algorithms secret and constantly changing so that SEO couldn't break their search.
I'm speaking as someone who was first on the Internet in the 80's.
The majority of "new users" was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?
I mean it's worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.
Yeah, so it REALLY SHOULDN'T BE A SURPRISE
But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.
And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.
People are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.
The only thing keeping the bot population low here is that there just aren't enough people here to be worth it yet. If the Fediverse grows they'll come in greater numbers.
According to your Reddit history, you're a huge fan of building these bots... Or are you more of a "slop for thee but not for me" guy?
For someone who likes digging around in my Reddit history you'd think you'd be able to find something that was actually relevant to the topic at hand. That was a comment about the uses of agentic coding tools for making custom applications, not about building bots.
Yeah, well, I judge you for participating in all those scat and cuck subreddits.
DISCLAIMER: This is a joke. I haven't stalked them on reddit. Just being silly and want that to be clear. :)
Stop being a weirdo or go start a tech company so your behaviour is at least expected.
I wonder if there is any inherent defence against slop on Lemmy. I guess if an instance doesn't prune it's user base of bots, shills and other slop merchants, it could be black listed by other admins of other instances.
No, but there is on PieFed.social. Mods and admins have functionality to check any post or comment for LLM-generated text. There's more stuff too.
Generally I share my findings with Lemmy admins so they can ban the account.
I think this is a pretty big threat to the fediverse and social media in general and am taking it very seriously. At the moment the amount of slop is pretty low but we need to be ready for the deluge when it comes.
One of the complaints I had about the place was how AI positive it was, I guess that explains it.
Wasn't AI part of their "selling" point?
If it was, it was a bad stratagy.
AI is the only industry that is somehow nonprofitable, without customers, and yet also propping up the economy right now.
Just waiting for this stupid bubble to pop
I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so ... pretty on brand
Reddit was doing fine before the influx from Digg. That's one of the reasons people migrated to reddit in the first place - because it was already viable. That said, it was an influx of users, for sure.
Man. I liked Digg. Not as much as Lemmy, but I liked it.
There were entire communities popping up dedicated to SEO and advertising. A lot of the spam would happen during the US night time, so they’d have to wake up every morning to sweeping away all the crap. Really curious on how they intend to handle the bots.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is ~~democracy~~ democratization manifest.
Ah man, I applied for the beta months ago but never gotten a response. For those who manages to enter how was it? Was it a Lemmy/Redit style or more like Instagram/Facebook.
I found it boring and mostly dead. Most links had a dozen comments at most, almost all of them very short and very few of them thoughtful at all.
It was basically exactly Reddit but with two noticeable AI features that were easy to ignore:
- An AI-generated summary of popular posts on the homepage
- Underneath every link post to an article was an AI summary, but on the app it was a collapsible section so collapsing it in one post would keep it collapsed for all.
I found the second one slightly handy, though, because when I was on Reddit I fell into the bad habit of posting after just reading headlines. With the AI summaries I could get more context and it often lead me to opening more articles than I would have without it.
It was okay during closed beta, more dead than here, but similar.
I think I had blocked maybe one or two of the default communities very early on, and after that I hadn’t noticed any spam. I used the app at least once a day since the open beta started. Whatever they were doing to combat the bots appeared to be working. It’s a huge shame they thought otherwise and shut down.
Not noticing it doesn't mean it's not there.
Isn’t that the best we can ask for nowadays though?
Don't lower your bar.
I didn’t notice the spam and I was quite happy using the new Digg, so I don’t exactly know what you think I should have been doing differently.
To reiterate, my points are:
- You just didn't notice the bots
- You should always advocate for less slop
How was it? Did it feel lively?
I just checked the front page a couple of times out of curiosity, but I never bothered really checking it out too much. I was always surprised how dead it looked from the outside, but that might have been the wrong impression.
Edit: As an illustration, the last snapshot of Digg on internet archive a couple of days ago shows a front page where almost all posts had less than 30 upvotes, and the only two posts breaking above 50 are tech nostalgia posts about a Windows 98 screensaver (105 upvotes, 9 comments) and some young woman reviewing instagram 15 years ago (59 upvotes, 6 comments). Fitting for a platform from the past, worrying if they wanted to be part of the future.
In terms of activity, Digg thus never seemed to be able to keep up with more famous and well-funded competitors such as eviltoast.org. Never mind that a lot of the users seemed to have been trolls upset about being banned by Reddit. SEO is probably part of the problem, but it seems unlikely to be the full story. I think their problem is that it never took off.
That's interesting and I missed that post, thanks!
It can be easy to lose track of how successful the fediverse already is, as the number of users will remain negligible compared to mainstream platforms for a really long time and possibly forever. Seeing how it easily outperforms a major player like Digg trying to re-establish themselves puts things into perspective.
Maybe they'll relaunch as a piefed instance, lol
It was active enough that there was new content every day. Checking multiple times a day I’d see the same stuff but I saw that as a positive that kept me from wasting too much time.
Did it have niche communities that had successfully moved over, but that were not featured on the front page?
Sorry if it's a stupid question, I just always had the impression I didn't understand what I was looking at and now it's gone and I'm genuinely curious.
My community is a niche one Albumartworksheaven. It took me a month to have more followers on digg than here in 6 months. My community was featured twice
Oooh, neat community! Joined!
I guess that's one benefit of a smaller site - if you put down the effort in it, it stands out more. But community discovery is absolutely a challenge.
It had some, yeah. Maybe not “successfully moved” per-say but they were there. I never really got a chance to dig into them very much but I was a member of the /spongebob community and it had some sincere activity from people who wanted to grow it into something fun and engaging.
Didn't spend a lot of time there but my experience was similar. Didn't notice any spam, but activity was sparse.