The Return of Digg, a Star of an Earlier Internet Era

Reddit’s Trajectory and “What Could Have Been”

• Commenters reflect on Reddit’s current ~$27B valuation versus its early low-price sale and years as an under-resourced Condé Nast property.
• There’s confusion over how such a massive site with user-generated, highly cacheable content can still be unprofitable.
• Some see later growth as fueled by “investor pandering” and user-hostile changes rather than genuine improvement.

Enshittification and User-Hostile Moves

• Many frame the evolution of big platforms as classic “enshittification”: prioritize users, then business customers, then extract value for the platform itself.
• Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Fark, and Gawker are all cited as case studies in redesigns and product decisions that alienated core users.
• There’s a sense that, today, user-hostile moves have less impact because alternatives are weaker and mainstream users care less about control or openness.

Digg’s Fall vs Reddit’s Changes

• People remember Digg v4 as a catastrophic, structural change: removal of downvotes, upcoming pages, user curation, RSS/third-party breakage, and dominance of official publisher feeds.
• By contrast, Reddit’s big shifts (new UI, killing third-party apps) are seen as painful but mostly “just a reskin”; the core interaction model survived, so mass exodus never fully happened.

Current Reddit: Bots, Moderation, and Culture Shift

• Many describe Reddit today as “dead internet”: ragebait, political brigading, AI-written posts, pervasive bots, and hollow-feeling comment threads.
• Moderation is viewed as fragmented and highly partisan across all sides; API changes reportedly weakened mod tooling and flooded subs with spam and bad actors.
• Old.reddit is cherished; users fear it will eventually be killed, which for many would end their use of Reddit.

Alternatives and Fragmentation

• Lemmy is mentioned as a promising but politically skewed, still-small alternative.
• Discord is widely used but criticized as a poor replacement for forums due to ephemerality and poor searchability.
• Some see a broader move to private communities and decentralized protocols as the real “future,” rather than any new centralized platform.

Reaction to the New Digg Revival

• Nostalgia for early Digg and Diggnation is strong, but expectations are low.
• AI-heavy pitches (e.g., “translate threads into Klingon,” AI moderation) are seen as buzzword-driven with little real moat, and risk removing the human element that made old communities compelling.
• Some hope Digg could become a clean link-centric alternative to Reddit’s current content mix; others think the ship has sailed and this is just another VC-flavored content honeypot.