Digg: Back from the Dead

It appears that Digg is indeed back from the dead! Or at least it entered public beta a couple of days ago. I even made an account on it yesterday. Not because I have high hopes for it (though you never know), but more so through curiosity and a tiny bit of nostalgia.

For those of you who aren't aware, Digg was a hugely popular site in the mid 2000's. It actually felt quite revolutionary at the time and was a site I visited regularly. Then it collapsed in 2010 after a period of decline, much of which was due to an overhaul of the site's design and features (though the culture had also turned sour). The changes weren't popular at all and led to many abandoning the site for pastures new.

Somebody posted a screenshot of the original Digg site on tne new Digg site (meta much?), which I duly captured for your eyes below:

Reddit sprang up in August of 2010 and there was a mass migration from Digg. The rest, as they say, is history. Digg sold for a mere $500,000 in 2012, despite having once been valued at $175 million. Meanwhile, Reddit continued to grow in popularity, to become the absolute behemoth that it is today.

Of course, it's well known for being somewhat of a cesspool these days. I'm a regular user of Reddit myself, but I avoid the vast majority of toxicity by sticking only to the areas I'm interested in (you won't find a toxic culture in r/fountainpens or r/mindovermagic for example).

Reddit does have numerous other problems aside from the rotting culture. The CEO's have had some controversy and the heavy monetisation of data definitely isn't popular. There was a very small exodus to Lemmy (a decentralised, federated alternative to Reddit) a couple of years ago when they upset the user base, including moderators, by charging the developers of third party clients for API access. Lemmy never really took off in huge enough numbers, but I do think if the right alternative comes along a lot of people will leave.

The new owners of Digg are Kevin Rose (the original founder of Digg) and Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit). Have we now come full circle and everyone will join Digg in droves? Somehow I doubt it, but we'll see. It's early days and much will depend upon how Digg develops (it's pretty feature light right now for a start).

Whatever happens, I'll be watching with interest!