Gems is deceptively named but it's essentially just for posting interesting things that gets discussions or Diggs, or being early to post something. It has nothing to do with crypto etc.

Source: I've been using the app since the alpha started.

I'm on the old style Reddit and it hasn't really changed much for years. I imagine they are wary of mucking it up after knowing what it did to Digg.

At this point I think I’m giving up on the migration. The critical window is over. Most of the curious people who made reddit what it was 15 years ago are probably too bogged down with life to make the next replacement good today. Younger people have been brought up on ad based social media and have no concept of what a healthy forum environment ought to be like and therefore lack the cultural context to be good contributors that we took for granted in the 2000s and early 2010s. Instead many want to be useful mouth pieces for a brand endorsement. It is just such a different internet today than just 10 years ago.

As someone who was very active on Digg, it failed because of a massive all-at-once redesign (Digg v4) that made it unrecognizable to those who considered it home. It’s basically the go-to case study in how not to do an overhaul.

I’m not sure that Reddit doing the same thing is a big a problem as random acts of admin overreach and the looming threat of old Reddit going away. The moment that happens, I’m done with the service. New Reddit is a prime example of enshittification.

Slashdot deserves a honorary mention under not doing what the users want.

Isn't this New New Digg? Or maybe New New New Digg?

I think this is basically misguided. Digg failed because their commenter UX was clunky. It tried to split the baby between linear and tree comments and just ended up being a mess. Reddit had been slowly stealing traffic from Digg for years by the time of the "rebellion".

In the end, Reddit became many times larger than Digg ever was. The biggest problem with displacing Reddit as such is that currently most of the users hate most of the users; consequently there is no reason that people leaving Reddit would want to converge on a single alternative.

In some ways, Reddit has already survived its own replacement. The workflow for getting involved with a video game community is to ask on Reddit which Discord you should join. In this case Discord plays the role of a parasitoid wasp.

It hangs on as a less reactionary NextDoor and a gathering place for semi-serious discussion of niche topics (/r/MedicalPhysics, for example). It also hosts some political stuff, but nobody wants to invite Reddit's political elements to their new community.

> "Gems" you can earn

omg, here we go again

[flagged]

Request the desktop site, mobile version (non-app is WIP). Desktop version mostly works on mobile, some small issues with achievement display.

Not sure what you are seeing but it tells me it’s in invite only beta.

This doesn't make sense, since it's advertisers who are the ones putting pressure on sites like Twitter to stop spreading extremist content.

The problem is that humans are extremely willing to enter echo chambers where they are told they are right all the time. That's what they will do by default. So if you optimize for engagement, they will radicalize themselves very quickly. If you figure out how to power a social network without ads, you will get something a hundred times worse than Facebook, because there will be no pressure to moderate content at all.

Im not sure that advertising specifically is the issue.

I think a lot of the ills of social media are ills of the medium itself... once it reaches "everyone scale," game theory maturity and whatnot.

Anyway the way past it is probably to go past it... and onto the next medium. Back is rarely an available option.

On that note... its curious that Digg now describes itself as a "community platform," not a social network. Ironic, considering they bought the name "digg."

Speaks to the "late stage social media" meme.

Hackernews remains mostly ok by focusing on a niche that’s always been easy on the Internet for obvious reasons: tech. Once it strays even one step away, like the intersection of tech and policy, or the intersections of science and humanities, guaranteed you will get some totally ridiculous takes.

And, HN can only not-rely on advertising because it exists as a sort of funny pseudo-advertisement thing for some startup incubator.

Let's just start shifting the overton window: let's make all paid advertisement illegal y'all.

I've thought about how I'd build one and I keep landing on content based ads, give me ads that target page content. You are already interested in the content you see, so why not. Generic "show everyone you can" ads should also be fine, and slightly discounted. But I do wonder if it would even be enough to keep the lights on.

HN has advertising too. I don’t claim it’s the same, but let’s be accurate.

Digg was more of a news aggregator than “social media” which I see as user generated posts + profile interactions. As far as I remember Digg didn’t have followers or any major original content or influencers.

I do think you are right about the rest as it applies to Twitter and Facebook.

> I think hacker news manages to be ok since it doesn’t rely on advertising which makes it much more palatable.

It's also worth considering that you could just be part of the right demographic that finds it palatable. I know in certain circles the HN groupthink on women's issues for example are seen as a meme.

Hacker news is not an app for cheap entertainment. Social media is. Hacker news is predominantly used by professionals, entrepreneurs, and/or tech interested/adjacent people. Social media isn't. Internet access and historical self selecting of people who sought out online spaces for interaction/community (it was not the norm, nor as acceptable, in fact often considered weird) acted as a gatekeeper that previously skewed early social media to have a different user base than today.

I think algorithmically curated social media feeds should be regulated the way we do tobacco. Massive education campaigns and obnoxious labeling laws so that everyone and their dog knows it's toxic. Maybe take away their safe harbor while we're at it. The algorithm is a form of editorial control after all, so it can no longer be argued that these sites simply function as a "public square".

predates the iphone!

I was an early refugee from Digg, been on reddit for 17 years now.

Aggressive curation of subreddits did help, but I fear the decent subreddits are slowly dying out. The modern iteration of site (It's more of an app these days) appears to attract the wrong type of users for the healthy conversations that I enjoy.

I am surprised how long reddit lasted, but I get the feeling it might not hold on to me for much longer.

> Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.

This is true of all social media platforms. People who have all day to post/reply and figure out how to game the system will always dominate the discussion. This is also why online propaganda works so well, it is literally their day job. People who have a life will always be at a major disadvantage. In some ways Reddit is worse off because those people also become moderators. The only thing that saves it is the ability for users to flee a subreddit if the moderator becomes a tyrant and start a parallel subreddit with hopefully more sane moderation.

The default subreddits are mostly a writeoff at this point. Terminally online people latched on to them and are never letting go. Or they were useless from the start like AITA.

Same here. I (proudly) had my account there banned for posting the AACS key.

Went to reddit and was not unhappy there for many years, but, aside from some targeted subreddits (/r/beagle!) I rarely spend any time on reddit anymore. The new reddit changes just feel user-hostile and they are aggressively pushing users away from old.reddit.com, it feels like a matter of time before they announce that they are killing old reddit.

Perhaps we are getting old but I also find happiness is inversely proportional to my time spent on social media.

> I think overall I'm just less enthusiastic about the internet...

Some of that is a function of age I am sure. When you are young, sites like reddit and digg hold promises of some new and interesting unknown unknown. As you get older, the amount of unknown unknowns fall off a cliff and you are just left with the known knowns and known unknowns... occasionally you are once again interested in the known unknowns, but you certainly didn't need a website to remind you they existed. The novelty is gone.

Funny, it’s actually after I come back from a week of backpacking that my “internet quality time” is highest - there’s a bunch of new, meaningful content for me to go through.

After a few hours of catching up tho, that’s when my internet usage devolves to reading pointless faff and refreshing my timelines in a loop.

I remember Reddit before Digg users invaded it. Reddit used to be good. Digg refugees fucked it up nearly overnight. The comment sections quickly became garbage. It was like a bunch of teenagers decided to take over Reddit.

Agreed. Throwaway account because I’m an internet nomad and I don’t have a long term account here (they get banned anyway).

Don’t forget Digg’s demise wasn’t just the revamp, it’s that most of the front page was dominated by a few people who were literally posting all the damn time.

It’s amusing to see the usual HN flex with smug superiority but both Reddit and 4chan even to this today demolish HN in every (good and bad) criteria. Moderation here has stifled honest discussion in favor of safe-harbor, bullshit talking points.

But it’s all for lulz.

Every time someone mentions reddit 14 years ago all I can think about are all the admins that allowed r/jailbait on the front page. I honestly wouldn't tell people you used it then

its_happening.gif

Sounds kinda like StumbleUpon with comments. I'm not sure I'd like to host unmoderated content on my site, but I do miss the original StumbleUpon experience. Reading through the history of what happened to StumbleUpon in the 2010s is sad, and indicates that this idea may not actually be viable (or maybe was ahead of its time, or maybe wasn't done right).

It essentially needs to be a p2p/dht list of disconnected hosts who all provide communities that can be overlaid. You dont want one comment section. Then through filters you can enable or disable which communities you want to see.

It also should be a protocol that lets the client decide how to render the organization of comments and the editor.

So Disqus? (I'm not dismissing you. I like Disqus)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus

That's what Reddit did originally too. I wouldn't be too surprised if they just use AI to do it now.

A community driven link aggregator site. Think of a cross between Reddit and a forum. It was one of the biggest sites/communities in the 2000s.

It's where Reddit's userbase came from but it isn't exactly like reddit. It was more like HN until they ruined it to make the investors happy and instead investors got their investment killed in one day.

it's the missing link between slashdot and reddit.

The buzzwords are news aggregator, or social bookmarking.

Kind of HN for the masses. I don't remember if there were comments but one could vote links up or down.

Reddit before reddit.

HN is moderated…

I really like the approach to moderation and algorithms in ATProto

tl;dr users get choice, anyone can make them, they plug-n-play into any of the atproto apps

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684027

Nah it was all Obama, once he got elected they shut everything down. Same thing now, the new digg is all anti-maga. It doesn't matter to me either way, but politics polarizes people. That's why I rarely come here or post here.

The struggle isn't people remembering Digg badly, it's people not remembering Digg at all.

The original Digg was shut down around 2012 (though really it died in 2010). The domain was sold off and the new owners replaced it with something that might have looked like Digg at first glance, but it was entirely relying on editors to select posts... Basically, it was a curated blog themed to look like a social media site.

That version of Digg limped along for almost twice as long as the original Digg, until a few months back when the domain was sold to Keven Rose (one of the original Digg founders) and Alexis Ohanian (one of reddit's co-founders).

Beta users got 2 invites when it just went live. Not sure if they have a date planned for new users yet.

You forgot Fark! Except that was unironic brainrot and everybody knew what it was. Unlike now, where critical thinking went out the window and everybody takes things at face value.

Wow, I was trying to remember his username, but I wasn't even getting close. Quite impressive haha.

Metafilter is still around and still great content!

IMO Slashdot lost out due to being a fairly focused site and more generalist sites with little focused areas won out, and I'm not sure Slashdot's focus when it was popular would have that big an audience anyway.