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[–] 121 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Digg went sideways because of "power users," among other things.

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  • [–] 63 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

    Eh. There's more than one kind of poweruser. The "people who are too online" are very different from the "accounts that exist to leverage social media for advertisement".

    Social media thrives on the whale users who are churning out content and hungry for engagement. It goes to shit when you've got your front page clogged with Native Ads and other shameless marketing gimmicks.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Digg's powerusers were often revealed to be selling their influence.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Many of these accounts weren't just freelancers. They were set up by marketing agencies, often with the explicit support of the social media hosting firm.

    Like, its in the fucking business model to sell artificial engagement and promotion.

    Might not even be a bad business model per say, if the promoted material wasn't so consistently slop.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    "churning out content" aka reposting old memes

    The Internet, the fediverse included, seems like it's mostly just different buckets all containing the slop.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think we are in a much different time than the Digg days. Reddit has much more power over their users than Digg ever did. If you leave Reddit, you are leaving all your niche communities and the boatload of user created content.

    I left as an active user, but if I want to see conversations about the latest episode of whatever show I’m watching, there is always an active discussion on Reddit. Or if I’m looking for some BIFL suggestions, I almost always end up on a Reddit thread from 2 years ago with exactly what I was looking for and 8 different opinions.

    I am hopeful that all this stuff will slowly make its way to Lemmy, but until then, Reddit is in no danger of losing its user base.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    a lot of people aren't old enough to remember that when the digg exodus happened, reddit didn't even have subreddits yet. it was just links on one page, and we built our little subculture in the comments of each thread. that's why there is such a culture of commenting before reading the article (if at all) — it used to be a big, disorganized blob of chatty nonsense, much like Fark or MetaFilter were at the time too.

    reddit is a lovely example of how tech companies from 1995 to 2020 fell into success and figured out what their product does later down the line. to quote homer simpson when asked what his tech company does, "we're a website that sells computers.... or.... a computer that sells websites, I haven't decided yet."

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    While this is true, it's funny to watch them wrestle with the exact same problems right now. Literally on the front page of new Digg right now is converstions about fragmenting the user-base with blocks/bans, and how to establish friend groups.

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