Digg Launches Its New Reddit Rival To the Public (techcrunch.com) 44
Digg is officially back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. "Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests," reports TechCrunch. "There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or 'digg') the site's content." From the report: [T]he rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian's firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding. They're betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today's social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they're not taken over by AI bots posing as people.
"We obviously don't want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process," said Rose in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the 'know your customer' verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone's identity. Instead of simply offering verification checkmarks to designate trust, Digg will try out new technologies, like using zero-knowledge proofs (cryptographic methods that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify the people using its platform. It could also do other things, like require that people who join a product-focused community verify they actually own or use the product being discussed there.
As an example, a community for Oura ring owners could verify that everyone who posts has proven they own one of the smart rings. Plus, Rose suggests Digg could use signals acquired from mobile devices to help verify members -- for instance, the app could identify when Digg users attended a meetup in the same location. "I don't think there's going to be any one silver bullet here," said Rose. "It's just going to be us saying ... here's a platter of things that you can add together to create trust."
"We obviously don't want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process," said Rose in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the 'know your customer' verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone's identity. Instead of simply offering verification checkmarks to designate trust, Digg will try out new technologies, like using zero-knowledge proofs (cryptographic methods that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify the people using its platform. It could also do other things, like require that people who join a product-focused community verify they actually own or use the product being discussed there.
As an example, a community for Oura ring owners could verify that everyone who posts has proven they own one of the smart rings. Plus, Rose suggests Digg could use signals acquired from mobile devices to help verify members -- for instance, the app could identify when Digg users attended a meetup in the same location. "I don't think there's going to be any one silver bullet here," said Rose. "It's just going to be us saying ... here's a platter of things that you can add together to create trust."
New Gold Rush (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like a great opportunity to get in at the ground floor and start some amazing communities so you can sell them to scammers later.
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I sold a subreddit to a sex toy manufacturer
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Where can I apply to be a moderator dictator? (Score:2, Insightful)
Setting my own rules, booting people off the forum who I don't like, deleting posts like I'm the great dictator of the internetz. /R/MidgetPorn and /R/KeyboardTricksForPeopleWithNoHands.
Unfortunately, all dictator positions at Reddit were already taken besides maybe
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You can try at the house plant community...
https://digg.com/house-plants/... [digg.com]
Re: Where can I apply to be a moderator dictator? (Score:2)
There were mods on bulletin boards
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Are moderators the real reason why social media is toxic? Anyone remember back before there were mods (on bulletin boards, not irc wich started the banning culture) and the internet was much more fun?
Is it fair that I only get two posts a day here now, while tools like gweihir get to post their smelly opinions as much as they want?
Usenet was way more lethal than any bulletin board. Funny as hell at its heights, if you could take the flames, but absolutely brutal if you were delicate in any way.
I kinda miss that wild west vibe sometimes. Now everything's so sanitized. Even the Nazi dumbasses around here pale in comparison to the truly gifted rage baiters of the glory days of usenet.
Cool but it's already filled with.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Platform decay has accelerated so much that Digg had already started decomposing during the closed beta. It has absolutely nothing to offer a user base. The game theory is all wrong and the only possible way for them to create the metrics they need to make this platform profitable is to fill it with fake accounts.
6 months from now it'll either be dead or entirely filled with bots.
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And that kinda sucks. I used to play WoW with the cohost and was an original D
Tried it... (Score:2)
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You clearly didn't try it, because not only does the site appear to be fully functional without an app, I couldn't even *find* any reference to an app on the site. I had to google it to figure out if they even had an app.
Re: Tried it... (Score:3, Informative)
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Fair enough, I only tried it on desktop.
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Check out https://lemmy.world/ [lemmy.world] as a reddit alternative. It's basically open fediverse reddit. It's not overrun by bots and advertising, the community is small.
Re: Tried it... (Score:2)
I hate logins like this (Score:2)
It wants your email, and lets you set a username.
But it doesn't give you a password.
Now when you want to login- or really, as these things go, every fucking time- you get to go to your email and dig out their confirmation. It behaves like a site to which you have forgotten your password each and every time. Total ass.
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Hopefully they'll add a PIN so we can have two things to try and memorise.
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Didn't try it (too much AI for my taste), but I expect it so set a cookie, so you aren't asked to login every single visit.
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Now when you want to login- or really, as these things go, every fucking time- you get to go to your email and dig out their confirmation. It behaves like a site to which you have forgotten your password each and every time. Total ass.
Another unfortunate trend these days. Email link (or even fucking SMS code) as the only means of login. Far less convenient for the user, presumably just a means of keeping their contact database updated to maximize the value when they sell it to spammers.
Speaking of which...
Plus, Rose suggests Digg could use signals acquired from mobile devices to help verify members -- for instance, the app could identify when Digg users attended a meetup in the same location.
And at what point will it start selling th
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I don't think that's too bad. In particular you are spared of the "We sent you a code to verify your login" e-mails that make you check your e-mails in addition to having to type a password. And security-wise the site cannot leak your password, the best a hacker can get is your username and e-mail address.
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Perhaps I keep my email client on my phone, but would like to log into Digg on my computer. Or perhaps I'd like to be the judge of whether or not I want to open a second browser tab, or fetch a different device, to complete my login to a silly antisocial-media site or burger-rewards app.
Salt and hash your passwords. Offer 2FA for those who want it, preferably methods that aren't known to be fundamentally broken (e.g. SMS). Not rocket surgery.
I'd like to believe that this trend is a liability dodge -- "we
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A liability doge is "We hash and salt passwords". OAuth, OpenID, or token via E-Mail (which have all the same security model) are the actually safe technical solutions. If you never store credentials, they cannot be hacked.
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Meh, all that does is move the risk somewhere else. Instead of Digg or Pornhub having my credentials, now Google or Faceplant has them and okays my login, and as an added bonus gets to see where I'm logging in.
Passkey/FIDO2 stuff might be a viable, decentralized solution if everyone implements it.
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FIDO / Webauthn is the safest solution. The problem is, that it involves something you can lose. I think most people are more comfortable with passwords because they can remember them, they can write them down, they can share them. And other than a physical key and lock, you cannot even have someone break the website's "lock" when you lose the physical FIDO key.
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Agreed. I use it wherever it's available, and I can customize the security model to fit my perceived need on a per-token basis, storing unimportant ones in a password manager, hardware key for more sensitive stuff.
Management of these credentials is still sort of a shitshow, unfortunately. Seems the various platforms for storing them (and a lot of the sites implementing them) can't decide whether they should be shareable across devices or you should create a separate one per-device. And then there's how
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That's the flip side. Companies know that people may lose the devices and implement password reset procedures with less safety than WebAuthn. So your login is completely secure, but an attacker can guess your dog's name on the account recovery page and then add another security key to your account.
doesn't look like digg (Score:4, Informative)
this feels like a facebook newsfeed. old reddit cloned old digg. i can't stand new reddit, so i will continue to use old reddit while it still exists
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Slashdot limiting karma to 50 was an extremely good move.
Looks like low-information trash (Score:2)
Perfect for the current generations.
Looking forward to .. (Score:3)
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being ignored by everyone is not "shadowbanned"
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Shadow banned is when you can't see any recent posts when not logged in. Including certain dialogs with other parties. It only happens after I get traction on the site. I guess you can't violate church dogma or something
Disappointed to see a Reddit Clone (Score:2)
I don't know what to call it, but the iteration of Digg before this one was nice: a simple, curated front page of interesting (sometimes clickbait-y) articles on a range of topics.
I was hoping it'd be something similar when re-launched. I don't see what value-adding differentiator a Reddit clone brings to the internet.
Kevin Rose and who? (Score:2)
I mean, if I was looking for an alternative to Reddit, I sure as fuck wouldn't want it to be co-owned by one of the co-founders of Reddit.
Digg (Score:2)
Timeouts (Score:2)
ActivityPub (Score:2)