Digg’s open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam

Comments

• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.

  I love how the SEO industry pretends they’re anything but a caustic cancer, fucking up literally everything.

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  • daychilde@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    SEO is like CGI. What you don’t like is bad CGI. What you don’t notice is good CGI.

    There’s many abuses of SEO and many ways it’s used quite badly. What you don’t notice is when it’s done very well. It’s one reason that these days, a large part of the time the thing you search for is on the first page of results. If you know how to search well, SEO helps you find the things you’re searching for.

    I know people will disagree and probably ridicule, but i’m not talking out my ass. I’ve been on the internet since 1994, and I remember a time when finding things involved sometimes scouring mange many pages of search results. SEO is one reason that’s less common. And I will say that search did indeed reach a peak and has come down a bit from there thanks to AI bullshit and things like Google’s bullshit about returning ads and prioritizing revenue over usefulness. But it’s still better with SEO than it was without.

    Add that to the fact that best practices for SEO has of course changed over the years in ways that have also gotten better for end users in finding content.

    And this is again not a full defense of SEO at all. There are many MANY bad actors out there trying to abuse SEO. But, again, that’s the bad SEO that you notice, not the good SEO that you do not notice. So THAT part of the “SEO industry” is absolutely caustic cancer, sure.

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    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      SEO is one reason that’s less common.

      No it isn’t. SEO is about faming the search engines to place their data ahead of everything whether relevant or not.

      Yahoo was fantastic in it’s time because it was human curated. No SEO could bullshit a person reading the page and categorizing it.

      Google was fantastic at the start because SEO couldn’t game the system. Google was famous in the early days for maintaining quality by keeping their algorithms secret and constantly changing so that SEO couldn’t break their search.

      I’m speaking as someone who was first on the Internet in the 80’s.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No, you’ve got a point… Actually you’re right. To an extent.

      But I’d argue the “bad” part of SEO is just too tempting. It’s clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say “Google search is fine.” Or that discoverability of small genuine services is fine. It’s definitely not; it’s a miracle any business is surviving as a pure web app anymore.

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    • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Fuck that, being back boolean operators!!!

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    • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      :) your interwebers journey began the same yesr I was born. I didnt join in these “dark places” tell about the year 2000.

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  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The majority of new users was bots twenty years ago. How was this news to these chuckleheads?

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    • TheFogan@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I mean it’s worth saying that the new bots are kind of a different league to the old bots.

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    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      But now bots pass captcha and use a real browser. So… it’s not easy removing them.

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    • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      And the majority of posts were mrbabyman.

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  • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Which Futurama movie so I can rewatch?

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens.

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    • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I love that entire series. 🫶

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  • rainwall@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Bill hicks had it right.

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    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Drink Coke.

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• ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Dead internet theory reality

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• drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Nah it sucked. I was on it. It was just lemmy but with less features and with less content. It was dead the moment it started because it did nothing.

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  • Psythik@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I didn’t even know it relaunched. They should have advertised it better. I would have checked it out had I known it was coming back.

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    • Stern@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I paid 5 bucks for a founder badge. I’ve spent more on poorer decisions but that only reduces the sting a little.

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  • Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Right, but isn’t Lemmy itself a bit of a “less features” version of Reddit? I’m not here for features, I’m here to get away from toxic Reddit mods because fuck spez.

    I’ll admit, I might have taken the bet that “reddit but not reddit” would hold at least some interest.

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    • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Kind of but decentralization really makes it up for it. Digg didn’t even have custom communities let alone decentralization.

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• BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  People are naive to think there aren’t also thousands of bots here in the Fediverse.

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  • IcePee@lemmy.beru.co ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I wonder if there is any inherent defence against slop on Lemmy. I guess if an instance doesn’t prune it’s user base of bots, shills and other slop merchants, it could be black listed by other admins of other instances.

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    • rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No, but there is on PieFed.social. Mods and admins have functionality to check any post or comment for LLM-generated text. There’s more stuff too.

      Generally I share my findings with Lemmy admins so they can ban the account.

      I think this is a pretty big threat to the fediverse and social media in general and am taking it very seriously. At the moment the amount of slop is pretty low but we need to be ready for the deluge when it comes.

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    • Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      My instance bans non-consensual AI content and users. Rimu’s tools have made that a lot easier to do, I get an alert when the system detects a possible AI user.

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  • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If there are, theyre not very active

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    • RxBrad@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’ve been noticing a lot more definitely-AI-generated “blogposts” and full-on ads in my Mastodon hashtag feeds.

      It’s a fairly new thing.

      75% of the accounts I’ve had to ban in the roughly-two-years since I spun up my instance have been AI slopfaucets that popped up in the last 2 weeks.

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• Sat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I tried using it and was kinda hopeful, but NSFW was against their TOS which is a no go.

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  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Not on my wholesome christian server /s

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    • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      *Holesome 😏

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    • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      LOL…

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  • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    RIP lemmynsfw.

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    • Sat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s back as an archive and a new instance though.

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  • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Prude and ambicious. Executives these days…

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• FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Their tolerance of racism and bigotry was why I left

  It seemed like every shitty person wanted to make it a far-right safe place

  I’m glad it failed

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    those were the bots

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    • FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I had interactions with a few, and they were very much the typical, stupid, bigoted yank

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  • TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There was once a reddit alternative, namely voat, that started normal and became the most alt right incel qanon thing imaginable. Here’s a dataset with voat data and posts arxiv.org/pdf/2201.05933v1

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  • dadpolice@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It was just reddit with a nicer interface but the exact same awful users. There was absolutely no reason for anyone to use it. 

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  • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    centrists Ideals are a bit more subtle some what a ballance of chaos Haha.

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• rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That reminds me, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

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  • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Straight off to jail with you!

    For those who don’t remember this- en.wikipedia.org/…/AACS_encryption_key_controvers…

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    • Anaeijon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I know about it, but didn’t recognize the code. So I assumed, they encoded some text to make it harder to read. So I tried decoding it.

      Turns out, if you decode this in UTF-16, it turns into a japanese sentence

      契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈

      Which means (according to DeepL)

      The sound of the wind rustling through the trees

      And now I’m confused, why.

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    • orbitz@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Thanks for the link I never remembered the numbers to know if it was for that or not…course been online long enough to know that’s the code (style) shown in comments. Was a lot of comments at one point.

      My only unsureness of the code is cause I’m old and miss newer stuff so had to check to be sure.

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    • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      oh wow that is dumb you are right.

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  • dan@upvote.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    lol I still have a screenshot of Digg from when every article on the home page had this key in it.

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    • eah@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Please share.

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    • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Did they really demand a key be removed like . Ehhh this why you should use cryptographic tokenization, non static securities… . Ehhh lol.

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  • zbyte64@awful.systems ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Apparently you can get that sequence from an AI bot if you ask it “correctly”. But rules for thee and all that.

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  • badgermurphy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Its good that you have enough self-control to hand over your keys when you’ve had too much to drink.

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  • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    breh why is this going around the net… 🥺gahat is this… 🤣

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    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Read up-

      en.wikipedia.org/…/AACS_encryption_key_controvers…

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  • bilb@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Remember the Ron Paul mania on Digg?

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• reksas@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  blaming? shouldnt they have celebrated how much people utilize their beloved slopmachines?

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  • titanicx@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Dude an idiotic thing is one of the biggest sellers for dig was their stupid AI slop notifications that helped tell you what the article was about. I fucking hated that so much.

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    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      they are just hoping to datamine JUST like reddit to profit of its user, but worst. a corporate structure like diggs wouldnt eventually want to use AI so they can sell the data to GOOGLE, or other large AI to train on.

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  • MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Haha … … slop?

    youtu.be/BlVCT3O9g20

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• ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Wasn’t AI part of their “selling” point?

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  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If it was, it was a bad stratagy.

    AI is the only industry that is somehow nonprofitable, without customers, and yet also propping up the economy right now.

    Just waiting for this stupid bubble to pop

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    • ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I mean, reddit only got big because Digg made some very stupid moves before, so … pretty on brand

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  • silentjohn@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    “we’re reddit, but with AI!”

    I noped so hard away from digg

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    • TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Doesn’t reddit already have ai?

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  • garretble@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Right? Weren’t they making some AI podcast or something as well?

    None of that sounded good.

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• swizzlestick@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Honestly, the first rebirth as a run-of-the-mill article aggregator was better. A lot of it I’d have already seen elsewhere, but occasionally it’d have something interesting that I missed.

  Whatever they do, they’ll still be riding the name of a very dead horse.

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  • Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Image

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    • swizzlestick@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Basically this, yes haha

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• ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There were entire communities popping up dedicated to SEO and advertising. A lot of the spam would happen during the US night time, so they’d have to wake up every morning to sweeping away all the crap. Really curious on how they intend to handle the bots.

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  • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I was curious how they planned to monetize, but some questions are pointless to ask - all you’ll get are the responses prepared for maximal PR value…

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    • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I think I had read somewhere that they would eventually have ads, but that may have just been member speculation.

      Maybe if they go down the Apollo route they could have some sub tiers, but we’ll see.

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• Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  well duh, reddit is infested by AI BOT/bot spammers for a while to spread propaganda or do things like promote links of OF, or other businesses. thats the other reason why they are very ban heavy as of late.

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  • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Hey now let’s be fair, not all of it is AI propaganda. Some of it is shrimp Jesus. Mind you that also started as propaganda but it’s since devolved into something so much more fascinating, namely because how the fuck do you even get to shrimp Jesus.

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• devolution@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Man. I liked Digg. Not as much as Lemmy, but I liked it.

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  • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I liked Digg right up until they folded like a cheap suit over the HD DVD decryption key.

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• Evotech@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  These things need to grow from grassroots.

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• etherphon@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  One of the complaints I had about the place was how AI positive it was, I guess that explains it.

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• YesButActuallyMaybe@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  They should bring back google circles

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Unironically. But only on the condition they bring back Google from 2011

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• XLE@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ladies and gentlemen, this is democracy democratization manifest.

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• nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  damn you think they would have just used cloud flare

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• lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Didn’t you have to buy an account at Digg? If so, were the bots buying the accounts? And if so, who was buying them?

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• IckabodKobain@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  OH NO! But how? They resurrected Kevin Rose for this! /s

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• kinkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I think I had blocked maybe one or two of the default communities very early on, and after that I hadn’t noticed any spam. I used the app at least once a day since the open beta started. Whatever they were doing to combat the bots appeared to be working. It’s a huge shame they thought otherwise and shut down.

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• Hiro8811@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ah man, I applies for the beta months ago but never gotten a response. For those who manages to enter how was it? Was it a Lemmy/reddiy style or more like Instagram/Facebook.

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• MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Welp I feel jumped. Welcome and nice to meet you all I guess.

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• MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  hmm?

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• wabafee@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  They missed an opportunity there. Could have pivot something similar to moltbook.

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• MinoriMirariRProductions@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  haha what have a i walked into. 🤭 …

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• fubarx@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  MySpace reboot vs Spotify.

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• AgentBoom@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I tried it and liked it a bit. The problem for me was that it was very empty: posts about the same article had more comments in Lemmy than Digg. It also lacked many features that even Lemmy has. And, since everyone was able to create 2 communities, there were more communities than users. Most of them were created and forgotten, while others tried to get bigger with only 1 user posting everyday. The biggest/mainstream communities had less than 100k users each one. After some days, I joined Lemmy and never looked back.

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• BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  They’re doing it wrong. Use crypto for login and charge user for every single resource used. Problem solved

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