Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.

>> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country.

Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.

The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.

Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.

The bot problem cannot be solved. Even if you strongly authenticate, people are letting bots act on their behalf (moltbook is a great example of this) and what's to stop people doing that in the future. Build your identity and reputation autonomously with the benefits that come with that.

This happens now on Onlyfans too. Content creators hire agencies which in the best case outsource chatting to "customers" to armies of cheap labour in Asia, and the worst case use bots.

The dead internet theory [1] is probably not just a theory anymore. HN recently made a policy to not allow AI posting and posters, but do you honestly think that's going to work? I would place a bet that a top HN poster within the next year is outed as using AI for posting on their behalf.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

With AI running rampant, it seems security through obscurity is basically the best thing we have. Everyone knows reddit, facebook, xitter, etc so any clown can and does have bots running loose. HN is "obscure" in that most normies don't know about this place, and so it's relatively safe from the floods of spam. But I think it's just a matter of time until non-tech people start looking for those few bastions of human comments online, come across this place, and a great flood begins and it'll never be undone. After that, I guess it'll be a rise of invite-only forums like we had in the early 2000s all over again.

> Though it’ll be interesting to see what happens to ChatGPT and the like once the amount of quality content for them to consume slows to a trickle.

Creative loop moves inside the agentic chat room, where we do learning, work, art, research, leisure, planning, and other activities. Already OpenAI is close to 1B users and puts multiple trillion tokens per day into our heads, while we put our own tokens into their logs. An experience flywheel or extended cognition wheel of planetary size. LLMs can reflect and detect which of their responses compound better in downstream activities and derive RLHF-RLVR signalling from all our interactions. One good thing is that a chat room is less about posing than a forum, but LLMs have taken to sycophancy so they are not immune, just easier to deal with than forums. And you can more easily find another LLM than a replacement speciality forum.

The future is human curated content. Provide the same experience people get today but without the noise. Give them just the good stuff and don't let just anyone make a post. A book has an author, a movie has a director, maybe websites can have webmasters again who filter through the garbage for you.

This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites. The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.

You mean a complete collapse of social media, not the whole internet. The internet is a telecom ecosystem and has a lot more to it than just forums and link aggregators.

I honestly believe it might not even be such a bad thing. People were arguably better without social networks and media, and it's perhaps better to let the cancerous thing just die and keep the internet just as a utility powering boring things like banking and academia.

> And there’s really not much point in publishing good content anymore, since AI is just going slurp it up and regurgitate it without driving you any traffic.

You just published good content knowing AI will slurp it up and not give you any traffic in return. I'm now replying to you with more content with the same expectations about AI and traffic. Why care about AI or traffic or recognition? Isn't the content the thing that matters?

It's like answering technical questions in an anonymous/pseudonymous chat or forum, which I'm sure you've done, too. We do it to help others. If an AI can take my answer and spread it around without paying me or mentioning one of my random usernames I change every month or so, I would be happy. And if the AI gives me credit like "coffeecup543 originally posted that on IRC channel X 5 years ago", I couldn't care less. It would be noise to the reader. Even if the AI uses my real name, so what?

The people who cared about traffic and money from their posts rarely made good content, anyway. Listicles and affiliate marketing BS and SEO optimizations and making a video that could be 1 minute into 10 minutes, or text that could've been 5 articles into a long book - all existed from before AI. With AI I actually get less of this crap - either skip it or condense it.

As someone who came of age before “the internet as you know it”, I am looking forward to all of the cancerous Web 2.0 OG slop and narcissism factories succumbing to their own fates. Let me tell you, the internet as we know it sucks, and the internet it ate 25-years ago is a marked improvement. We should be so lucky. Now go write a personal blog in plain text, and rejoice.

Every website that was driven by traffic is also dying. I have put nearly a decade of work into mine, and AI overviews and ChatGPT have reduced traffic by over 60%. At some point I will need to give up and find a job, and that corner of the internet will get no new original information, just rehashed slop.

That and most of the news being behind a paywall, which they can scrape anyway.

The internet archive is my safe haven these days, i can go back and remember the old internet.

Unless you're allowed to say slurs without being banned, your forum will be overrun with bots. The sanitation of the internet is the perfect breeding ground for brand-safe AI promotion bots.

Cutting staff does in no way mandate a un-notified and abrupt "hard-reset".

They could at least put it in read-only mode for a short time and allow downloading of extant community content prior to a scheduled "reset day".

This smacks of flailing leadership and zero respect for their target user demographic.

If you're looking for a new platform lemmy is probably your best bet, at least if a server goes down everything is still saved on federated servers.

You chose to put your effort into building something that someone else owns.

Next time try doing it in a way that you control it.

Will we never learn to stop. Building. On. Platforms.

Argh. Also quite irritated. I had 50/50 transitioned over to it despite the lower traffic because it was a calm oasis. The thing about bots is believable, though, because you could already see it happening. Dead Internet has been real for a while, and I'd love to seem Kevin and Alex do a followup on this.

Kevin Rose (original digg founder) and Alexis Ohanian (a.k.a. kn0thing, original reddit founder) did an AMA recently about restarting digg

(context so people don't have to click links)

> Digg.com Is Back - Jan 2026

Damn, that didn't take long at all...

> sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, “witty” one-liners [etc]

There are subreddits within Reddit such as https://www.reddit.com/r/neutralnews/ that have strict rules around sourcing, etc. However, I think that’s not what most users want, and may not be quite what you’re looking for either, apologies.

The whole problem is trying to be a catchall where people with zero knowledge or skills can hang out. Twitter/X and Reddit especially suffer from it.

Topical forums tend to have a much higher SNR. My favorite forum of all time, johnbridge, had none of those issues. Sadly it died this year all the same, but many others still exist. When you have a forum dedicated to something that requires a minimum barrier to entry, the more useless folks get shunned away pretty early and easily.

I want a "reddit" like discussion board where:

- Users don't have to pay to post links/stories - Users have to pay to comment on links/stories - Users have to pay to "upvote" comments. Downvotes don't exist - Each link "lives" a certain amount of time before it is locked. - After lock time, users who posted the link get "paid" a % of the collected $ comments/upvotes. Comments that are upvoted also earn $ proportionally to the upvotes.

Hashcash was conceived to solve automated spam/email. Participating in a discussion must cost something, that's the only way bots and spam will get partially stopped. Or, if they start to optimize to get "the most votes", then so be it, their content will increase in quality.

Reddit is flooded with AI slop. r/all currently has AI-generated text posts and articles on the first page. Upvoted because they're the typical orange man bad stuff, but LLM slop nonetheless. Assuming the engagement is organic, it's depressing how much of the site has no eye for this stuff.

There are decent small communities I'm a part of but the trash feels like it is encroaching.

And the notifications you describe are exactly reddit's notifications? "your comment received 10/20/50/100 upvotes!" "x responds to y about z" "News is trending"

Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.

For a short time I was a part of a small site that banned politics.

It was fine, people talked about work, personal stuff, travel, until one person posted about their disappointment that their state was limiting various services or rights to gay people. For them this meant their rights were in question and they were understandably upset.

Immediately some folks cried politics and that they shouldn’t post about that sort of thing.

To the user posting it it was about their life…

I don’t think “no politics” rules really make much sense. For someone it’s more than politics, and IMO because a topic is touched by politicians or government shouldn’t make it disallowed.

Wouldn't that be almost impossible?. Politics affects our lives every day. Your comment suggests that you believe it doesn't affect yours.

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

Why do you think people will stop at politics?

Erm, Brexit, anyone?

You thinking that astroturfing only happens for US politics is dangerously naive.

One of the things I always disliked about the original Digg was their threading. The slashdot like feed where the oldest comments were at the top and there was only one level of replies tended to encourage the "first" comments and harmed the quality of the discussion. I was glad to see it use a reddit-like comment thread for the new site, but it also meant there wasn't much reason to use it over reddit.

I'm a bit surprised with Alexis' involvement they didn't anticipate the bot problem. Alexis left reddit several years ago but I'm sure he's still in touch with the folks who run the place. It would've been worth it to talk to them about the threats they currently face and how they deal with them.

Why didn’t it make sense to you?

It was 4chan lite...

Those 100 npm packages won't load themselves.

> We really need some way to "verify as human" in the next coming years.

I don't believe there is any practical way to do it.

Sure, there are ways to verify a human linked to a specific account exists in a one-off fashion, but for individual interactions you'll never know that it isn't an LLM reading and posting if they put even a small amount of effort to make it seem humanish.

> Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.

Digg isn't just here again. It's gone again.

The LLM style is like nails down a blackboard, are people blind to it or do they just not even read the stuff they're posting?

They introduced user-created communities a few months ago. They had problems with squatting and splintering, which might have played a role in their annoucement.

I wonder if the old forum model would work. Instead of these mega-forum-platfroms, there are just small communities with a niche focus at their own URL.

I suppose bots could find forums that use the most popular software and still make accounts and spam, but it would be much more obvious and less fruitful for someone to spam deck builders in Vancouver (something I saw often on Digg) on a forum that is focused on aquariums owners in the midwest.

Go to any career subreddit and it's almost entirely LLM- generated rage bait. Never mention political subreddits, those have been gamed for years.

Reddit very much is.

This leads to paid certifications from limited experts leading to political payoffs controlling the certifiers

"Digg is Just Resting"

>> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.

> Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.

This… seems like regular prose to me. What makes you say so confidently it was written by AI?

He and Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit) went in on it together.

Yes, he did. Now he's gonna be the full-time CEO according to this.

Sure.. Digg.com is back (118 points, 6 months ago, 209 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430

"This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem."

Yes.

> legendary Digg slip up

I wasn't a digg user, but this was done to combat 'voting rings' (bots), and the reddit migration was memed partially because it was/is far more open to manipulation. So at least their principles have been somewhat consistent.

Ok, unduped now. Thanks!