Digg iscoming back, and Im left wondering if anyone will care.
Those superpowers will have to be quite impressive to dislodge the entrenched interests of how we consume media now.
The thing is,Slashdot,Fark,Hacker News, and Reddit all still exist.
Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.© Nicholas Hunt
Reddit is, of course, the biggest of all these sites.
As an elder millennial that was around when Digg was ascendent, the promotion leaves me cold.
I think the people who want that already have it.
Sure, there was nothing on but that wasnt the point.
The point was inducing a vegetative state and letting your brain turn to mush.
Thats how the scroll works, its what made Meta a Big Tech juggernaut.
Sometimes, I like to doom scroll like this, and I always do so consciously.
I know Im going to let my brain leave my body for a time.
But thats not the only way I watch videos and read articles.
I always open NewsBlur before getting lost in the endless tide of social media.
I check my subscriptions on YouTube before scrolling past its endless tiles in a daze.
Ive organized BlueSky into lists of valuable contacts and interesting topics.
I go through those before hitting the Discover feed.
You have more control over what the internet shows you than you think you do.
you’re free to set up RSS feeds and news alerts for the things you want to see.
you might block YouTube channels you dont want to appear in your feed.
you could avoid entire websites youd rather not check.
The tools are available for anyone to shape their own information ecosystem.
So Digg, powered by the nostalgia of 40-year-olds, will enter this information environment.
Its nice to imagine the superpowers will help them disrupt the current market.
But I have trouble believing it.
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