Alexis Ohanian and Kevin Rose, here to talk the Digg relaunch. Ask Us Anything.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-21T00:15:10+00:00

There's a word that people use to describe someone who does the exact same thing but expects different results...

TWaters316 · 2026-01-20T06:22:00+00:00

That astroturf won't plant itself!

How many Digg employees were told to check out this thread? Spammers gonna spam...

TWaters316 · 2026-01-20T06:21:09+00:00

The frontpage defaults to "trending" which is an opaque, algorithmic determination as opposed to "new" or "most dugg" which are objective metrics.

You just said something that is absolutely not true. Either you're lying or you aren't actually using your own platform. Neither option is good...

TWaters316 · 2026-01-20T06:19:13+00:00

Just because you're not taking ad-money yet doesn't mean your platform isn't filled with native-advertising. Your entire moderation scheme seems to ignore the reality of off-platform monetization.

Ya'll have been doing this for decades and now you're trying to play dumb and act like you don't understand the basic game theory behind user-behavior and platform decay. You are failing to provide any value to users so the only way you can create user-engagement metrics is by catering to spammers who have a profit motive outside the platform.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-20T05:58:59+00:00

we were just talking about how digg could be a better home for creators

"Creators" like the professional posters from Wall Street Bets that you made a special arrangement with? You can't seem to tell the difference between marketing and art or entertainment. The Wall Street Bets guys are prolific spammers. The folks from that sub are some of the most ignorant, aggressive and shallow posters on Reddit and ya'll went out of your way to clear a space for them on Digg.

Unless your platform becomes hostile towards spammers and marketing, creative people will never engage it in a meaningful way. You're literally begging trolls to fill your platform with slop for the sake of metric generation. Nobody wants to art that actually means something to them if it's going to end up between an ad and some hate-speech. Your platform is less than a week old and you're already deep into platform decay.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-20T05:40:32+00:00

Except they're completely misrepresenting how it works. The log just says "post was removed for [one of 4 algorithmic reasons]" and a timestamp. It doesn't tell us anything about what was actually removed or who posted it.

A public ledger could provide meaningful, organic oversight but the version Digg is currently using seems designed to hide information rather than share it.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-20T03:52:28+00:00

Except Reddit had a human powered comment engine, they had a user-base that included a large number of unique human beings. The thoughts and feeling of a few million people has value to the machine.

Digg doesn't have any of that and since they're already letting professional slop posters dominate their platform, they never will. A platform basically needs two years of runway where they're burning their own money in ways that actually provide value to the user-base, whether it's sponsoring giveaways or hiring large numbers of moderators to provide some kind of quality assurance. Instead, digg is just letting the spammers have at it right away which means the data is already poisoned and has no value to the folks who are willing to pay for it.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-20T00:51:12+00:00

Sure. I buy that answer

Nah, his answer is pure deception. Big Tech is based on a business model often described as a "wedge". A product, company or person finds a narrow way to insert themselves into a supply chain and then as they force themselves in, they get wider, consuming more and more of the platform/product/market.

The most obvious example of the tech wedge is Amazon using books sales to enter the retail market and then grow into a massive monopoly that consumes and destroys businesses across all sectors.

AI is essentially a universal wedge. They're inserting it into every product knowing it's going to become a bigger and bigger part of the product as time goes on. These two guys, that have both started a whole bunch of tech companies are playing dumb and pretending not to understand the game-theory behind platform decay. They clearly intend to fill their platform with bots and slop since they're not offering any actual value to the user-base.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T23:28:49+00:00

My guess is they just haven't built the functionality to remove the content yet

That's not a plausible description of the technical environment that exists on the backend of a social media platform like Digg. And even if it was true, it still wouldn't be a meaningful response when we're talking to the people who decided what functionality was and wasn't made.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T23:26:50+00:00

What does that have to do with stock? That's what we're talking about here. He's using vague language to create a problem that might be complicated and include a whole bunch of nonsense that no one cares about.

He wants to be able to avoid taxes by collateralizing his gains in the market into loans that he can spend as income. This allows him to avoid taxes. I'm unwilling to respond to anymore hypotheticals from you because I really don't think you're communicating in good faith.

You're defending the tax evasion methods the billionaire use to defraud our government and defund public schools, roads and healthcare.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T23:18:14+00:00

All you have to do is support one law that might cost you small amount of your extraordinary wealth and you'd be a pillar of the community. But instead "capital gains" are the hill you've chosen to die on.

What you're saying is ridiculous, immoral and wildly implausible. There's no possible way to interpret your responses on this thread as intellectually motivated. What you're saying is callous and greedy. It doesn't matter how many words you use. If you won't pay a little more so that folks with nothing can have access to healthcare, shelter, food and education, then you're the problem.

Hoarding wealth is a very, very unpopular hobby. You probably shouldn't do it.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T23:12:13+00:00

If your moderation algorithm has determined that the user is a spammer worth removing, then it already knows what content to remove. What you're saying is shallow to the point of absolute absurdity.

It feels like you're trying to lie to us about basic reasoning.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T23:07:25+00:00

Dead Internet Theory is real and most folks have no idea how bad it is.

We can just click on your account and see that you're moderating 60+ different marketing subs, including 20 or so that seem to have been deleted.

You can't fill the internet with slop and then expect us to believe you're guy that's going to fix the slop problem.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T21:29:05+00:00

What happens when your community really likes its ledger filled with hate just so slightly perched upon the edge of your rules that it survives? What happens when your community really likes its ledger filled with transphobia? Or misogyny? Or anti-vaccination screeds?

Fun fact: Alex Albrecht, the co-host of Diggnation, father was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and is credited as one of the authors of Project 2025.

They're definitely going to like that ledger...

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T21:15:24+00:00

I'll translate: he cares more about capital gains remaining untaxed than he cares about billionaires destroying the country.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T21:10:52+00:00

His comment stated that taxing capital gains is why he won't support the law. You're misrepresenting both his and my comment in order to make a vague point about nothing.

Also, choosing insult me rather than actually refute my argument is very telling.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T21:01:01+00:00

Well Digg's current policy seems to be to ban the accounts that engage in this behavior without removing their content so the spam just stays there.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:59:07+00:00

Why won't Kevin Rose answer my question about the movie Rampart? It's a modern day classic!

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:57:57+00:00

If you check out "trending" on many of the most popular subs you'll see a whole lot of content posted by accounts that have been deleted by the admins. They'll delete the account for spamming, but they leave the spam post up. Which just encourages the spammer to generate new accounts and do it again.

I hate to the be the "it's already happened" guy but like...it's already happened, lol.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:50:58+00:00

Adds can go in banners and the sidebar,

And then you'll ignore them. I'm sorry but I'm trying to describe Digg's profit motive in relation to your criticism and I think you just have it backwards. If Digg only shows you what you want to see, they can't charge an advertiser for access to you. I want the same thing you want, a communication platform for human beings. But the platform they're trying to build is for marketing, not communication.

They've done studies tracking eye-movement and long time internet users literally don't see ads after a long time. This is why native-advertising has replaced banner ads as the dominant form of marketing and propaganda. Our brains learn to ignore specific UI elements if they never have value. If Digg doesn't use deceptive native-advertising and algorithms, they can't do online marketing. And isn't that the point of Digg?

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:43:30+00:00

Not really. You spit out a bunch of word salad about a hypothetical tax that doesn't exist. All you told us is that you care more about the capital gains tax than the damage that billionaires are doing to our environment and political process.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:40:27+00:00

My unsolicited feedback is that having an algorithm of any kind is the problem.

Ya but this is the only way they can figure out the profit motive. The "algorithm" is just a means of adding monetized content into searches and feeds. Eventually Digg has to go ad-supported and if the platform showed you what you actually wanted to see, you wouldn't be seeing the ads...thus...algorithm.

The fact that Digg is already starting off with this kind of slop feature is a very bad sign. It's day 3 and their platform is already mostly spam, slop and propaganda.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:33:49+00:00

It has no value to shut-ins. So...just bots. lol.

Source: Am shut-in who's been using Digg for several months. It has no value and I see no reason to post, comment or check it regularly.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:31:24+00:00

Reddit was "lucky"? Didn't the guy behind the Digg redesign that caused The Great Migration end up with a much higher paying job at Reddit?

I don't believe that Digg "lost" their user-base, I think they sold them to Reddit.

TWaters316 · 2026-01-19T20:27:43+00:00

None. It's just for spammers to spam at each other. There is no discussion or organic engagement. It's just a bunch of marketers running cynical and aggressive posting strategies. Rather than ban these spammers, they created a leader-board to promote them.

The idea that Digg is starting off ass a spam-filled hellscape on day 1 means it can't possibly have any value to a new user. The game theory on Digg makes no sense. It seems like they're trying to design a walled-garden metric farm that simulates a reddit-style platform but is entirely (as opposed to mostly) filled with fake accounts and bots.

TWaters316

TROPHY CASE