A few observations
- interface is cleaner than Reddit (some people will probably complain about the space wasted, even in “compact” mode, but most users should be fine)
- there is only a handful of communities existing at the moment, and no option to create more. See picture for the list.
- feature-wise, it looks very similar to Reddit/Lemmy/Piefed: upvotes/downvotes, comments, sort types
Based on what happened with Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon, we can probably imagine that Digg might be a new actor that quite a few people will join, when the people the most aware of enshittification of corporate platforms will stay on Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed
Random thought: maybe a “lifestyle” community could be a way to encompass a few communities that struggle to stay active
Is Digg committing itself to the concept of community moderation by volunteers with large amounts of autonomy, or is it going down an AI-route?
I’m sure we can guess correctly at this one.
There’s at least an AI tl:dr below each post, not sure about the moderation.
To me, if it doesn’t have the basic users running communities foundation of Reddit and the Fediverse - it just isn’t a Reddit alternative. Communities would be more like hashtags.
Sidebar of a community
I guess they plan to have user-managed communities later, otherwise indeed they wouldn’t be able to compete with Reddit
Having a “Top Contributors” section on the sidebar is already putting up red flags to me, to be honest.
I find the badges on reddit (I still use it for some niche gaming communities and r/tycoon) very annoying. We want organic engagement, not a skinner box.
The operators basically said they want AI to do moderation because that’s the boring and shitty part of being a volunteer. They would rather have community volunteers focus on building the community.
That still in part requires moderation tools for purposes of curation.