Art 19 ↔ Art 12 — Free expression and unrestricted posting (Article 19) tension with privacy and communication integrity (Article 12); resolved by prioritizing authenticated community trust over bot-driven artificial engagement.

Art 19 ↔ Art 29 — Individual expression rights (Article 19) conflict with community-level limitations imposed for collective trust; moderation activity (banning tens of thousands) subordinates individual posting freedom to platform-wide integrity.

Art 23 ↔ Art 1 — Right to work and employment (Article 23) in tension with business sustainability; mass layoffs preserve company survival but harm workers' economic dignity.

MildlySerious 2026-03-13 19:27 UTC link

I am kind of peeved. I started a community there and diligently posted links to topical news, and it kind of became a reference to me. Like many others, I've put in some amount of effort.

Now it's gone, again. Without a head's up or a way to get a backup out of it, it seems like. Can't say I am a fan of that.

dang 2026-03-13 19:44 UTC link

Related - others?

Digg.com Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46671181 - Jan 2026 (10 comments)

Digg.com relaunch public beta is live - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623390 - Jan 2026 (18 comments)

Digg.com (Relaunch) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524806 - Jan 2026 (3 comments)

Digg.com is back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963430 - Aug 2025 (204 comments)

Digg is trying to come back from the dead with a reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812384 - April 2025 (0 comments)

ahmedfromtunis 2026-03-13 20:12 UTC link

I liked digg v2 (I guess), when it relaunched as a sort of curator of interesting articles (and videos). For years it was my go-to place when bored and wanted something interesting to read.

I guess that in an ocean of upvote-based platforms, an island of hand-picked content was a welcome change -- at least for me.

The move (back) to a reddit-like site never made sense to me. Hopefully what comes next has real value to the users.

basisword 2026-03-13 21:27 UTC link

Interesting there was no notice given to the people who paid $5 for pre-launch access and who helped build the communities before it went public. Not a good way to get anyone to invest their time in it next time they launch. "Bots" is a shitty excuse too. Their whole thing was that they were going to build it a utilise "AI" to prevent that and make moderation more automated. In reality they launched zero of those features and then opened it up to the world completely unprepared.

int32_64 2026-03-13 21:31 UTC link

I would pay cash for access to a social site that bans all US politics, the astroturfing associated with it is simply unbearable.

jjcm 2026-03-13 21:33 UTC link

The bot problem is serious right now. I've switched to only allowing accounts that have paid at least once to post for my own network. It's a hard barrier (minimum spend is $2 for my site), but it almost completely solves the bot problem.

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

mikeocool 2026-03-13 21:35 UTC link

Kinda seems like we’re rapidly headed for the complete collapse of the internet as we know it.

Every site that is driven by user posting seems to be headed towards being overrun by AI bots chatting with each other, either for sake of promoting something or farming karma.

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.

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. Will people still use ChatGPT to get product recommendations without Reddit posts and Wirecutter providing good content for those recommendations?

hazelnut 2026-03-13 21:40 UTC link

Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.

To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.

Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.

sunaookami 2026-03-13 21:42 UTC link

The "new" Digg was just Reddit with the exact same type of comments you can find there and I left it (Digg and Reddit) because of that. There are very few sites where real discourse is still possible without it being filled with memes, running jokes, "witty" one-liners and the constant need to "one-up" and call-out each other. What does Digg even want to be? Nobody needs a second nu-Reddit. It speaks volumes that this post also seems to be AI-generated.

amatecha 2026-03-13 22:10 UTC link

More evidence that "millions of people in the same room" isn't a sustainable model for online communities. I've been feeling for years that some kind of "chain of trust" and/or "X degrees of separation" reputation model is basically inevitable for broad-scale online social communities.

al_borland 2026-03-14 00:44 UTC link

That didn't last long. I'm not sure I want to invest my time again if/when they relaunch.

I kind of expected this. The way some of these people work, if the site isn't an instant unicorn, it's trash. But if the goal is a good community, that is something that takes time to build and should grow slow. The incentives are all backward.

pacomerh 2026-03-14 05:47 UTC link

It's a shame, the intention is still there, if they decide to come back I'll give it another shot. Btw, why are we publishing simple static pages at ~2.84 MB compressed.

jdprgm 2026-03-14 06:17 UTC link

This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch?

There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?

ThalesX 2026-03-14 08:43 UTC link

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. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.

I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.

frou_dh 2026-03-14 08:44 UTC link

You really gotta wonder how much value the "Digg" brand actually has, because the number of people that remember/care about the site from its original glory days is ever dwindling.

dwedge 2026-03-14 09:38 UTC link

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

Am I completely off base or did they use AI to write the post complaining about AI?

wycy 2026-03-14 14:36 UTC link

This kind of makes the Digg team look like a joke. Rebuilding was always going to be hard, but I think this kills any chance of building it up a third time since no one can take it seriously.

mvkel 2026-03-14 14:55 UTC link

The patterns were there if you knew to look for them.

The original Digg excepted, Kevin Rose's attention span is extremely limited. He will give something ~3-4 months of attention before (apparently) getting bored and wanting to move on to something else.

Up until that point, he will be an unrelenting hype man of whatever his attention is lasered on at that moment.

Then the hype posts start to drift. They show up once every few days, then once a week, then stop entirely. Any criticism or skepticism is considered a buzz kill in the cloud of good vibes only.

A few months later, a dramatic explainer post arrives (underestimating the cold start problem? Really??), outlining why the idea didn't work and why the next one will be better, for sure, for real.

This (AI generated) note from the current CEO paints an optimistic picture, but the most likely outcome will be that Digg simply doesn't launch. It's sustained on the nostalgic vapors of the old guard, not renewed by a replenished sense of purpose, or connection.

I'd say I'd love to be proven wrong, but I personally question the utility of a Web 2.0 social network phoenixing itself. We have endured a decade+ of originality being buffed out of web products, most now resembling variations of Bootstrap and shadcn in service of dev convenience and getting rich quicker.

Surely in the age of vibe coding, we can afford to take creative risks again, and think of something new.

jzig 2026-03-14 17:36 UTC link

> None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

What is HN doing differently then?

giancarlostoro 2026-03-14 19:30 UTC link

At some point websites will just have to start charging an entry fee just to make it so if you really are yet another bot, at least you are paying for your stay. If you're not rate limiting your websites in 2026 on a per user level, you really need to, and figure out how to do it meaningfully. Raise limits for known human power users, especially if they pay to use your website.

I wonder if the "short-term" "fix" is people will start to migrate off the web and into mobile, though none of this stops agents from using phone emulators, so kind of pointless, but I imagine crawling the web is easier for AI.

calmbonsai 2026-03-13 20:09 UTC link

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.

bink 2026-03-13 20:23 UTC link

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.

snapetom 2026-03-13 20:24 UTC link

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.

bsimpson 2026-03-13 20:30 UTC link

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)

ekjhgkejhgk 2026-03-13 20:36 UTC link

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.

BoredPositron 2026-03-13 20:39 UTC link

It was 4chan lite...

NuclearPM 2026-03-13 20:55 UTC link

Why didn’t it make sense to you?

RobotToaster 2026-03-13 20:56 UTC link

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.

ranger_danger 2026-03-13 21:35 UTC link

Why do you think people will stop at politics?

gagik_co 2026-03-13 21:45 UTC link

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.

xtracto 2026-03-13 21:53 UTC link

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.

diacritical 2026-03-14 00:51 UTC link

> 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.

al_borland 2026-03-14 00:54 UTC link

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.

pacomerh 2026-03-14 01:40 UTC link

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

duxup 2026-03-14 02:25 UTC link

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.

no-name-here 2026-03-14 03:00 UTC link

> 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.

kdheiwns 2026-03-14 06:45 UTC link

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.

georgemcbay 2026-03-14 06:47 UTC link

> 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.

NitpickLawyer 2026-03-14 06:50 UTC link

> Digg.com Is Back - Jan 2026

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

cbg0 2026-03-14 07:06 UTC link

Those 100 npm packages won't load themselves.

silisili 2026-03-14 07:08 UTC link

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.

deanc 2026-03-14 07:37 UTC link

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

october8140 2026-03-14 08:31 UTC link

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.

p2detar 2026-03-14 09:07 UTC link

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.

vintermann 2026-03-14 09:30 UTC link

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.

insin 2026-03-14 09:49 UTC link

> 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?

r0fl 2026-03-14 12:04 UTC link

If your site creates more than $3 of value then I’ll happily setup 1000 bots a day and pay you the $2 per account every single day

latexr 2026-03-14 12:09 UTC link

> Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago?

Two months, according to The Verge.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/894803/digg-beta-shutdown-layo...

This is particularly embarrassing since from what I recall they were all in on AI with the new website, so to shut it down so fast because of it…

1123581321 2026-03-14 13:13 UTC link

They’re only in their 40s and 50s. Not quite dead yet. :)

vehemenz 2026-03-14 13:28 UTC link

I'm always amused when people say things like this. Any criteria that determine what constitutes "political" talk is inherently political.

Editorial Channel

What the content says

Structural Channel

What the site does