@lemmetakeitapart
in /digg 4 days ago
From your point of view:
Why do you digg a post or comment?
Why do you bury a post or comment?
What is your thought process behind that decision?
I digg comments and posts that I feel need visibility. I digg for thoughtful participation. I digg what I enjoy.
I bury a post if it is spam. I bury off-topic posts in communities I follow. Sometimes I bury a repeat post that I’ve seen before in the same community.
I don’t usually bury comments.
4 days ago
mindset is that you intentionally head into New and look for Gems. So a lot of my Diggs are for posts that I find interesting, but also when I see someone looking to just "connect". It's hard out there when, as put it, you're trying to connect at a riot. That's also the motivation behind actively responding in threads.
Buries are rarer, mostly since I respect anyone's right to speak their piece even if I disagree with it. Trolls I've just developed that weather worn Internet thick skin to over the years. They just fascinate me that they'll take all that energy and choose destruction over comadarie (though I've enjoyed a little anarchy in my day lemme tell you what).
Spam gets reported and that mostly comes from seeing the patterns of the posts from New. There's some people very clearly using the space to boost search engine results or advertise to us directly. But the more egregious ones get reported or blocked.
Digg's kind of back into it's chill mode right now as the dev's have done a great job on stopping a significant portion of that stuff
4 days ago
Appreciate your thoughts and chiming in here. Thanks for the response.
Also taking a page from here, I love the building and bridging I’m seeing lately. Kind of a recent vibe and I’m enjoying it.
4 days ago
I love it! Thank you for tagging me and mentioning that idea. I credit Irwin Altman and Gillian Sandstorm for those ideas. They are real researchers who literally dedicated their lives to studying social science. Gillian's work is available on her website and really interesting to read. And I think it's true, you've got to build and bridge to make connections and weave that fabric! We've got the tools by tagging. As long as it's not abused for spam, I'm all for it! This is a great thread to read, thanks!
4 days ago
Thank you for the tag! Really appreciate you putting this on my radar and also even reading what I'd written about connecting in a riot. Like you said, it means a lot to someone to know they've been "seen".
I love the idea of morning crew being up first thing in the morning looking for gems! For me, I'm really starting to try to focus on finding obscure and personal content that is not off a major news aggregator or publisher or online source. I loved 's post about early Internet sites/pages that were very personal and hand coded. It's a bit etsy-ish, but maybe without the focus on a marketplace.
I've also been conflicted about trolls. On the one hand there are definitely people who skew negative, bit still have a "human" feel to them. On the other, there are what seem like obvious troll bots that just go around spewing vitriol with the intention of creating distrust, discord, and other words that start with dis. If we were on an island, I would be actively campaigning for these bot-people to be exiled, because their only goal is to tear apart the social fabric. It's destructive. Sometimes these bots are even state sponsored actors. There has to be some kind of basic barrier to entry- ie. the golden rule- that gives these actors the boot... Or maybe not, maybe they just hang out in the riot all the time, and when they get into quieter communities the mods just say "nope! Not here!"
4 days ago
It really can depend on the 2-3 folks that look to cause some chaos. I remember back when people on Reddit set up one of the first unofficial Minecraft servers (still running to this day, which I'm kinda proud of helping start). In those days, you were just on Ventrilo servers (pre Discord days). Trolls would download flying/xray mods so they could find diamonds immediately, then go on major destruction/killing sprees. They'd even come into the Vent's to laugh at us casual normies.
They hit us a few different times, but each time my stance stayed the same - just surprised that's what they used their time and energy being script kiddies instead of actually getting into reverse engineering hacking. They're in their little communities having a blast. There's not much you can do when their actual peer group is cheering on the behavior.
I think with Digg though, we were lucky to hook a significant portion of older Internet techies that were there for the Napster, Torrenting, Newgrounds, yes 4chan, Digg/Reddit, webcomic days. Then its a series of mental light bulbs going off that make you go "oh yeah, there was a better way to surf the Internet once upon a time that didn't need the town square".
was invented because I saw a lot of just weird Internet fighting last year, where like various forms of media were getting co-opted by political commentary (its still there, hence the GET OFF THE INTERNET catch phrase). Someone in my music streaming chat rooms started talking about Bowie being a Nazi sympathizer and I was like "... I'm still gonna like Bowie..." Same in the Final Fantasy Tactics Facebook meme groups - lot of attempts to use FFT meme dumps to co-opt the game for some grand battle against IRL billionaires. It was weird.
Anyway, MORNING CREW was my way of making fun of all the people getting on Digg to immediately sow political discourse, and it was pretty clear the users that were doing it because they were already well ahead of 10k Digg Points, always sitting at the top of the Leaderboard. My MORNING CREW Thunderdome post is still one of my favorites from last year. It caught on, and so now there's a bunch of us trying to steer this Internet spaceship safely to the promised land.
4 days ago
Also feel free to take a deep dive into my post history. It was a lot of meta commentary about how Digg was during Part 4 Alpha.
4 days ago
Thanks! I'll do that- I like the meta angle. And totally see your vote on the trolls who are actually forming a troll community. It's like, trolls should have a home too... Under some virtual bridge somewhere. Really appreciate the commentary and history to provide context to the evolution so far. These are early days and it's helpful to learn from the senseis!
3 days ago
Just catching up on this thread! (I was like, I know I got @ mentioned the other day, but WHERE???) 😂
your comments in this thread describing the function and origin of the crew are the ones I was looking for when I first noticed on public beta launch week! It kind of took me a while to understand what this was, and only by participating and watching did I finally “get it” ! Perhaps a sticky or link to this comment in the community somewhere would be useful for new recruits. Though I do also like the idea of participation leads to understanding. Dunno, just spitballing!
thanks for tagging me in! This has been an interesting experience the last few weeks. It makes me want to write about it all, but there are so many (too many) angles I could take it’s kinda overwhelming hahah
3 days ago
Oh oh and if I didn’t get to mention it before, this post and the discussions in it, like this thread, are exactly the reason why I’m here on Digg!
I want to find the people who care about fostering healthy community and care about building bridges. Trolls exist and will always be hungry. I make an active choice not to ever feed them.
I find life is a lot more pleasant this way :)
2 days ago
I feel the same way about so many/too many angles! That's why I've got Fever Dream Friday, so I can explore and riff without limits :) It's a joy to be discovering and exploring and working with people who are creating. I guess that's the beauty of early-days, it's a blank canvas. But also great to read some of the "lore" that's already been written by others. I'd love to read your writings!
2 days ago
Consider it done!
