Internet Artifacts

I also would consider Digg to be the direct predecessor of Reddit. If I recall correctly it was more popular until possibly as late as 2010.

I thought that was basic common Internet knowledge, that Digg led straight to Reddit.

Digg is being relaunched - with Alexis on board.

A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.

Napster, Limewire, Digg, GeoCities…to name a few

> A bunch of the early internet brands are being rebranded/relaunched

More like recycled to lend credence to dubious grifts and tangential services. Digg is all-in on AI; Napster is another paid music streaming service; Limewire is another file locker and an AI cryptocurrency¹; GeoCities I’m not aware of a revival.

> which is collectively is being branded as the nostalgic internet.

Nothing about that is nostalgic or remotely related to the old internet. The names are the same and some founders may have returned, but the values and technologies are entirely different.

¹ Whatever that even means in practice. Double-dip on a pile-on of grifts, can never have too many hyped technologies!

fark.com

Fark feels like the echo of a dream these days. It's like the Friendster of news aggregators; it came on the scene first, set the tone for everything that followed, then faded from memory.

Besides GeoCities - the rest are being relaunched by SV VCs and PE groups.

Napster was acquired and relaunched in crypto a few years ago and just resold for $100M+ to a metaverse company immediately following a new raise at a $1B+ valuation.

So yeah it’s acquiring historic IP by VC/PE to resell to friends that are using someone else’s funds. Considering the .com boom and era of publicly traded big tech giving golden parachutes to friends (buying their companies and shutting them down) - it’s very nostalgic.

I only knew it through the lens of it being a (good natured) punching bag of somethingawful.com. Today it's still up and being updated regularly, while somethingawful hasn't had a new article in half a decade+.

Something Awful is also missing from this history. Maybe too niche? Though for geeks and gamers it was well known, and (checks Wikipedia) it was launched on 1999...

It was certainly a notable part of the internet culture of the era.

"...the top 100 Digg users are responsible for more than half of the content that reaches the Digg front page. Furthermore, there could be as few as 20 'superusers' who are responsible for submitting 25 per cent of Digg's front-page stories. If you do the maths, you'll realise that anyone could set up a company with that many employees and have a far more interesting and diverse front page... "

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/digg-is-dead-twitter-kil...

My social media path is this:

SpyMac → Slashdot → Digg → Reddit

Not sure where I picked up on Hacker News ... probably from a Reddit link.

I think it might not be well-known how much of current internet culture cascaded out from the hive that was the SA forums. 4chan was started by an SA goon, as was bellingcat, for example.

Drew Curtis Presents Drew Curtis' Fark.com By Drew Curtis

Wow. I knew about 4chan but not about bellingcat having its roots in SA.

Napster is so old that I remember its DMCA-compliant reboot from 20 years ago. My college gave students free access to it, all the music was a DRM'd WMA file. Most people who used it also downloaded a DRM-removal program to be able to put it on shared drives and MP3 players.

Most people visited Digg for the comments, not so much the posts themselves.

"Alexis on board" has about as much value as saying "Richard Branson is an investor". The difference in their goals now vs when they were young and hungry is in orders of magnitude. They are old, out of touch and spread too thin to do anything noteworthy in rebooting an old brand. They're lending their name for credibility, in exchange for equity and board seats.