How's your public beta Digg experience been so far?

Howdy all! 👋

How has your experience with Digg since the public beta launch earlier this week been so far?

I'm personally interested to get a sense of how people have been finding growing community and engaging with content. I'm also curious about why you are here or what you want to see from this platform. Please share any thoughts you have!

I'll start.

How I joined Digg

I kind of joined Digg on a whim. I was originally on the wait list to join last year (not a Groundbreaker), but never got the email letting me know. Oof haha. I think I found out about this and decided to join on my own because of a news article on TechCrunch. This is my first time ever using any version of Digg.

Why I joined Digg

1. It feels like a fresh start on the internet. A reset button, if you will. So much possibility!

2. Because it's early, it's an opportunity to "start again" online and steer the direction of the product, which is pretty cool.

3. I like the idea of having some influence over the growth of communities I want to be a part of, hopefully getting the chance to steer them in a positive way.

4. Being proactive about thoughtfully engaging online with things that are important to me, and using it as a tool to stay accountable to some personal goals I have this year around trying and building things in public. Community is one of these goals, and it's been overall very fun so far.

The things I've noticed so far have been mostly pleasant overall, including:

• I got to select my own communities over at /birds and /swiftui which has been really cool.

• I was one of the first to detail my observation about Digg community ownership questions .

• I made a silly report detailing the first few days of growth on Digg. Just for fun and because the internet should be a fun place. Bless be thy bagel!

• I got to witness the growth of /digglist and digglist.com . Excellent stuff.

• Shared a blog post with /oldweb that really resonated with me. Don't be afraid to go build something today!

• Noticed that very early engagement on early public beta Digg has been positive because of a willingness from everyone to share and recruit others to their communities, the idea of advertising each other be damned.

• Figuring out ways to engage and build community in ways that are thoughtful and meaningful. Just be real.

• Posting to birds as a way to get content shared and grow engagement

• Asking lots of questions about things I'm interested in

• Wrote an open letter to members over at /swiftui about how I'd envision this space growing

• Joining communities with that overlap with my interests

• Not feeling as intimidated to post because of less critical mass than other sites. If there's anything I've realized, it's that WE ARE THE CULTURE we want to see on Digg, so what we decide to do at the individual level matters especially this early on.

• Learned about /morning-crew and gems, and also how and why content surfaces and thinking thoughtfully about quality content

• Generally feeling welcomed by team Digg

Other interesting things I've seen this week have also included:

1. Bots and how they ruin our user experience

2. Moderation in general and how it's hard but being worked on

3. Many comparisons of Digg to its largest competitor platform, and other discussions on how we're different or may/may not want to be different.

4. Learning about the user and community handles "land grab" or handle squatting conversation.

5. The recent AMA talking about the Digg relaunch. Forest's comment was nice to see.

I dunno. I kind of feel like I've been having a lot of fun. I've adopted the idea that the web is what we make of it. This has been an overall nice place. I appreciate the level of care and responsiveness the team has put in so far. I know not everything is perfect, but I can't even imagine how it's going on behind the scenes.

How about you?!