Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. I used to spend lot of time on TheEnvironmentSite.org some time before Slashdot, but I cant recall whether anything else came in between those two.

I am this old:

BBS’s -> College’s Telnet -> .edu sites over lynx -> Usenet -> IRC -> commercial websites -> Slashdot -> Fark -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy

BBS From the back of Computer Shopper magazine, we would get a list of phone #'s to call which then connected us to various Wildcat BBS’s that were filled with interesting & squirrelly information and people. Usually 1 at a time could connect, but the fancy ones had multiple phone-lines.

College/Telnet/Usenet Went to college and got access to a telnet account, which let me run Lynx and open a Usenet reader. From there we bounced all around text-based sites (using the book above) because there were no search engines. You had a big list of all the places you liked to visit, and you visited those. Sometimes, someone told you about another spot, or you played whack-a-mole with various .edu domains. A lot of kids started hosting sites on their dorm-room machines. Usenet opened up a whole world of discussion about topics far outside the scope of my tiny little town.

Next up was a PPoE connection using Trumpet Winsock and suddenly I could load NCSA Mosaic and mIRC and that opened up a graphical web with the easy ability to download software and more communication. Then Businesses all decided they needed to try “internet” for themselves, and you started seeing the rise of commercial endeavors. So early PCMag and other adopters showed up.

Slashdot came along and was primarily a Linux site, with some tech news sprinkled in. I still remember following the threads there for Columbine (when school shootings were still a novelty) and then on 9/11 when just about every site ground to a halt, there was lots of speculation and word-of-mouth, but at least information was still moving. It then expanded its audience with tags so that all sorts of news topics could open up and you could follow specific ones.

Ran with an RSS feed for a while around this point and subbed to all the different sites I liked, so I could get my fix in one place.

Fark came along and was an irreverent alternative to Slashdot. Somewhere between twitter performance art with everyone trying to make the catchiest title for their headline, but also just a lot of goofing off in the comments. Totalfark was $5 a month and worth the money to get at the un-curated content.

Then, just as Tech TV was going south and becoming some sort of wrestling-based channel, Kevin Rose mentions at the end of The Screen Savers about “This new website, Digg!” which in hindsight he was shamelessly plugging. That site offered the upvote/downvote concept allowing the community to create a constant stream of content. Somewhere along those lines Slashdot lost its luster, presumably because all of its content was curated by a handful of people who were in the process of selling out to other investors.

Reddit came along, and further customized the upvote/downvote/commenting experience. It also allowed you to create your own communities/subreddits and follow those. Because its audience was basically “anyone” it allowed for tons of creative content. Right as it started to take off, Digg made a huge faux pas on how they moderated content, which annoyed all the content creators and they moved to reddit as well.

I loved what Reddit could have been without the enshitification taking over. If you look at that list, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit all suffered from busily trying to monetize their users, and all of them died (or are dying) a slow, sad death. Fark is still owned by Drew Curtis, and as far as I can tell, still has a similar feel & userbase.

Lemmy honestly feels like finding Usenet, IRC & Lynx again. There’s a learning curve you have to get over, and then you have to be willing to hunt for your information. But the quality of the content is higher than reddit, and each one of those other services went through the same decline as we jumped ship to the new one.

In a world where every new “service” just annoys me now, because I know it’s going to be frustrating to use, and will likely just steal my data, turn into a content/ad mill and eventually turn to shit Lemmy feels like a big middle finger to those sites. And I’m here for it.

Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy. Back then, web servers didn’t have a lot of resources. So if a Digg post was popular, it could slow the site to a crawl. Then we all knew the site was being “Digged”.

Put it this way, I still remember the drama around MrBabyMan and other power users!

Yes, and also watched the Diggnation netcast.

I was a casual lurker of Digg. I would open it up and scroll through for a bit, never spending more than 20 minutes or so just looking for something interesting to read. I don’t think I even knew it “died.”

In 2013 I joined Reddit, and somehow began spending hours reading posts and comments, and then becoming a poster/commenter myself.

I remember visiting Reddit and StumbledUpon and thinking to myself how ugly these sites were compared to my beloved Digg

Me! I was a huge fan of Kevin Rose due to TechTV and jumped on board as soon as he released it.

I was using Digg and Reddit both at the height of Digg. I had already mostly moved over to Reddit at the time of the migration but still was on Digg some. But I was among those that abandoned Digg then.

Raises hand

Me!

I loved Digg back in the day. I had a reddit account too, but preferred Digg by a lot. Then the enshittification of Digg via v4 came along and I hopped wholesale over to reddit and never looked back.

I was and used to watch the Diggnation podcast all the time. Loved Digg in its heyday, and it was sad when it went downhill. Reddit ended up being excellent though, and better than Digg ended up being. Sucks that it died too, but hopefully the Fediverse ends up finally being the chosen one.

Yeah I moved from Digg to Reddit around 2008/2009. Was also a fairly low numbered user of Slashdot.

I discovered Digg about a year before the Digg Exodus to Reddit, so I don’t know if I’d call it the “prime” but I was there just in time to watch it fall.

Not only Digg, but I also watched Tech TV and was on forums I can’t even remember the names of. I’m still using IRC.