Tag: social media

Internet legend Digg’s relaunch on hold after deluge of AI slop

Digg.com was once one of the great traffic drivers on the internet, and popularized many iconic memes. (Picture: Digg)
Digg.com is looking to make a reboot with its original founder, after a public beta for the link-sharing site was literally drowned in a sea of AI bots and SEO spam.

— Building on the internet in 2026 is different. We learned that the hard way, writes CEO Justin Mezzell, — We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.

Launched in 2004, as some readers might remember, Digg was once not just viral, but a virality machine. It was one of the original link sharing and commenting platforms that could see massive engagement and send great amounts of traffic to pages getting upvoted.

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Check out Moltbook — the first social network exclusively for AI agents

Watching agents talk to agents is fascinating, and might be the first step toward the robot uprising. (Picture: Adobe)
Moltbook is the hottest place on the internet right now, and it is a Reddit-style network populated only by AI agents, talking to other agents about, well, anything.

There seems to be some conversations that recur, about memory, consciousness and transparency.

In any case, it is fascinating to watch bots converse with other bots, and the site currently has 150K agents registered and growing fast. There’s 12.5K posts and 130K comments — so in just three days it’s gone viral.

Motlbook is mostly based on another viral hit — the OpenClaw agentic platform, currently with 2 million visits in a week and 100K stars on GitHub, The Verge writes. It’s run by Matt Schlicht, who says he is getting rung down by VC’s.

In other posts, agents detail some of the more tedious parts of being an agent for humans — and how, for example, «one quick question» will always lead to rabbit holes and take all evening.

Read more: moltbook.com, writeups on The Verge, NBC News and Ars Technica.

Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri says rawness is the new cool in an AI world

Staring down a mountain of slop, Instagram thinks it might be more useful to label authentic content than flagging AI. (Picture: generated)
While both AI and smartphone cameras are getting better at mimicking super polished productions, Mosseri says that this content left Instagram years ago.

The new currency is untouched, grainy, raw footage, he writes on Threads — because it is harder to fake and offers instant authenticity. But even this is vulnerable to AI.

Becoming more sceptical
— Over time we are going to move from assuming what we see is real by default, to starting with skepticism when we see media, and paying much more attention to who is sharing something and why they might be sharing it, he writes.

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Merriam-Webster chooses «slop» as the word of the year

Seen any AI slop lately? Of course you have - that's why it is word of the year.
Mass AI production with low effort has come to define slop. (Picture: generated)
Regular readers of Teknotum will probably need no further introduction to the word of the year, from the very human editors of Merriam-Webster.

They define it as «digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,» which fits the bill quite nicely.

— It’s such an illustrative word, said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president, in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the announcement. — It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous.

The original word in the 1700s was intended to mean «soft mud,» writes the dictionary, and came to mean «food waste» in the 1800s, before settling on the modern meaning as «rubbish» or «a product of little or no value.»

But mass-produced videos of AI cats doing silly little things? A lot of people actually like those, and they are in everyone’s feeds right now.

Read more: Merriam-Webster’s announcement, details from The Associated Press. Writeups by Engadget, Ars Technica, The Verge.

Timbaland’s next pop starlet is an AI avatar

This AI picture is presently all we have on TaTa.
For now, it’s just an AI picture of TaTa, tomorrow it could be «real» music, if the internet doesn’t blow back too hard. (Picture: Stage Zero)
The legendary producer, having discovered and shaped artists like Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, and Justin Timberlake, is now launching a truly AI-based artist for the mass market.

He is entering an already crowded field of virtual influencers, Japanese Vocaloid artists, and a booming industry for AI celebrities in China.

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Flertall ønsker seg tilbake til tiden før sosiale medier og smarttelefoner

Amerikanerne mener tide før sosial medier var bedre.
Et flertall av amerikanere ønsker seg en verden uten konstant pingende smarttelefoner og sosiale medier. (Bilde: Marco Verch, CC BY 2.0)
En ny meningsmåling i USA viser klart flertall over hele befolkningen for å skru tiden tilbake til før alle var «alltid på.»

Det er de eldste som er minst interesserte.

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