Last fall, Kevin Rose once again began to seriously think about digging. A Smidge over 20 years ago, he launched a social and link sharing website known for many years as the “internet homepage.” Since then, Digg has gone through several owners and many pivots. Rose went on to several other careers and the internet went on. Rose was even approached to rebuilt something like Digg again and buying back the domain and website several times, but the timing was never right.
But this time things started clicking. Rose and the group he calls “brainstorming partners.” This includes people like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Design and Product Exec’s Justin Mezzell, and even Blogger and Twitter co-founder EV Williams, who have begun talking about whether AI can help build better social platforms. “I’ll call Alexis and we’ll chat,” Rose says. And many of them have begun to give us both the butterfly situation, as you do. This might be really cool. ”
Digg is making a comeback now. Rose is the chair, Ohanian, CEO of Mezel, who will be the advisor. (Rose and Ohanian are still venture capitalists, and their companies are investing in new ventures.) They purchased the domain and other assets from Money Group at a price they had taken home without disclosing. The site is restarting today, but only in a limited format. But its ultimate ambition is huge. Digg aims to build a community-first social platform that is essentially no longer present on the Internet. And the new founding team believes that AI could become the secret to pulling it off.
If you were on the internet long enough to remember an old digg, you already have a rough idea of how a new digg will work. Everything is based on content and links. Someone shares the link and people can comment on the link and vote. (If you like something, you “digg” it; the old “burial” down boat option has now disappeared.) The most popular one ends on the homepage.
Of course, there are many ways to talk about links on the internet. One of them, Reddit, continues to be extremely popular! The team is not shy about comparisons, but they believe that by improving their community engagement, they can build something that takes better care of their users without the all-cost requirement of being a public company. If Digg does this right, the homepage may feel like an old Digg, and everything else may feel like a better Reddit.
Rose says he and Ohanian are sure that both are the hardest methods. The real trick is, that what no one is doing right now is to give the community the tools they really need to work with. This is where AI appears. Much of the job of a moderator is to fight spam, review obvious policy violations, and litigate the pointless fight. “How can I remove cleaning work for moderators and community managers?” he says.
The real trick is to give the community the tools they need to actually operate
Rose said the new Digg includes many AI-Forward ways to organize and decide on content. He also hopes that AI can be used for fun. “I’m just making things here, but there’s everything from AI agents that convert your entire sub-community to Klingons to another agent that doesn’t allow certain types of blasphemy to what’s automatically automoderated.” Users can quickly build on the community by tapping on the AI model. “If we can create more dynamic canvases where agents are stacked on top, doing wild things, creating games and doing whatever the community wants to do, then we have something,” Rose says.
The new Digg should feel more like a community-driven art project than an old-fashioned internet forum if the team does the right thing. But Rose and Mezzell both say that everything depends on doing what users want. “One of the things I believe is that I created Reddit, a special place on the internet,” Rose says. Second, when you start sterilizing it, you are just an information aggregator. You are a flashy RSS leader voting for it. ”
According to Mezzell, one of the big challenges is coming up with ways to reward and promote users to do great work. Digg doesn’t show you how many followers you have because it creates bad incentives. It’s the same as being the most “doug” person on the platform. “There’s all these very simple systems that we already have to comment on systems, branches, etc. But even if we start from there, we can’t stop asking questions about how to really be insightful, how to give people respect for things that are really insightful and really encouragement and really interesting.” He doesn’t have the perfect answer to that yet, but he knows that it’s the key to getting it to work.
There are many more that the new DIGG team still doesn’t have the perfect answer. Rose and Mezzell both say several times each that they are essentially prototypes on sale today. There is a homepage, some sub-communities, some links, some comments, and it’s about it. The goal is to excite people that Digg is back. And both are introducing new platforms and building them together. “If you come on the first day,” says Rose, it’s 99.9% nostalgia and you’re like a slightly updated version of Digg that looks really cool. “If the new team ships as fast as Mezzell promises, then give it some time.
