Digg Is Coming Back (Sort Of)

Digg, the dominant link aggregator of the mid-2000s, is attempting yet another comeback. Kevin Rose, one of Digg's original founders, has acquired the brand name for an undisclosed sum and is teaming up with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to build a new-ish social network. The plan was announced this morning in articles on Techcrunch and in the New York Times.

There aren't many concrete details in these articles about what the site will look like, though they do note it will use AI as a key moderation tool. "Online communities thrive when there’s a balance between technology and human judgment,” Ohanian told Techcrunch, adding that, "AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections." Rose surveyed current Reddit moderators in an attempt to learn what improved moderation tools could look like.

That's about it in terms of specifics—both pieces focus less on the tech and more on the founders themselves. But we do know the new Digg won't look like an "old school forum" according to Rose. He said that, in a few years, it "will be an interface that is unlike any other that you've seen." Whatever that means.

Digg was founded in 2004—more than two decades ago, an eternity in internet terms—by Rose and other collaborators. Reddit arrived on the scene around a year later, in 2005, founded by current CEO Steve Huffman, the late hacktivist Aaron Swartz, and Ohanian. The two websites fought to be the dominate link aggregator for a half-decade, a competition Reddit eventually won. One way of looking at this history is that Reddit ultimately won over users, though you could also argue that Digg destroyed itself: An extremely buggy and widely unpopular 2010 redesign, launched under Rose's leadership, prioritized the posts of certain contributors and ultimately led to a mass exodus of users. The site never recovered and was soon more or less sold off piecemeal in 2012.

How to sign up for early access to the new Digg

Invitations to the new version of the site will be sent in the next few weeks—you can sign up here to try it if you're curious. With any luck it won't just be yet another place to yell about screenshots taken from other social networks; the internet sure could use something that's actually new. Only time will tell, though.

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