Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian teams with Kevin Rose to resurrect Digg

The ambitious reboot, announced today, aims to create a community-first platform that uses AI to empower users and improve content moderation. Additional funding comes from True Ventures, which Rose recently joined as partner, and Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six.

Since their rival years, Rose and Ohanian have become business partners and friends. Ohanian also has made headlines this week after joining billionaire investor Frank McCourt’s bid to buy TikTok’s U.S. operations.

“I just hit him up and and we started chatting about the golden era of Web 2,” Rose told Digiday. “What we did right, what we did wrong, and what we would change today…This theme [emerged] of how can we use the current tech to really not only sand down a lot of the rough edges that are out there.”

Digg’s relaunch aims to blend nostalgia with innovation, combining the website’s early ethos with a mobile-first design and features like haptic feedback. The company also has a new CEO, Justin Mezzell, who was previously creative director of Yuga Labs, a Web3-focused company known for creating NFT communities like Bored Ape Yacht Club. Rose and Mezzell also are co-founders of Proof Collective, a private group of NFT collectors that Yuga Labs acquired last year.

Plans for Digg’s relaunch stem from Rose and Mezzell testing various AI tools, which led to wondering if AI could help curate quality content and online communities. What if they could use AI to solve some of the biggest issues that have plagued Digg, and the internet at large, since the early days?

An early Digg user, Mezzell remembers it as a vibrant place of discovery along with website like StumbleUpon and others: “Most of us were raised by the internet in one way or another.” When asked how the Web3 world might shape Mezzell’s vision for Digg, he said the goal is to make Digg more transparent about everything from how it moderates content to future plans for its product road map.

“The biggest part to me is my good memories of the internet [through] communities or the groups I’ve engaged with,” Mezzell said. “…But then I think about today’s current climate and about how social media feels. I used to use X all the time and now I don’t because it’s just outrage culture. It’s exhausting.”

Using AI and humans for Digg’s community and content

Two decades after Digg’s initial debut, major shifts are underway online. As search engines are adapting to AI-driven disruption, social platforms like Meta have pulled back from third-party fact-checking. There are also growing concerns about AI’s ability to moderate content — along with other issues to address like bias, transparency and copyright infringement.

The new Digg will use a combination of AI tools and humans for content moderation. Rose noted community managers and moderators have often been a “largely thankless job,” but he wants to rethink how it’s done and how it’s rewarded.

“Community moderators were largely just seen as unpaid janitors in some sense and just kind of cleaning up the crap and dealing with a lot of spam, death threats, hate, and all the bad parts of the internet,” Rose said. “Big tech public companies are all reaping the rewards of all this hard labor and effort [contributed by] an actual community of folks that are running it.”

To understand the frontlines of online community management, Rose even bought Reddit ads targeting moderator forums. He then used large language models to analyze thousands of answers about various pain points and feature requests. The feedback included requests for better filtering controls, automated moderation assistance and ways to tailor content environments based on community preferences.

Creating a new place for micro-communities

In the years after its early Reddit rivalry, Digg struggled to compete with more nimble startups. In 2008, it was reportedly in talks for a $200 million sale to Google. But four years later, Digg was divvied up. The engineering team was acquired by The Washington Post, LinkedIn bought more than a dozen Digg patents and its brand was sold to the tech accelerator Betaworks. The most recent owner is ad tech firm BuySellAds, which bought Digg in 2018.

“Honestly when [Reddit] sold to CondeNast [in 2006] we kind of thought we had won and then they spun it back out and did some pretty innovative things,” Rose recalled. “They were a much more nimble startup and we had already become this big giant that was too big to get out of our own way. They just ran circles around us.”

Digg knows it won’t gain its old throne overnight. In January, its website had nearly 3 million visits versus Reddit’s 3.84 billion visits, according to data from Similarweb. However, the plan is to create micro-communities focused on various topics to help people better understand information across the web. That’ll include mapping stories, identifying patterns, flagging misinformation and fostering community engagement.

So far, Digg hasn’t provided too many details yet about its tech, content, growth strategy, but the plan is to start rolling out features every few weeks over the first year. Potential features could include AI tools for curating news, translating text, building community-specific features and creative tools for customized designs.

When asked whether ads are part of monetization plans, Mezzel said Digg could explore them in the future. For now it’s “well capitalized,” but they’re already thinking about what future ad formats could look like, such as native ad formats for the website and for specific Digg communities.

Even if the “internet’s homepage” era has been replaced by a fragmented online communities, Digg could play a new role if can decide what corner it can serve best, said Sara Wilson, digital communities strategist and founder, SW Projects. For example, she said Digg might thrive if it creates a place for hyper-focused communities around certain topics that go beyond what people can currently find on TikTok or Reddit. (In 2020, Wilson coined the term “digital campfires” to describe small, community-driven online spaces such as private messaging groups, micro-communities like Subreddits.)

“That’s what I see as a really big opportunity in terms of what’s out there: to go deeper,” she said. “Everything else that we’re seeing is really — like the TikToks of the world — you’re getting a high-level taste of something. If you really want to find your people and go deeper, you’re probably going to need to go to a different platform to be able to do that. And what is that platform?”

https://digiday.com/?p=570895