Can Digg unbury itself?

Digg — once a trove of internet gold — is mounting a comeback.

A shovel digging in the dirt next to a sprouting plant and Digg's logo.

The new Digg, helmed by founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, will attempt to harken back to Digg’s early-aughts days, per TechCrunch

Digg…

… was founded by Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson in 2004 as an aggregator for web content. 

The website peaked in 2008 — then worth $175m and welcoming 236m+ annual visitors — but suffered from a buggy redesign in 2010 that saw users flock to rivals Facebook and Reddit. 

Digg's ownership changed hands a few times until Rose and Ohanian — who left Reddit’s board in 2020 — announced they’d purchased it for an undisclosed amount in March. 

What are they gonna do? 

Rose has said that if he could do it all again, he’d aim for smaller changes over big redesigns and listen more to community feedback.

To that end, the new Digg will be mobile-first and start with simple features. In April, it launched “Groundbreakers,” an early-access community where, for a $5 donation to charity, members could get a “front-row seat” to Digg’s resurrection and secure their user names.

At the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference, Rose and Ohanian also revealed: 

  • While they’re not opposed to using AI for some tasks, they intend to use tech to ensure content is created by humans.
  • Digg will allow moderators and creators to monetize their contributions. 

That’s not a lot of info, but it comes at a time when even Pinterest is battling AI slop. Rose also criticized Reddit for trademarking “WallStreetBets,” taking ownership of a popular forum name versus appreciating its creator.

Digg also brought on Christian Selig, founder of Reddit-browsing app Apollo, as an advisor. Selig was particularly vocal about Reddit’s unpopular API decision ahead of its IPO. 

Will it work? 

Many platforms have tried to elicit the nostalgia of an aughts internet where X was Twitter, ads were more minimal, and AI was for sci-fi. And it seems to be working for Tumblr, founded in 2007.

For Digg, success likely lies in offering what made people love it — quality links and authentic human engagement — without a ton of bugs. Of course, it must also become sustainable without that other thing people hate about today’s platforms: extremely obtrusive ads. 

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