restart Digg, an early Internet online community that was once a rival to Redditmoving forward. The company is now back under the ownership of original founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and will begin an open beta for the public on Wednesday.
Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse a feed featuring posts from your chosen community and join other communities that match your interests. There you can post, comment, and upvote (or “dig”) content on the site.
Digg was originally a Web 2.0-era news aggregation site that was once valued at $175 million in 2008, but was eventually overtaken by Reddit. This early version was split in 2012, with the largest stake sold to incubator Betaworks, and other parts acquired by LinkedIn and the Washington Post. This iteration of Digg attracted additional investment in 2016, but was subsequently sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.
Meanwhile, Reddit continues to grow as a community-focused site, and since going public, it now generates additional revenue from content licensing deals with major AI companies like Google and OpenAI.
But Rose and Ohanian believed the rise of AI was an opportunity to rebuild Digg, and they acquired Digg last March through a leveraged buyout between True Ventures, Ohanian’s company Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and venture firm S32. The company did not disclose the funding.
They are betting that AI can address some of the chaos and toxicity of today’s social media environment. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to avoid being taken over by AI bots masquerading as humans.
“We obviously don’t want to force some kind of crazy KYC process on everyone,” Rose said in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the “Know Your Customer” verification process used by financial institutions to verify identity.
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Instead, he suggests Digg should “pick up little signals of trust along the way and put them all together into something meaningful.”
Digg plans to experiment with new technologies, such as using zero-knowledge proofs (cryptographic techniques that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify users using the platform, rather than simply providing verification checkmarks to indicate trust. We may also do other things, such as requiring people who participate in our product-focused communities to verify that they actually own or use the products discussed there.
As an example, in our community for Oura ring owners, you can see that all posters have verified ownership of one of the smart rings.
Additionally, Rose suggested that Digg could use signals obtained from mobile devices to help verify members. For example, an app might be able to identify when a Digg user attends a meetup at the same location.
“I don’t think there’s a single silver bullet here,” Rose says. “This is just us saying…here’s an assortment of things that can be combined to create trust.”
Prior to today’s public beta launch, the site offered 21 more generalized communities such as gaming, technology, and entertainment, and was open to 67,000 users by invitation. Now, anyone can join and start their own community on almost any topic, even niche ones, which is the most requested by beta testers. Community managers (moderators) for these individual forums can set their own rules, and moderation logs are shared publicly so members can see what decisions are being made.
The site has been redesigned since its private beta, with a new sidebar where you can pin your favorite communities, and a main feed optimized for visual elements.
At launch, there will only be one manager for a community, but that will change over time as the company adds more features, including the ability to customize the look and feel and functionality of individual communities using integrations and other tools. For example, you can include Letterboxd scores in your movie review community.
“We made the choice to continue building this airplane as it flew,” explained Digg CEO Justin Mezzell. “That means it’s going to be very lightweight. We’re just going to ship aggressively and bring new features every week,” he added.
The company also plans to listen to what community managers need and build accordingly, and has brought on several Reddit moderators as advisors. Reddit was built by volunteer moderators, and Digg aims to find a model that improves the experience for moderators. However, plans on this front have not yet been fleshed out, but Mezzel said, “We need to talk about it.”
“We need to find a way to make this a fair experience for everyone who is actually trying to build Digg into what it should be,” he said.
Additionally, the team is considering migrating AI-generated podcasts about interesting stories emerging on Digg to a human-hosted version in response to user requests.
Rose told TechCrunch that the current team is small and finding product-market fit “will take years.”
“The great thing about this launch is that we’re finally at a point where the fundamentals of Digg are done and we can really start having fun,” he said.
Note: The rollout should start around 4:00 PM ET.
