The rebooted version of Digg’s News Aggregator will take part in testing and you’ll be able to see what Reddit competitors, built in the AI era, are in store for the first time.
At its height in 2008, Digg’s site was valued at $175 million, but was split up after 10 years and sold for parts. In March, former Digg founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian teamed up to regain the brand and reinvent the site for a new generation of internet users.
The founders believe the internet is full of bots and AI agents, creating a demand for online communities like Digg, who fosters real human connections. They also said they are considering using technology to establish ownership like zero knowledge proof, along with other tools that allow them to post conversations and see if someone is human before joining the conversation.
On Friday, Digg launched the iOS app for testers, part of the groundbreaker community of early adopters. The app under Alpha testing will first see the direction the restarted Digg is heading.
The app itself has a nice design, with a navigation bar at the bottom that moves through various parts of the service, such as home feed, search, leaderboards, and user profile pages.
Like Reddit, Digg offers you a selection of feeds that allow you to view the content of your site in a variety of ways. There is a feed to see the most popular content on the site (most dougs), the latest, trending, and “heated” content. These filters can be used in all of the DIGG or in your own feed. It is based on the community that follows.
Unlike Reddit, there are only a handful of communities to participate in for the time being, including those focusing on interests such as art, entertainment, sports, finance, food, music, science, technology, and more, as well as questions (AMA) and chatting about Digg itself. (The company says its ability to create communities will be rolled out in later tests.)
When users share posts with these different communities, others can support them, vote, save their posts, and leave a comment.
Under the post, Digg uses AI to summarise the content of the article. This news summary trend is prevalent in other apps such as Artifact sold on Yahoo, as well as modern news readers like Particle. However, some publishers are wary of implementing them on their own sites, as AI-based news overviews can be hits or misses.
Digg has yet to add other AI summary tools, like the ability to explain stories in both sides and in simpler formats, like “I explain them like 5”, as the previous AI news app did.
Digg uses icons similar to hand shovels when trying to distinguish between Reddit’s upvote and down boat buttons. However, this design still requires work. As some have pointed out, it is not clear which icons are intended to be a for or down vote. The icon can be read either way.
The app also features user profiles with BIOS, statistics, posts and achievements. For example, users can earn “jewels” by first digging into trending posts across the platform. The earlier you discover and dig these posts, the more gems you will earn.
The mobile app also has leaderboards that highlight daily top posts, comments and gem-finders, but Digg says it is responding to user feedback and dialing gamification elements on your desktop.
More importantly, Digg learns from past mistakes and makes new leaderboards timebound. That means it refreshes every 24 hours.
In previous versions of Digg on the Web 2.0 ERA, Digg’s leaderboards were dominated by certain individuals and subsequently had a major impact on trends. Users who organized the page to promote or fill in, began charging them to get stories to the front page.
A rebooted Digg may want to avoid these types of issues, including app leaderboards, but you may receive the wrong message.
What’s yet to prove that the new app is, especially considering it’s alpha, is why I leave Reddit to use digg instead. Digg allows users to create their own community and customize it to their preferences, making it in time for that push.
Rose suggested at the recent AMA that Digg would like to turn his eyes to AI and support more community design.
“We see the world where we are finally having conversations with the LLM built into Digg.
