Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, 41, has joined forces with former rival Kevin Rose, 48, to revive Digg, a social and link-sharing website Rose founded in 2004 — it was divided up and sold for parts to Betaworks, LinkedIn, and The Washington Post in 2012. The two intend to infuse the new Digg with AI content moderators, a move not yet implemented by Reddit.
The Digg of 2004 allowed users to share links that others could “digg” and upvote or “bury” and downvote, creating a place for trending news. Users could comment on links too, with the most popular content ending up on the homepage.
In its heyday, Digg attracted 40 million monthly unique users, but after a 2010 update removed the “bury” button, users revolted and left the site in droves, leading to its demise.
Ohanian and Rose announced on Wednesday that they are relaunching Digg as a mobile-first platform, with invites to the new Digg rolling out to users in the coming weeks. The webpage for Digg’s reboot shows that over 175,000 people have signed up to get early access to it at the time of writing.
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According to Bloomberg, Justin Mezzell, a product designer who previously worked at Code School and RevenueCat, will be Digg’s new CEO. Ohanian and Rose will serve on the board of directors.
The team bought Digg’s domain and assets from Money Group for an undisclosed sum, and have received investments from Ohanian-founded venture capital (VC) firm Seven Seven Six, as well as True Ventures, a VC firm where Rose is a partner. They declined to disclose how much they had raised, per Bloomberg.
Alexis Ohanian. Photo by Patrick Smith/Athlos/Getty Images for Athlos
Plans to revive Digg started when Rose reached out to Ohanian last year with the idea of a new Digg that could use AI to help fight spam and moderate content. According to The New York Times, Rose determined where AI could help Digg by spending thousands of dollars on targeted ads on Reddit, a comparable platform, to ask moderators about their biggest challenges.
“These moderators are pouring their lives into this,” he told The Times. “We think we can do it better.”
Rose told The Verge that he envisions Digg using AI for “everything from an AI agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon,” a fictional language in the Star Trek universe, “to another one where you don’t allow a certain type of profanity and that’s automatically auto-moderated.”
Ohanian, who served on Reddit’s board until 2020, stated in a press release that AI will take on the background “grunt work” of fighting spam and filtering through content on Digg while human moderators focus on “building real connections.”
“I’m all in on this chapter,” Ohanian stated.
Digg is a direct competitor to Reddit, a $30 billion company with 101.7 million daily active unique users as of its February earnings report. Reddit has made AI a priority, signing a $60 million deal with Google in February 2024 that allowed the tech giant to train its AI on Reddit content and following up with a similar deal with OpenAI in May 2024.
Reddit has a built-in moderation system called AutoModerator that automatically goes through posts to check to see if they violate community policies. Though the platform introduced an AI-powered safety feature in March 2024 to detect online harassment, it does not yet have AI agents working as moderators and has not stated if it is working on implementing them, per Business Insider.
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