Digg back from the dead

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has teamed up with former business rival Kevin Rose to relaunch Digg, a platform once dubbed “the homepage of the internet.”

Rose, who co-founded Digg in 2004 as a social news sharing service, approached longtime competitor Ohanian last year with a pitch: The two could use artificial intelligence to create an alternative to “toxic” and “hostile” social platforms.

The new Digg.com will aim to lure back users nostalgic for its earliest interface and an internet that didn’t amplify the loudest voice in the room, he said. 

The duo will relaunch Digg this week as a mobile-first platform with a design reminiscent of the site’s early days. The team also is beginning to develop AI tools that can aid human moderators in finding and sifting out problematic content. 

“If you have asked me over the last decade, ‘Would you ever want to reboot Digg?’ the answer was always no,” said Rose, who left the company in 2011 as Digg’s users flocked to Reddit and other social media entrants like Facebook and Twitter.

His reluctance to reengage “was quite frankly because we didn’t have anything new or novel to tackle some of these bigger issues,” like misinformation and hate speech. 

Advances in AI have changed that dynamic, Rose said in an interview. He envisions equipping community moderators with AI “so they’re less janitors” cleaning up the internet and instead “champions of good vibes.”

With this approach, he believes Digg could once again take on Reddit, which he sees as a “big, unchallenged competitor.” 

Though Digg’s design, brand and ownership has repeatedly changed over time, the latest pitch landed with Ohanian, who has long criticized how content promoting racism, violence and revenge porn has increasingly proliferated online.

“If you want to create a Nazi forum, there are tons of places you can find that on the internet,” Ohanian said in an interview. Digg, he hopes, will avoid being that by leaning on AI moderators. “Humans can’t be the solution —there’s not enough humans.” 

Ohanian and Rose, both of whom will serve on Digg’s new board, have put their own money into the project in addition to deploying investments from Ohanian’s venture capital firm, Seven Seven Six, and True Ventures, where Rose is a partner.

The duo declined to share how much they have raised for Digg’s relaunch. Justin Mezzell, a product designer who has worked with Rose, will serve as chief executive officer.

It’s not the only new venture for Ohanian — he’s also part of a bid to buy TikTok — but rebuilding Digg is an interesting project considering Ohanian’s role building a similar product at Reddit.

Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit in 2005, stepped down from the company’s board in 2020. 

The serial tech entrepreneurs also don’t have a near-term plan for making money from the site. Rose said the small team relaunching Digg will first focus on growing its user base.

Digg already has 500,000 to 700,000 people visiting its site each month, Rose said, and only once it has tens of millions of users will the company focus on monetization. 

Rose added that he’s not interested in typical advertising-focused business models, and is instead drawn toward models that take a commission from revenue generated by its community members, which is a model used by Substack. 

“This is our time for experimenting,” Rose said.