Restarting it the early online community of the Internet Diggonce a rival of Redditproceeds. The company, which is now back under the ownership of its original founder Kevin Rose along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, is launching its open beta to the public on Wednesday.
Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds of posts from its various communities and join other communities that align with your interests. There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or “dig”) the site’s content.
Originally a Web 2.0-era news aggregator site, Digg was once valued at $175 million in 2008, but eventually surpassed Reddit. That previous version was split in 2012, with its biggest stake being sold to incubator Betaworks, while LinkedIn and the Washington Post took other pieces. This iteration of Digg attracted additional investment in 2016, but was later sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.
Meanwhile, Reddit continued to grow as a community-focused site that has since gone public and is currently generating additional revenue from content licensing deals with major players in AI, including Google and OpenAI.
But the rise of artificial intelligence presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to buy Digg last March in a leveraged buyout from True Ventures, Ohanian’s company Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding.
They’re betting that AI can help deal with some of the clutter and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social media platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they are not taken over by AI bots posing as humans.
“Obviously we don’t want to force everyone to go through some crazy KYC process,” Rose told TechCrunch, referring to the “know your customer” verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone’s identity.
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Instead, he suggests Digg takes “little trust signals along the way and puts them all together into something meaningful.”
Instead of simply offering verification marks to determine trust, Digg will test new technologies, such as using evidence of zero knowledge (cryptographic methods that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify the people using its platform. It could also do other things, such as requiring people participating in a product-focused community to verify that they actually own or use the product being discussed there.
For example, a community for Oura ring owners could verify that everyone who posts has proven they own one of the smart rings.
Additionally, Rose suggests that Digg could use signals acquired from mobile devices to help verify members — for example, the app could recognize when Digg users have attended a meeting at the same location.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a single silver bullet here,” Rose said. “We’re just going to say… here’s a platter of things you can add together to build trust.”
Before today’s public beta launch, the site offered 21 more general communities, including gaming, technology and entertainment, and was open to 67,000 invite-only users. Now anyone will be able to join and create their own communities on almost any topic, no matter how niche — a top request from beta testers. Community managers (ie, moderators) for these individual forums will be able to set their own rules, and their moderation logs will be shared publicly so members can see what decisions are being made.
The site has also been redesigned since its private beta, now offering a new sidebar where you can pin your favorite communities and a main feed optimized for visuals.
At launch, communities will have just one admin, but that will change over time as the company adds more features, including those to customize the look and feel and functionality of individual communities with integrations and other tools. For example, a movie review community could include scores from Mailbox.
“We chose… let’s continue to build this airplane as we fly it,” explained Digg CEO Justin Mezel. “That means it’s going to be very light and we’re just going to ship aggressively every week and just give them new features as we go along,” he added.
The company also plans to listen to its community managers about what they need and build accordingly, and has hired some Reddit moderators as consultants. While Reddit was built on the backs of volunteer moderators, Digg aims to find a model that improves the moderator experience. However, plans on that front haven’t been finalized yet, but Mezzell said it “has to be a conversation.”
“We have to find a way to make this a fair experience for everyone who builds Digg into what it needs to be,” he noted.
In addition, the team is considering turning the AI-generated podcast about interesting stories that appear on Digg into a human-hosted version, as requested by users.
Rose told TechCrunch that the current team is small, giving them “catwalk years” to find product-market fit.
“The beautiful thing about this launch is that we’re finally at the point with Digg where the basics are done and now we can really start having fun,” he said.
Note: Disposition should begin at approximately 4:00 p.m. ET.
