Digg is back from the dead. Again.
Just months after launching, Kevin Rose’s reboot of the once-popular link-sharing site shut down in March as the company changed course. Originally redesigned as a competitor to the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it was unable to effectively manage the bot traffic invading its platform and hadn’t differentiated itself enough from the competition to make an impact.
The startup has laid off staff and said it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Rose, a partner at True Ventures, returned to work full-time on a new version of Digg in April.
On Friday afternoon the founder preview a link to the newly redesigned Diggwhich now looks less like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was.
This time, the site is focusing on ranking news — specifically, AI news for starters.
In an email to beta testers, the company said the site’s goal is to “track the most influential voices in a space” and surface the news that’s really worth “paying attention to.” Artificial intelligence is where it’s testing this idea, but if it’s successful, Digg will expand to include other topics.
The email cautioned that the site was still raw and “buggy” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut.
On the current home page, Digg presents four main stories at the top: the story with the most views, a story with increasing discussion, the story with the fastest climb, and an “In case you missed it” headline.
Below is a ranked list of the day’s top stories, with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren’t generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg ingests content from X in real time to determine what’s being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what’s most important.
As Rose noticed in X, When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tackles a story about AI, it almost always sets off a chain reaction involving deep discussion and dissemination of that topic across X. The new Digg will be able to track this increased engagement.
This might be something of interest to data nerds, as it exposes the impact of X-based engagement with charts and graphs, and offers a way to monitor the signal among what, in X, often causes a lot of noise. But it’s not clear if there’s enough underlying value here for an everyday user, beyond seeing that yes, @sama Tweeting can make something go viral.
The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and politicians focused on AI issues.
For those who don’t have the time to devote to following X in breaking AI news, Digg could prove to be a useful resource. However, it’s not clear why people would regularly return to Digg for their favorite news app, RSS reader, or even their “For You” X feed if they wanted to stay up-to-date on what was trending — especially since there’s currently no discussion on the Digg site.
Digg may also struggle when it moves into other topics, as AI news is one of the few areas where there’s still strong discussion on X. Other industries don’t have the same traction, especially after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter created an ecosystem of competitors, which now includes creator-focused Meta Threads. Many non-tech discussions now take place off X, or off the public internet altogether.
But if Digg ends up gaining steam, it could serve as a useful source of website traffic for publishers whose businesses have been decimated by declining clicks thanks to Google’s changing algorithms and the impact of AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that Google displays at the top of search results, which often answer users’ questions before they click on a website.
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