Restarting the publication of the Social Site Digg aims to restore the spirit of the old tissue at a time when the content created by AI threatens to crush traditional social media platforms, drowning the voices of real people.
This presents the opportunity to build a social website for the AI era, where people who create content and manage online communities take a greater share of the success of a platform, the founders of Digg believe.
A web 2.0 news giant, Digg once valued at $ 175 million in 2008 and is now given new life under the guidance of its original founder, Kevin Rose and co -founder Reddit Alexis Ohanian. The two recently worked to announce a new vision of Digg, which will focus on enhancing discovery and community, how the early internet once allowed.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal’s Future of all Conference on Thursday, the founders offered a more picture of how they plan to achieve this goal by restarting Digg.
Initially, the two touched the problems they encountered in the previous days of social media, with Ohanian reminding how he chose to resign from the Reddit Board of Directors of the company’s disagreement on the company’s approach to the speech of hate that felt it was bad for society.
For example, the company allowed a Forums to Reddit called “R/Watchpeopledie” to continue operating until the Christchurch Mass Shooting, which dives the attention of the media, he said. Only then did Reddit decide to adapt its policies to violence and Gore to the platform.
After Reddit, Ohanian continued to be at the business capital of seven seven six, which says he focuses on building businesses that are more aligned with values. “He said he sees Digg as another step in that direction.
Rose is reflected in the early days of mechanical learning, where technology was often used to reward the positions in which people would take the “most vague, kind of marginal contempt”, he said.
“Sometimes this may be good, but often it really pushes really weird age and that is not even to get bot and AI on the whole side of things that also push these daily provisions,” Rose said.
With Digg, the founders want to create a new community that focuses on the service of real people, not ai or bots, they said.
“I have long enrolled in” Theory of the Dead Internet “, said Ohanian, referring to the idea This much of what we see on the internet is not created by real people, but bots. Ten years ago, this was more of a conspiracy theory, but with AI’s rise, it changed, he said. “Probably in recent years – after we have blown up beyond the Turing test – [the dead internet theory] It’s a very real thing. ”
“I think the average person has no idea how much of the content they consume in the social media, if it is not a final bot, he is a man who uses AI in the loop to create this content on a scale, to handle and to avoid,” he added.
To cope with the rise of bots, the founders are looking for new technology, such as Zero -knowledge receipts (Aka Zk Proofs), a protocol used in cryptography that could be used to prove that someone holds something on a platform. They envision communities where managers could turn the selectors, speak, to verify that a poster is human before allowing them to participate in the discussion.
“People are going to flood with bots, AI agents,” Rose said, and this could penetrate communities where people are trying to make genuine human connections. This has recently happened to Reddit, where Researchers have secretly used AI bots to put as real people In a forum to try how AI could affect human opinion.
“We will live in a world where the enormous, overwhelming majority of the content we see is in … some form or form created by AI and is a terrible user experience if the reason you come to one place is for authentic human connection and is not with humans-or is with people who disguise as people,” he said.
He explained that there are several ways that social spaces could try to see if someone is a person. For example, if one owns the device for a longer period of time, this could add more weight to their comment, they suggested.
Rose said the space could also offer different levels of service, based on how likely someone would be.
If you register with an e -mail address and used a VPN, for example, then you might only get recommendations or participate in some simpler ways. Or if you were anonymous and typed in a comment very quickly, the site could then ask you to take an extra step to prove your humanity – as to verify your phone number or even charge you a small fee if the number you gave was available, Rose said.
“There will be these levels we make, based on how you want to join and interact with the network itself,” he confirmed.
However, the founders stressed that they were not anti-Ai. They expect to use AI to help areas such as the moderation of the space, including escalation situations where one begins to cause problems.
In addition to verifying people, the founders envision a service where coordinators and creators benefit financially from their efforts. “I believe that the days of unpaid moderation from the masses-doing all the heavy elevation to create mass communities of many millions of citizens-must leave, I think these people put their lives and their souls in these communities and not to be upset.
As an example, he pointed out how Reddit is in the term “Wallstreetbets” which is the name of a forum created by a Reddit user. Instead, Rose believes that a company should help creators such as the one who adds value to a community, not to try to take on their own job as Reddit did.
With the combination of improved users’ experience and a model that enables creators to generate revenue from their work, the founders believe that Digg himself will benefit. “I want to believe that the business model that will make Digg successful is what aligns all these stakeholders and I think it is very likely,” Ohanian said.
