Digg relaunches with AI enhancements to compete as a toxicity-free Reddit rival

Digg Relaunches From the Grave With Some 'AI Enhancements'

For all the people who've abandoned or been kicked off Reddit, your Bluesky moment has arrived. If you find yourself nostalgic for an earlier era of the internet, you may welcome the news that after spending the last decade or so being passed between owners like a Christmas present no one wants, Diggâ€"the site that was Reddit before Redditâ€"has been relaunched, with its new incarnation now in open beta. Digg pioneered the idea of an aggregation site where users could vote on the merits of links shared by other users. It launched a year before Reddit, and the two sites fought for supremacy throughout the mid- and late-2000s before the combination of an ill-conceived 2010 redesign and an increasing tendency to highlight content from a small number of sources tipped the balance against Digg for good. Now, original co-founder Kevin Rose is back to try again; along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, he re-acquired the site last year. Why? Well, Techcrunch’s report on the purchase described Rose’s sadness at seeing the internet having “become toxic, messy, and riddled with misinformation,†and explained that “[Rose and Ohanian] believe the rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg.†It’s certainly refreshing to see at least one pair of tech types pushing back against AI and taking a stand against the deluge of poisonous nonsense that the rise of consumer LLMs has dumped onto the internâ€"sorry, what? Oh. Ohhhhhhh. No, as it turns out, Digg’s resurrection isn’t some sort of brave stand against the machine. Instead, as the 2025 press release announcing Rose and Ohanian’s purchase made clear, their vision for fixing the damage that AI is doing to the internet involves turning to â€| AI: “Digg is primed to set itself apart from other platforms by focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative.†You wouldn’t know this from reading Digg’s “About†page, mind you. That page doesn’t mention AI at all. Instead, it promises to “bring back social discovery built by communities, not by algorithms.†Nor would you know it from the experience of using the new site. This is perhaps a testament to the success of the vision that Ohanian outlined in last year's press release, in which he opined, “AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections.†The company isn't getting into all the details of how AI is being used at the moment, but it appears to have something to do with cutting down on human moderators. Rose said last year that "we've hit an inflection point where AI can become a helpful co-pilot to users and moderators, not replacing human conversation, but rather augmenting it, allowing users to dig deeper, while at the same time removing a lot of the repetitive burden for community moderators." So with all that out of the way, what’s it like using Digg in 2026? Well, as someone partial to old Diggâ€"it always seemed like Betamax to Reddit’s VHSâ€"the new site is very much like the original version. Digg was always more polished than Reddit, and its new incarnation remains so. Given that the site is in beta, there aren’t many communities to choose from, and new users’ feeds are populated with content from the 21 generic communities with which the site launched, but the site promises that this is as far as algorithmic curation will go: “You decide which communities you’ll join, and that’s what appears in your feed. It’s that simple.†Much of the discussion so far is about Digg itself, with users debating the merits of the new UI, discussing how to address spambots, and indulging in good old-fashioned nostalgia. Amusingly, one of the top questions in the /digg subreddit community is about how to opt out of the site’s AI-driven “TLDR†feature, which displays pop-up summaries of the contents of links, and its AI-hosted podcast. As per Mashable, Digg’s management has heard user feedback on the latter and is now pondering whether to stoop to “bringing in human hosts†for the show. The very fact that this is even a question to consider is a reminder of just how much the internetâ€"and, indeed, the worldâ€"has changed. When Digg launched for the first time in 2004, podcasts barely existed; the term itself was coined that same year, and iTunes didn’t support podcast subscriptions until 2005. It seems like a tall order for one of the original Web 2.0 sites to flourish again in the dark days of Web3, but given the ongoing problems at its biggest competitor, it's not impossibleâ€"and hey, these are halcyon days for zombies.

Digg launches public open beta as toxicity-free Reddit rival

Digg, rebooted by founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, launched its public open beta on Wednesday to compete with Reddit. The platform uses AI-driven trust tools to curb toxicity and bots, enabling users worldwide to join via website or mobile app. The new Digg functions like Reddit, providing a website and mobile application where users browse feeds of posts from various communities. Users join communities matching their interests, post content, comment on submissions, and upvote items using the term "digg." This structure supports community-driven content discovery and interaction. Digg originated as a Web 2.0-era news-aggregation site. In 2008, the company reached a valuation of $175 million. Reddit eventually surpassed Digg in popularity and user engagement during that period. By 2012, the original Digg underwent a split. Betaworks acquired the largest stake as an incubator. LinkedIn and The Washington Post obtained other portions of the business. This version attracted further investment in 2016. In 2018, a digital-advertising company purchased Digg. Reddit, in contrast, expanded as a community-focused platform. The site went public and now earns revenue through content-licensing deals with AI companies, including Google and OpenAI. In March 2024, Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian reacquired Digg via a leveraged buyout. Participants included True Ventures, Ohanian's firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and venture firm S32. The funding amount remains undisclosed. Rose and Ohanian view the rise of AI as a chance to reconstruct Digg. They aim to mitigate the messiness and toxicity prevalent in current social media. The platform incorporates tools to block takeover by bots masquerading as humans. "We obviously don't want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process," Rose stated in an interview with TechCrunch. He referred to the know-your-customer verification standard used by financial institutions to confirm user identities. Rather than imposing strict identity checks, Digg collects "a little signals of trust along the way and bundle them all together into something that's meaningful," Rose suggested. This approach avoids simple verification checkmarks. Digg experiments with zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic techniques that confirm information without exposing the underlying data. These methods verify user authenticity while preserving privacy. The platform requires verification of product ownership or usage for product-focused communities. For instance, in a community for Oura ring owners, posters prove possession of the smart ring before contributing. Digg also leverages signals from mobile devices for verification. One method detects when multiple Digg users attend a meetup at the same physical location. "I don't think there's going to be any one silver bullet here," Rose explained. "It's just going to be us saying ... here's a platter of things that you can add together to create trust." Prior to the public beta, Digg ran a private beta with 21 generalized communities, covering topics such as gaming, technology, and entertainment. Access limited to 67,000 invite-only users allowed testing of core features. The public beta, launched on Wednesday around 4 PM ET, opens to everyone. Users create communities on any topic, including niche subjects, fulfilling a key request from private beta participants. Community managers, equivalent to moderators, establish rules for their forums. They publish moderation logs publicly, allowing members to review decisions transparently. The redesign introduces a sidebar for pinning favorite communities. The main feed prioritizes visual content for improved browsing. At launch, each community features a single manager. Upcoming updates add multiple managers, customization of appearance and functionality, and third-party integrations. A movie-review community, for example, integrates Letterboxd scores directly. CEO Justin Mezzell described the development strategy: "We kind of opted for ... let's just keep building this plane as we fly it." He added, "That means that it be very lightweight, and we're just going to be aggressively shipping every week and giving them new features as we go." Weekly feature releases maintain a lean platform. Digg consults community managers for input on needed improvements. The company recruited Reddit moderators as advisers to enhance the moderator experience. Reddit relies on volunteer moderators, but Digg seeks a superior model. Specific plans remain under development. Mezzell emphasized, "It has to be a conversation." He continued, "We need to figure out a way to make this an equitable experience for everybody who's actually building Digg into what it needs to become." The team evaluates replacing its AI-generated podcast, which covers notable Digg stories, with a human-hosted version. This change responds to user feedback from the beta. Rose described the current team as small, providing "years of runway" to achieve product-market fit. He noted, "The beautiful thing about this launch is we're finally at the place with Digg where it's just that the foundational stuff is done, and now we can really start having fun."