Sometime last fall, Kevin Rose started thinking seriously about Digg again. A smidge over two decades ago, he’d launched a social and link sharing website that, for years, was known as “the homepage of the internet.” Since then, Digg had been through several owners and many pivots, Rose had gone on to several other careers, and the internet had moved on. Rose had thought about building something like Digg again, and had even been approached to buy back the domain and website a few times, but the timing had never been right.
This time, though, things started to click. Rose and a group of what he calls “brainstorming partners,” which included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, design and product exec Justin Mezzell, and even folks like Blogger and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, started to talk about whether AI might be able to help them build a better social platform. “I would call Alexis up and we would chat,” Rose says, “and we’d be like, ‘hey, what if, what if, what if?’ And a lot of those things started giving us both that butterflies-in-the-stomach situation, where you’re like, ‘oh, this could be cool. This could be really cool.’”
Now, Digg is making a comeback. Rose will be its chair, Mezzell its CEO, and Ohanian an adviser. (Both Rose and Ohanian are also venture capitalists now, and their firms are investing in the new venture.) They bought the domain and other assets from Money Group for a price they wouldn’t disclose and are bringing it back. The site is relaunching today, but only in a limited form. Its ultimate ambitions, however, are enormous: Digg aims to build the kind of community-first social platform that basically no longer exists on the internet. And its new founding team thinks AI could be the secret to pulling it off.
If you’ve been on the internet long enough to remember the old Digg, you already have a rough idea of how the new Digg will work. Everything is based on content and links: someone shares a link, and people can comment and vote on the links. (If you like something, you “Digg” it; the old “Bury” downvote option is now gone.) The most popular stuff ends up on the homepage — which Rose and Mezzell tell me they hope will once again be the homepage of the internet — but there will also be countless smaller communities surfacing and sharing stuff in their own niche.
There are, of course, plenty of ways to talk about links on the internet. One of them, Reddit, continues to be very popular! The team isn’t shy about the comparison but thinks that by better engaging with the community, and without the growth-at-all-costs requirements of being a public company, they can build something that takes better care of its users. If Digg does this right, the homepage will feel like Old Digg, and everything else might feel like Better Reddit.
Rose says he and Ohanian are both convinced — and both learned the hard way — that the real trick, the thing nobody has yet done properly, is to give the communities the tools they actually need to operate. This is where AI comes in. So much of a moderator’s job, Rose says, is just grunt work: fighting spam, reviewing obvious policy violations, litigating pointless fights. “How can we remove the janitorial work of moderators and community managers,” he says, “and convert what they do every day into more of a kind of ‘director of vibes, culture and community’ than someone that is just sitting there doing the laborious crappy stuff that comes in through the front door?”
The real trick is to give the communities the tools they actually need to operate
The new Digg, Rose says, will include lots of AI-forward ways to sort through and make decisions on content. He also hopes AI can be used for fun. “I’m just making stuff up here, but there’s everything from an AI agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon, to another one where you don’t allow a certain type of profanity and that’s automatically auto-moderated.” Users will be able to tap AI models to build stuff right in their communities, too. “If we can create more of a dynamic canvas where agents are layered on top to assist, to help, to do wild things, to create games, to do whatever that community wants them to do, then we have something,” Rose says.
The new Digg, if the team does it right, should feel more like a community-driven art project than an old-school internet forum. But Rose and Mezzell both say the whole thing depends on doing what users want — and nothing else. “One of the things that I believe that made Digg, and makes Reddit, a special place on the internet,” Rose says, “is that there are humans behind the scenes with real opinions, real conversation, real stories that they find interesting. The second you start to sterilize that, you’re just an aggregator of information. You’re a fancy RSS reader with some voting on it.”
One big challenge, Mezzell says, is figuring out how to reward and promote users for doing good work. Digg won’t show how many followers you have because that creates bad incentives; same with competing to be the most-“Dugg” person on the platform. “There are all these very simple systems that we already have, for commenting systems and branching and all that stuff. But even if we start there, we cannot stop asking the question about how to give people the respect for being really insightful, for being really encouraging, for being really funny.” He doesn’t have a perfect answer for it yet, but he knows that’s key to making it work.
There’s a lot more that the new Digg team doesn’t have a perfect answer for yet. Rose and Mezzell both say, a few times each, that what’s launching today is essentially a prototype. It’ll have a homepage, a few sub-communities, some links, some comments, and that’s about it. The goal is to get people excited that Digg is back, and then both introduce them to the new platform and build it alongside them. “If you come on day one,” Rose says, it’s 99.9 percent nostalgia and you’re like, damn, this is like a slightly updated version of Digg that looks really cool.” Give it some time — maybe even just a few weeks, if the new team ships as fast as Mezzell promises — and it’ll be something different.
