reboot of early internet online community digReddit’s one-time rivalMoving forward. The company, which has today returned to 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 a feed containing posts from its featured 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 aggregation site, Digg was valued at $175 million in 2008, but was eventually overtaken by Reddit. That older version was divested in 2012, with its largest stake sold to incubator Betaworks, while LinkedIn and The Washington Post bought other parts. This version of Digg attracted additional investment in 2016 but was later sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.
Meanwhile, Reddit kept growing As a community-focused site that has since gone public and is currently generating additional revenue from content licensing agreements with major players including A.I. Google And OpenAI.
However, the rise of AI is what Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe presents an opportunity to reinvent Digg, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian and venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding.
They’re betting that AI can help remove some of the dysfunction and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they aren’t taken over by AI bots posing as people.
“We obviously don’t want to force everyone into some kind of crazy KYC process,” Rose said in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the “Know Your Customer” verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone’s identity.
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Instead, he proposes that Digg should “pick up little signs of trust along the way and stitch them all together into something meaningful.”
Instead of just offering verification checkmarks to designate trust, Digg will try to use new technologies zero-knowledge proof (cryptographic methods that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify people using your platform. It can also do other things, like require people joining a product-focused community to verify that they actually own or use the product being discussed there.
For example, a community for Ora ring owners could verify that everyone posting has proven they have one of the smart rings.
Additionally, Rose suggests that Digg could use signals received from mobile devices to help verify members — for example, the app could recognize when Digg users attended a Meetup at the same location.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a single silver bullet here,” Rose said. “All we’re saying is…here’s a platter of things you can put together to build trust.”
Before today’s public beta launch, the site offered 21 more generalized communities like gaming, technology, and entertainment, and was open to 67,000 users on an invitation-only basis. Now anyone will be able to join and start their own community on almost any topic, no matter how specific – a top request from beta testers. Community managers (i.e., 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 been redesigned since its private beta, now introducing a new sidebar where you can pin a main feed customized to your favorite communities and visual elements.
At launch, communities will only have one manager, but this will change over time as the company adds more features, including integrations with other tools and customizing the look and feel and functionality of individual communities. For example, a movie review community might include scores of Letterboxd.
“We kind of made a choice … let’s keep building this plane while we keep it flying,” said Digg CEO Justin Maizel. “That means it will be very lightweight, and we will be aggressively shipping every week and adding new features as we go.”
The company also plans to listen to its community managers about what they need and build accordingly, and it has brought on some Reddit moderators as advisors. Although Reddit was built around volunteer moderators, Digg’s goal is to find a model that improves the moderator experience. Although plans have not yet been revealed on this front, Maizel said it “should be discussed.”
“We need to figure out a way to make it an equitable experience for everyone that’s really making Digg what it needs to be,” he said.
Additionally, the team is considering moving its AI-generated podcasts about interesting stories unfolding on Digg to a human-hosted version, as users have been requesting.
Rose told TechCrunch that the current team is small, giving them “years of runway” for product-market fit.
“The beautiful thing about this launch is that we’ve finally gotten to a place with Digg where just the basics are done and now we can really start having fun,” he said.
Note: The rollout should begin around 4PM ET.
