Reboot from early internet online community Digga one-time competitor to Reddithas progressed. Company, which is now back in the ownership of the original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, launched the open beta to the public on Wednesday.
Like Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from different communities and join other communities that match your interests. There, you can post, comment, and vote (or “digg”) the site’s content.
Originally a Web 2.0 news aggregation site, Digg was once worth $175 million in 2008 but was eventually overtaken by Reddit. The previous version was split up in 2012, with the largest share being sold to Betaworks incubatorwhile LinkedIn and The Washington Post took another cut. This is the iteration of Digg attract additional investment in 2016 but then sold to a digital advertising companies in 2018.
Meanwhile, Reddit keep growing is a community-focused site that has become common and now produce additional revenue of content licensing agreements with major players in AI, incl Google and OpenAI.
However, the rise of AI has given an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading to own Digg Last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and S32 venture firm. The company has not disclosed the funding.
He’s betting that AI can help solve some of the chaos and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms need new tools to ensure they are not taken over by AI bots posing as people.
“We obviously don’t want to force everyone to go down some crazy KYC process,” Rose said in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the “know your customer” verification process used by financial institutions to confirm people’s identities.
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Instead, he suggested that Digg should take “the little trust signals along the way and combine them all into something meaningful.”
Instead of just marking a verification check to determine trust, Digg will test new technologies, such as using proof of zero knowledge (a cryptographic method that verifies information without revealing the underlying data) to verify people using the platform. It may do other things, such as requiring people who join product-focused communities to verify that they actually own or use the products discussed there.
For example, the community for Oura ring owners can verify that everyone who submits it has proven that they own a smart ring.
In addition, Rose suggested that Digg could use signals obtained from mobile devices to help verify members — for example, the app could recognize when Digg users attend meetings in the same location.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a silver bullet here,” Rose said. “That’s all we’ll say…here’s a plate we can add to build confidence.”
Before today’s public beta launch, the site offered 21 public communities such as gaming, technology, and entertainment, and was open to 67,000 users by invitation only. Now anyone will be able to join and start their own community on any topic, regardless of niche – the highest demand from beta testers. Community managers (ie, moderators) for these individual forums will be able to set their own rules, and the moderation log will be shared publicly, so members can see the decisions made.
The site has also been redesigned since the private beta, now offering a new sidebar where you can pin your favorite communities and a main feed optimized for visual elements.
At launch, the community will only have one manager, but that will change over time, as the company adds more features, including to customize the look and feel and functionality of individual communities with integrations and other tools. For example, a movie review community can include scores from Mailbox.
“We kind of chose to … let’s just build this plane while we fly it,” explains Digg CEO Justin Mezzell. “That means it’s going to be very lightweight, and we’re going to ship aggressively every week and just add new features as we go,” he said.
The company also plans to listen to community managers about what they need and build, and has brought in several Reddit moderators as advisors. Although Reddit was built on the backs of volunteer moderators, Digg aims to find a model that improves the moderator experience. Plans ahead of this have not been finalized, but Mezzell said it “needs to be a conversation.”
“We have to find a way to make this a fair experience for everyone who really built Digg into what it was supposed to be,” he said.
In addition, the team is considering changing AI-generated podcasts about interesting stories that appear on Digg to a human-hosted version, as users have requested.
Rose told TechCrunch that the team is currently small, giving people “a year of runway” to find the right product-market fit.
“The beautiful thing about this launch is that we are finally in a place with Digg where it’s just that the basics are done, and now we can really start having fun,” he said.
Note: The launch should begin around 4 PM ET.