Remember Digg? The once-upon-a-time go-to site for finding cool things on the internet recommended by an audience of peers? Well, it’s coming back, and owned by one of its original co-founders, along with a co-founder of Reddit.
When I first heard that Digg is back — or is coming back — I kinda got excited, even though I didn’t much care for the site back in the day. For a second or two, I thought that this could be one of those things that will bring some excitement and fun back to the online experience — after all, hardly anything defined Web 2.0 (remember that?) as much as Digg.
My excitement faded quickly, however, when I realized that most people aren’t even going to know what Digg is — or was actually — and if they do it’s just a hazy memory from their youth.
If you don’t know about Digg — styled all lower case as digg — it was a social platform that served primarily as a news aggregator, that is, as a way for people to share interesting stuff they found online.
Although these day’s it’s being compared primarily to Reddit, that’s only somewhat valid, even though in my memory its users could be equally as snotty and rude. Like Reddit, people posted links to stuff they’d found and users then voted those links up or down. You didn’t run a website from about 2005 until around 2010 without creating a way for your users to easily post your content to the site.
So now, Digg — at one time “the homepage of the internet” with 40 million monthly unique visitors — is being resurrected by one of its original founders, Kevin Rose, and by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who have spent an undisclosed amount to purchase the property.
“At various times over the years I had been approached to repurchase Digg; it never felt right,” Rose said in a statement released on Wednesday when the reboot was announced. “The technologies to solve our biggest pain points didn’t exist.”
Rebooting Web 2.0 for the AI Age
Onboard as the new venture’s CEO is Justin Mezzell, a product designer, who has a long history of working with Rose.
“We’re not here to clone what came before,” Mezzell wrote on LinkedIn at about the time the reboot was announced. “We’re not ‘the everything app’ or a new compulsive vanity metrics machine. We’re here to rethink how we show up in digital spaces; throwing out what’s worked against us and dreaming up new ways to celebrate contribution and community.”
For the rebooted version, which is going to start soon — at first at invitation only — they plan to add a hefty dose of AI into the mix.
Although it’s unclear how much user-facing AI agents will be integrated into the user experience, that doesn’t seem to be the big focus, at least for now. Mostly Rose and Ohanian are planning to let AI do much of the behind-the-scenes work to free the human staff to be more creative.
“Online communities thrive when there’s a balance between technology and human judgment,” Ohanian said, also in a statement in Wednesday’s press release. “We’re bringing Digg back to ensure that balance exists. Kevin and I are here to build something better than what social platforms are offering today. AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections. No one dreams of spending their day hunting down spam or playing content police – they want to create, connect, and build thriving communities. I’m all in on this chapter.”
The Return of the Digg Effect?
The things that Rose, Ohanian, and Mezzell are saying to describe their vision for the sound good, and if the site is successful could be a valuable asset, both for users of the internet who are increasing unhappy with the results being returned for search engine searches, and for small sites such as FOSS Force, which are finding it increasingly difficult — in spite of instituting SEO best practices — to get meaningful search placement in search results.
As an example, ten years ago somewhere around half of FOSS Force’s day-to-day traffic came from search engines, mostly Google, while these days we get a negligible amount of traffic from search. This trend evidently isn’t just confined to our site, as we hear the same from other small site owners. Also, from where I set, small websites don’t seem to be benefiting from the increasing us of generative AI for search.
This is a far cry from the first decade of the century, when not only were search engines putting small websites on something of an equal footing with highly funded websites in their results, but the online social landscape — with sites such as Digg and Slashdot — also drove traffic to sites such as FOSS Force. At one time, just the mention of an article or a website on Slashdot evoked the “Slashdot effect,” sending enough traffic to take unprepared small sites offline for a while.
At the height of its popularity, the same was true with Digg, which was known for it’s own “Digg Effect”. While it would be nice for this reboot to revitalize this sort of user response, it isn’t going to happen if the trio behind the reboot takes only a Field of Dreams inspired “build it and they will come” approach.
“With Alexis on board, we bring a shared history, a deep respect for online communities, and a new perspective on what the internet needs today,” Rose said. “Our goal isn’t just to honor Digg’s legacy as a trusted news source and discussion hub, but to evolve it. We believe users and moderators should have more control, transparency, and ownership over the communities they work so hard to build.”
I’m keeping my fingers crossed, with the hope that this will pan out.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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