Why these former rival founders are teaming up to revive Digg

Mid-aughts news aggregator Digg is making a comeback, thanks to a pairing that would have seemd unlikely when the site debuted in 2004: Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former corporate rival, Reddit cofounder and former CEO Alexis Ohanian. The pair bought Digg from its prior owners Money Group in early 2025 for an undisclosed sum. The deal was supported by True Ventures, which counts Rose as a partner, as well as Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six fund.

They know this is an unlikely pairing. “I really disliked you for a long time,” Ohanian told Rose during an interview with Fast Company. “Reddit had raised $12,000 at YC. We felt like outsiders. Here was a tech celebrity who had VC funding, was in Silicon Valley . . . This was the birth of the new web 2.0 era. And he was getting the press, he was getting the funding.”

The animosity was mutual. “When I first heard about Reddit, I remember somebody was like, oh, there’s this site that does voting like you guys do,” Rose recalled. “And I went to the site, and I was like, oh, those motherfuckers—they just copied our shit. And I was pissed.”

Two decades later, Reddit is a publicly traded company with a $28 billion market capitalization and reigns supreme as the true “front page of the internet,” while Digg is a footnote in mid-aughts internet history. Rose has spent much of the time since Digg investing in companies—his fund has poured money into Fitbit, Peloton, and Ring, among others.

Over the years, however, Rose and Ohanian met and realized they had a lot in common and struck up a friendship. Now, Ohanian, who resigned from the Reddit board in 2020, is ready to help revive a company that he long warred with. He and Rose, along with Digg’s new CEO, web3 entrepreneur Justin Mezzell, want to reimagine social media, creating what they describe as an online ecosystem with better “vibes” than today’s combative platforms.

Reviving Digg from obscurity

Digg launched in 2004 where users could “digg” or “bury” content—similar to Reddit’s upvote and downvote system—a crowdsourced way to determine what made the site’s homepage. At its peak in 2009, Digg had about 44 million users and was a major driver of traffic to news organizations. After a messy redesign in 2010 alienated users, the site lost users and never really recovered. 

It was sold to the incubator Betaworks in 2012 for a reported $500,000 despite raising $45 million from venture capital. (Though LinkedIn bought its assets and patents for a rumored $4 million while the Washington Post hired much of its staff.) 

It was later sold to an adtech firm called BuySellAds in 2018 and then Money Group, which was its final steward before this sale. Despite numerous relaunches, Digg never recaptured its place in internet glory or its cultural relevance. 

Improving the internet’s vibe

Rose and Ohanian share a common critique that today’s social media landscape has become toxic and exhausting. They simply want to bring good vibes back to the social web—if that’s possible.

“Dude, it’s the vibes. Nostalgia is so hot right now,” Ohanian told me. “We’re in our early 40s. We’ve got kids. Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. I am nostalgic for the internet— forums, essentially. Forums taught me how to fix my computer. Strangers on the internet when I was a dorky teenager were willing to teach me things with their time because of this very simple software.”

The internet he said was smaller and “felt less broken.”

Rose wants to use artificial intelligence to handle the “janitorial work” of content moderation, freeing community members and leaders to handle more fulfilling tasks. They didn’t expand on this vision, but content moderation has been a hot topic of late with Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, aggressively rolling back its content moderation policies after Twitter, now X under Elon Musk, did the same.

“The dream is you can build a viable, healthy, great business with your users in a way that aligns their goals, their outcomes,” Ohanian said. “That is the dream scenario.”

An aggregator for a new era

The new Digg will depart from social media conventions in several ways, though Rose is hesitant to disclose much of what the team is working on. He does share that the site won’t have follower counts, an intention to move away from what he calls “popularity contests” that are common on social media.

He also wants to give community members more ownership over their audiences, but didn’t give specifics how. “It’s insane to me that someone would spend five years of their life building up a community of millions of members and have basically no ownership over that community,” he said. The site will ultimately have what Rose called “good vibes, throwback, fresh coat of paint” that’s familiar to original Digg users but modernized for 2025.

Digg will roll out invitations to the platform in the coming weeks and Rose said he wants to grow the site’s user base, which he says currently stands at 600,000 monthly users, to 20 million before committing to a specific revenue model (Twitter competitor Bluesky managed to gain 30 million followers in roughly a year from launch.) Rose says until then, the company is “well capitalized.”

Rose says he doesn’t want to replace social media, but give a different experience and new ideas—even if they’re reminiscent of the past. “This is not about you reading a headline three months from now that Digg has replaced Reddit,” he says. “That’s not the goal here. It’s to reimagine what’s possible.”

Ohanian adds that the intent is about more than just a nostalgia play. “Even on day one, I hope someone who’s never been to Digg is like, this feels fun. The internet can be fun.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91291036/whey-these-former-rival-founders-are-teaming-up-to-revive-digg?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss