Digg is getting another revival, this time with an injection of AI

Digg is getting another reboot with two of the most prominent names of the Web 2.0 era leading the charge. Founder Kevin Rose has bought it back for an undisclosed sum. Rose’s partner in this endeavor is a very interesting one. Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit — which was at one point the site’s biggest rival — acquired Digg alongside Rose.

They surely have hopes that Digg can go toe-to-toe with Ohanian’s former company once again. According to a press release, Rose and Ohanian “have teamed up to revive the social platform with a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be.”

The former rivals plan to tap into their knowledge of what did and didn’t work at Digg and Reddit over the years to help make the relaunch a success. Rose and Ohanian, both now venture capitalists, have also been meeting with community leaders from online forums (including Reddit) to try and better understand what gets in their way or frustrates them in order to address those factors in the new Digg. The new Digg will have a mobile-first approach too.

Since this is 2025, of course there’s an AI element here. The plan is to make Digg distinct from other services by “focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative.” Rose suggested to The New York Times that AI could help with moderation and allow for fun quirks, like translating a discussion among sci-fi enthusiasts into Klingon.

"At various times over the years I had been approached to repurchase Digg; it never felt right. The technologies to solve our biggest pain points didn't exist," Rose said. "Just recently we've hit an inflection point where AI can become a helpful co-pilot to users and moderators, not replacing human conversation, but rather augmenting it, allowing users to dig deeper, while at the same time removing a lot of the repetitive burden for community moderators".

Justin Mezzell, an experienced product design exec and a longtime collaborator of Rose’s, is CEO of Digg. Rose is the company’s board chair and key advisor. Ohanian also sits on Digg’s board and will be an advisor.

Digg has had a long and winding road to get to this point. It was an early darling of the social media era as it went toe-to-toe with Reddit to curate the best of the internet through submissions from users, who would upvote (or Digg) the things they liked to push it further up the homepage — similar to how Reddit works. However, Digg's early success gave way to attempts to game the system, while a contentious 2010 redesign caused a mass exodus of users to Reddit.

The company was sold off in parts in 2012, with LinkedIn and The Washington Post Company buying some aspects. A startup studio and venture capital company called Betaworks bought the Digg brand and relaunched it as a site where editors curated the content.

That approach continued on until now, even after Digg was sold to an advertising company in 2018. The most recent version of Digg was still pretty solid, as it continued to offer a nice blend of curated material from around the web as well as some original writing from its editors.

There were some hints that Rose was getting back in the Digg mix. After several years away, Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht resumed their Diggnation podcast last year. In December, a post on the Digg X account showed a screenshot of the app's icon with a bubble indicating that there were 3825 notifications. The same number is in the X account's header image. Some have taken that as a hint that the relaunch will take place on March 8 (3/8/25). In any case, Rose suggested the plan is to start small and ramp up Digg's features in the coming months. 

Here’s hoping that, as part of this revival, the company reanimates Digg Reader, a much-missed RSS reader from the Betaworks era. And while we’re bringing new life to staples of the Web 2.0 era, for the love of all that is well and good in this world, can someone please bring back StumbleUpon too?

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/digg-is-getting-another-revival-this-time-with-an-injection-of-ai-161205428.html?src=rss https://www.engadget.com/apps/digg-is-getting-another-revival-this-time-with-an-injection-of-ai-161205428.html?src=rss