Twenty years after it was founded, Digg is coming back, in a bid to “bring the fun back” to the internet.
Digg founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian are backing the deal, which will see Rose serve as chairman and Justin Mezzell lead as CEO.
“When the three of us got together we were like hot damn there’s enough here to go cook and create something very unique,” says Rose in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Rose says that the new Digg is in part a reaction to the current state of the web, where chaos and viral content (true or not) often reign supreme.
“Digg started in 2004 and the internet was a very different place back then. To watch what’s happened with social media and this idea that the microphone can be handed to anyone and oftentimes the loudest person in the room wins, has created a bit of chaos,” Rose says. “Some of it’s interesting in that we’re seeing the true side of humanity in some regards that we didn’t get to see before or was tucked away or hidden, but there’s also a lot of people that want to connect and share and gather around topics of interest in a way that is thoughtful and constructive and creates real lasting friendships.”
Mezzell says that the new Digg (look for a preview at SXSW, where Rose and Alex Albrecht will host a special episode of their show Diggnation) will lean on “nostalgia,” at least at first.
“We’re launching with a very limited tool set, and that is intentional,” Mezzell says. “And the reason why is we want people who remember Digg to be able to get in and say, ‘hey, this feels familiar,’ this feels like a different time when it was awesome to log into Digg and be like, ‘what are people into today? What are people talking about? What’s the fun stuff?’”
“But we also know that that is not going to buy us a very long amount of time,” he adds. “If we kept it there and kept it only feeling like old Digg, I think that the initial nostalgia bump would be really nice, but within two weeks you’d be like, ‘yeah, I think there was a reason we all kind of stopped using it over time.’ So there are steps that we’re taking to and they’re very intentional steps that we have mapped out right now, some of them are strong opinions loosely held, that we think that this is the roadmap that we want to take and that the community is going to shape that dynamic in some big ways.”
One thing that the new Digg will lean on is artificial intelligence innovations, which will be used to supplement the work of human moderators.
“The thing that’s interesting these days in terms of kind of restoring some of the original vibes of Digg and making it a more productive and safer place for people to connect is that we have a whole slew of technologies at our disposal now that we just didn’t have back then,” Rose says. “This stuff is really interesting in that we’re finally able to transition this into this world of moderators where instead of them being the janitors and the police, they can hopefully lean on a little bit more of the AI to do this heavy lifting for them so that they can be the director of good vibes and restore a lot of the positive things that came out of social media.”
“Online communities thrive when there’s a balance between technology and human judgment. We’re bringing Digg back to ensure that balance exists,” adds Ohanian in a statement. “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.”
Mezzell says that platforms like Reddit and Discord have underscored the desire for digital consumers to engage in smaller more targeted communities, but that the exiting platforms aren’t quite meeting their needs.
“A really big impetus for us thinking about ‘why now?’ is at the end of the day the new mainstream is niche,” Mezzell says. “I think about my kids and the stuff they’re into and there’s not the same notion of this is the only thing that exists here, this is what the mainstream is. Now it’s like indie is just as big as the larger labels. I mean Anora just won [the Oscar for best picture].”
“We’re not here just to make a Reddit clone,” Rose adds. “It is all about letting these communities come in and say ‘hey I am a part of this these are the things that matter to me.’ It can be everything from content moderation to the way that the site looks and functions. That should be something that is very flexible and very extendable in a way that has just never been done before. And if we can do that and take the burden off of content moderation and all of the janitorial work, we’ll have a new type of arena for people to come in and make meaningful connections, which ultimately is the kind of environment we want to build.”
And the new Digg will have one more distinguishing feature that Rose, Ohanian and Mezzell hope will separate it from some of the other competitors. While the company has raised enough cash to give it a nice long runway to build off of (terms were not disclosed, though True Ventures and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six are investors), once Digg starts monetizing, it intends to give a part of the economic growth over to the community it forges.
“I can say that the ideas that we have around monetization are certainly a lot more in the camp of not turning a blind eye to all the hard work and effort that the community builders and moderators are putting into the system and making sure that they’re brought along for the ride,” Rose says. “I think it’s ridiculous that you can have massive corporations that are being built on the backs of the effort of free labor and not let them have one, ownership in some sense over those communities and two, ways to monetize those communities.”
Original Source: Read More Here
