{"id":423190,"date":"2026-01-19T12:13:20","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T12:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/423190\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T12:13:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T12:13:20","slug":"digg-relaunches-from-the-grave-with-some-ai-enhancements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/423190\/","title":{"rendered":"Digg Relaunches From the Grave With Some ‘AI Enhancements’"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you find yourself nostalgic for an earlier era of the internet, you may welcome the news that after spending the last decade or so being passed between owners like a Christmas present no one wants, Digg<\/a>\u2014the site that was Reddit before Reddit\u2014has been relaunched, with its new incarnation now in open beta.<\/p>\n

Digg pioneered the idea of an aggregation site where users could vote on the merits of links shared by other users. It launched a year before Reddit, and the two sites fought for supremacy throughout the mid- and late-2000s before the combination of an ill-conceived 2010 redesign<\/a> and an increasing tendency<\/a> to highlight content from a small number of sources tipped the balance against Digg for good.<\/p>\n

Now, original co-founder Kevin Rose is back to try again; along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, he re-acquired the site last year. Why? Well, Techcrunch\u2019s report<\/a> on the purchase described Rose\u2019s sadness at seeing the internet having \u201cbecome toxic, messy, and riddled with misinformation,\u201d and explained that \u201c[Rose and Ohanian] believe the rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly refreshing to see at least one pair of tech types pushing back against AI and taking a stand against the deluge of poisonous nonsense that the rise of consumer LLMs has dumped onto the intern\u2014sorry, what? Oh. Ohhhhhhh.<\/p>\n

No, as it turns out, Digg\u2019s resurrection isn\u2019t some sort of brave stand against the machine.<\/p>\n

Instead, as the 2025 press release<\/a> announcing Rose and Ohanian\u2019s purchase made clear, their vision for fixing the damage that AI is doing to the internet involves turning to \u2026 AI: \u201cDigg is primed to set itself apart from other platforms by focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative.\u201d<\/p>\n

You wouldn\u2019t know this from reading Digg\u2019s \u201cAbout\u201d page<\/a>, mind you. That page doesn\u2019t mention AI at all. Instead, it promises to \u201cbring back social discovery built by communities, not by algorithms.\u201d Nor would you know it from the experience of using the new site. This is perhaps a testament to the success of the vision that Ohanian outlined in last year\u2019s press release, in which he opined, \u201cAI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections.\u201d The company isn\u2019t getting into all the details of how AI is being used at the moment, but it appears to have something to do with cutting down on human moderators. Rose said last year that \u201cwe\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

So with all that out of the way, what\u2019s it like using Digg in 2026? Well, as someone partial to old Digg\u2014it always seemed like Betamax to Reddit\u2019s VHS\u2014the new site is very much like the original version. Digg was always more polished than Reddit, and its new incarnation remains so. Given that the site is in beta, there aren\u2019t many communities to choose from, and new users\u2019 feeds are populated with content from the 21 generic communities with which the site launched, but the site promises that this is as far as algorithmic curation will go: \u201cYou decide which communities you\u2019ll join, and that\u2019s what appears in your feed. It\u2019s that simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the discussion so far is about Digg itself, with users debating the merits of the new UI<\/a>, discussing how to address spambots<\/a>, and indulging in good old-fashioned nostalgia<\/a>. Amusingly, one of the top questions<\/a> in the \/digg subreddit community is about how to opt out of the site\u2019s AI-driven \u201cTLDR\u201d feature, which displays pop-up summaries of the contents of links, and its AI-hosted podcast. As per Mashable<\/a>, Digg\u2019s management has heard user feedback on the latter and is now pondering whether to stoop to \u201cbringing in human hosts\u201d for the show.<\/p>\n

The very fact that this is even a question to consider is a reminder of just how much the internet\u2014and, indeed, the world\u2014has changed. When Digg launched for the first time in 2004, podcasts barely existed; the term itself was coined that same year, and iTunes didn\u2019t support podcast subscriptions until 2005. It seems like a tall order for one of the original Web 2.0 sites to flourish again in the dark days of Web3, but given the ongoing problems<\/a> at its biggest competitor, it\u2019s not impossible\u2014and hey, these are halcyon days<\/a> for zombies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you find yourself nostalgic for an earlier era of the internet, you may welcome the news that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[34822,64,63,218980,153225,203,2579,105],"class_list":["post-423190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-alexis-ohanian","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-digg","tag-kevin-rose","tag-mobile","tag-reddit","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}