Digg Relaunches From the Grave With Some ‘AI Enhancements’

If you end up nostalgic for an earlier period of the web, chances are you’ll welcome the information that after spending the final decade or so being handed between homeowners like a Christmas current nobody desires, Digg—the location that was Reddit earlier than Reddit—has been relaunched, with its new incarnation now in open beta.

Digg pioneered the thought of an aggregation web site the place customers might vote on the deserves of hyperlinks shared by different customers. It launched a 12 months earlier than Reddit, and the 2 websites fought for supremacy all through the mid- and late-2000s earlier than the mixture of an ill-conceived 2010 redesign and an increasing tendency to focus on content material from a small variety of sources tipped the stability towards Digg for good.

Now, authentic co-founder Kevin Rose is again to attempt once more; together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, he re-acquired the location final 12 months. Why? Nicely, Techcrunch’s report on the acquisition described Rose’s disappointment at seeing the web having “grow to be poisonous, messy, and riddled with misinformation,” and defined that “[Rose and Ohanian] consider the rise of AI has introduced a chance to rebuild Digg.”

It’s definitely refreshing to see not less than one pair of tech varieties pushing again towards AI and taking a stand towards the deluge of toxic nonsense that the rise of shopper LLMs has dumped onto the intern—sorry, what? Oh. Ohhhhhhh.

No, because it seems, Digg’s resurrection isn’t some type of courageous stand towards the machine.

As a substitute, because the 2025 press release saying Rose and Ohanian’s buy made clear, their imaginative and prescient for fixing the injury that AI is doing to the web includes turning to … AI: “Digg is primed to set itself other than different platforms by specializing in AI improvements designed to boost the consumer expertise and construct a human-centered different.”

You wouldn’t know this from studying Digg’s “About” page, thoughts you. That web page doesn’t point out AI in any respect. As a substitute, it guarantees to “carry again social discovery constructed by communities, not by algorithms.” Nor would you recognize it from the expertise of utilizing the brand new web site. That is maybe a testomony to the success of the imaginative and prescient that Ohanian outlined in final 12 months’s press launch, by which he opined, “AI ought to deal with the grunt work within the background whereas people deal with what they do greatest: constructing actual connections.” The corporate isn’t entering into all the main points of how AI is getting used in the intervening time, however it seems to have one thing to do with slicing down on human moderators. Rose stated final 12 months that “we’ve hit an inflection level the place AI can grow to be a useful co-pilot to customers and moderators, not changing human dialog, however fairly augmenting it, permitting customers to dig deeper, whereas on the identical time eradicating loads of the repetitive burden for neighborhood moderators.”

So with all that out of the way in which, what’s it like utilizing Digg in 2026? Nicely, as somebody keen on previous Digg—it all the time appeared like Betamax to Reddit’s VHS—the brand new web site could be very very like the unique model. Digg was all the time extra polished than Reddit, and its new incarnation stays so. Provided that the location is in beta, there aren’t many communities to select from, and new customers’ feeds are populated with content material from the 21 generic communities with which the location launched, however the web site guarantees that that is so far as algorithmic curation will go: “You determine which communities you’ll be part of, and that’s what seems in your feed. It’s that straightforward.”

A lot of the dialogue thus far is about Digg itself, with customers debating the deserves of the new UI, discussing how one can handle spambots, and indulging in good old school nostalgia. Amusingly, one of many top questions within the /digg subreddit neighborhood is about how one can decide out of the location’s AI-driven “TLDR” function, which shows pop-up summaries of the contents of hyperlinks, and its AI-hosted podcast. As per Mashable, Digg’s administration has heard consumer suggestions on the latter and is now pondering whether or not to stoop to “bringing in human hosts” for the present.

The actual fact that that is even a query to contemplate is a reminder of simply how a lot the web—and, certainly, the world—has modified. When Digg launched for the primary time in 2004, podcasts barely existed; the time period itself was coined that very same 12 months, and iTunes didn’t help podcast subscriptions till 2005. It looks as if a tall order for one of many authentic Internet 2.0 websites to flourish once more at nighttime days of Web3, however given the ongoing problems at its greatest competitor, it’s not not possible—and hey, these are halcyon days for zombies.