Digg launches public open beta as toxicity-free Reddit rival
Digg, rebooted by founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, launched its public open beta on Wednesday to compete with Reddit. The platform uses AI-driven trust tools to curb toxicity and bots, enabling users worldwide to join via website or mobile app.
The new Digg functions like Reddit, providing a website and mobile application where users browse feeds of posts from various communities. Users join communities matching their interests, post content, comment on submissions, and upvote items using the term “digg.” This structure supports community-driven content discovery and interaction.
Digg originated as a Web 2.0-era news-aggregation site. In 2008, the company reached a valuation of $175 million. Reddit eventually surpassed Digg in popularity and user engagement during that period.
By 2012, the original Digg underwent a split. Betaworks acquired the largest stake as an incubator. LinkedIn and The Washington Post obtained other portions of the business. This version attracted further investment in 2016. In 2018, a digital-advertising company purchased Digg.
Reddit, in contrast, expanded as a community-focused platform. The site went public and now earns revenue through content-licensing deals with AI companies, including Google and OpenAI.
In March 2024, Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian reacquired Digg via a leveraged buyout. Participants included True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and venture firm S32. The funding amount remains undisclosed.
Rose and Ohanian view the rise of AI as a chance to reconstruct Digg. They aim to mitigate the messiness and toxicity prevalent in current social media. The platform incorporates tools to block takeover by bots masquerading as humans.
“We obviously don’t want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process,” Rose stated in an interview with TechCrunch. He referred to the know-your-customer verification standard used by financial institutions to confirm user identities.
Rather than imposing strict identity checks, Digg collects “a little signals of trust along the way and bundle them all together into something that’s meaningful,” Rose suggested. This approach avoids simple verification checkmarks.
Digg experiments with zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic techniques that confirm information without exposing the underlying data. These methods verify user authenticity while preserving privacy.
The platform requires verification of product ownership or usage for product-focused communities. For instance, in a community for Oura ring owners, posters prove possession of the smart ring before contributing.
Digg also leverages signals from mobile devices for verification. One method detects when multiple Digg users attend a meetup at the same physical location. “I don’t think there’s going to be any one silver bullet here,” Rose explained. “It’s just going to be us saying … here’s a platter of things that you can add together to create trust.”
Prior to the public beta, Digg ran a private beta with 21 generalized communities, covering topics such as gaming, technology, and entertainment. Access limited to 67,000 invite-only users allowed testing of core features.
The public beta, launched on Wednesday around 4 PM ET, opens to everyone. Users create communities on any topic, including niche subjects, fulfilling a key request from private beta participants.
Community managers, equivalent to moderators, establish rules for their forums. They publish moderation logs publicly, allowing members to review decisions transparently.
The redesign introduces a sidebar for pinning favorite communities. The main feed prioritizes visual content for improved browsing.
At launch, each community features a single manager. Upcoming updates add multiple managers, customization of appearance and functionality, and third-party integrations. A movie-review community, for example, integrates Letterboxd scores directly.
CEO Justin Mezzell described the development strategy: “We kind of opted for … let’s just keep building this plane as we fly it.” He added, “That means that it be very lightweight, and we’re just going to be aggressively shipping every week and giving them new features as we go.” Weekly feature releases maintain a lean platform.
Digg consults community managers for input on needed improvements. The company recruited Reddit moderators as advisers to enhance the moderator experience. Reddit relies on volunteer moderators, but Digg seeks a superior model.
Specific plans remain under development. Mezzell emphasized, “It has to be a conversation.” He continued, “We need to figure out a way to make this an equitable experience for everybody who’s actually building Digg into what it needs to become.”
The team evaluates replacing its AI-generated podcast, which covers notable Digg stories, with a human-hosted version. This change responds to user feedback from the beta.
Rose described the current team as small, providing “years of runway” to achieve product-market fit. He noted, “The beautiful thing about this launch is we’re finally at the place with Digg where it’s just that the foundational stuff is done, and now we can really start having fun.”