The Return of Digg, a 2.0 web star

In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a technological entrepreneur, sent an email to his colleague Steve Huffman with a sinister matter: “Know the enemy.”

The email body contained only one line: a link to DIGG, a social message board focused on the community where people shared and discussed news articles and links to other sites that seemed interesting to them. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman, who had founded a similar effort called Reddit, established their competitive views in Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.

In the 20 years since then, these entrepreneurs have been carried out in other projects and, in the true fashion of Silicon Valley, submerged in other parts of the technology. Along the way, Digg, who went from popular to no, almost died.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he had bought Digg for an unleashed sum of Money Group, a digital media company, and would rebuild him to face Reddit. And he is doing it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.

“This is the perfect time to visit this idea with new eyes,” said Rose, 48, now a risky risk of True Ventures, in an interview. He said that social networks had become so omnipresent that “it is not necessary for everything to win,” and added that “we do not need to knock Reddit to win.”

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are relating Digg when social networks are in tumult. Elon Musk, who bought twitter in 2022 and renamed him x, has turned the platform into a mirror of himself. Goal, owner of facebook and instagram, is focusing more on the video to compete with Tiktok. And Reddit, which was made public a year ago, has added characteristics of the game to push users to spend more time on the site, and more time looking at advertising.

In the midst of this disorder, Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian felt the opportunity to reinvent Digg in a way that could reduce some of the traps of modern social networks and focus on “connection and humanity” online.

“The world has changed a lot in recent years,” said Mr. Ohanian, who left the Reddit Board in 2020, in an interview. “When Kevin told me that I was buying Digg, there was a part of me that I thought:” Well, curse, could we do it again? “

Not long ago, Digg was at the top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was among a class of early social news sites, such as Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Reddit, which was based on a community of unpaid users to cure articles or themes of interest of the entire website. Digg stood out for its robust base user base, which regularly returned to the site.

The company raised dozens of millions of dollars and offered Google acquisition offers and others. In 2006, Mr. Rose posed for a photo now Infamous on a cover of Businessweek, wearing a wide smile and giving two thumbs up, with the headline “how this child won $ 60 million in 18 months.” (Mr. Rose hated the photo).

The cover proved to be malfada. Digg then launched a redesign of his site that his community greatly rejected. Users finally went into mass, just like executives. Mr. Rose left Digg in 2012. That same year, the company was divided and Sold by pieces to betawaysLinkedIn and The Washington Post.

In contrast, Reddit became a viable business. Mr. Huffman, who had left the site for other projects, returned in 2015 and stabilized the company. Now 41 years, he has made Reddit's Faire content moderation policies once strict, leading advertisers, who adopt the site.

Some of these changes generated a violent reaction. Some Reddit moderators of “Subnetdits”, the forums dedicated to topics such as guitars or basketball or cute puppies, said they felt neglected by management. In 2023, hundreds of Subnetdits darkened after several executive decisions bother the moderators, threatening Reddit's business.

Seeing the uproar, Mr. Rose, who had ventured into investment and new companies, decided to act. He was anxious to return to his roots in social and community sites, he said, and always lamented the way things had ended with Digg.

“I remember how that company went, and I was very afraid to defend me in many cases,” Rose recalled. “I just didn't have maturity to get out and ask the questions difficult.”

Mr. Rose began to lay the foundations for a return of Digg. He ran thousands of dollars in specific Reddit ads with detailed questionnaires for moderators, asking about the greatest difficulties that supervises the subnets and other problems. He performed the results through an artificial intelligence program to think about new ways of addressing problems.

“These moderators are coming their lives in this,” he said. “We believe we can do better.”

He also approached Mr. Ohanian, with whom he had joined on the scars of managing his platforms. Mr. Ohanian said he had “all love” for his former company. “At the end of the day, Reddit was a great part of my life,” he said.

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian raised an unrelated amount of funds to repurify Digg and build a new version of the company. Its investors include True Ventures, where Mr. Rose is a partner, and Seven Seven Six, a risk firm founded by Mr. Ohanian.

They also hired less than a dozen engineers and designers for the new DIGG and brought Justin Mezzell, a very time collaborator of Mr. Rose, to be executive director. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian will join the Digg Board, with Mr. Rose as president.

They said that the invitations to the new DIGG will be distributed in the coming weeks, and the site will be directed mainly to people on mobile devices. ai will also play a more important role in making Digg more accessible to users, Rose said. For example, he said, a community of science fiction enthusiasts could translate their discussions to Klingon, the language used by the “Star Trek” alien race of the same name. IA tools can also help reduce spam, erroneous information and harassment, he said.

Less glamorous, but perhaps the most important thing will be their attention to moderators. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Rose said they wanted to train moderators with better tools to help keep communities online, which maintains the cozy site for users.

“What we never focused on is on the back -end,” said Ohanian, referring to the tools and characteristics in which moderators support. “But it is the back -where it really matters.”

The initial reaction to DIGG relaunch can be silenced, Rose said, and some people will probably see the resurrection as a nice wink to a retro version of the social network. But it has great plans, he said.

“Because there are so many giants in this space that they will be slow to move, it means that we can be agile,” Rose said. “We will not have everything we want Digg to be day 1. But in a year, we will have a very different conversation.”