Touting the return of Digg sounds like a bit of a stretch The return of Star Trek. It wasn’t exactly gone, and hey, Wasn’t it “back” just a year ago? Well, Digg always seems to come back without ever leaving, but this time it’s back as an AI news aggregator.
The title “Hello again” is currently being written Digg.com home page. The text on the page directs you di.gg/ai (“dih-dot-guh-slash-AI,” maybe), the new tentpole space in the Digg universe where you’ll find links to AI stuff like “Papers, issues, topics, and (and) hot moves flying faster than anyone can keep up with,” says a page text signed by Digg CEO Kevin Rose.
This should not be understood as the entirety of the final reboot. “AI is the first vertical. More to come,” Rose writes.
Digg kind of got off to a false start, will be launched in January of this year after being reacquired last year by its original founder, Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. His press release at the time Digg said it will “focus on artificial innovations designed to enhance the user experience and innovate,” leaving behind other platforms. human-centered an alternative, one that favors transparency, rewards human effort, and enriches debate. Then about two months ago, that version closed and laid off many of Digg’s employees.
Now we have di.gg/ai. Currently, di.gg redirects to this, so the entire platform is in effect. It’s a bare, beige news feed with a “Featured” section at the top. Each story is accompanied by a set of circled images that appear as a token of community interest—X avatars of users who have posted about a given story on X. According to TechCrunchnew Digg captures and analyzes popularity and sentiment to manage Digg.
Digg’s story has been digested into Internet history as something like this: “It was an early version of Reddit, later surpassed when the real Reddit emerged, defeated by a better one, and has been in obscurity ever since.” This popular account is misleading and obscures Digg’s role in shaping the internet during one of its most entertaining times.
“The Digg Effect” was one of the original terms for crashing your servers when the content was so viral – we later came to call it “cracking the internet”. Before Digg, there were similar events, notably “Slashdot effect,” but that was mostly just for poindexters. Digg’s innovation was the “Digg This” button. Major publications like the New York Times.
20 years ago, it felt massively innovative, and it represented the simplest way for casuals and normals alike to experience the vastness of the online world. Yes, the story The fall of Digg and the accompanying rise of Reddit is legendary (his 2014 makeup less so), but thanks to the rise of “Likes” clearly tracked from the “Digg This” button, we all still live in the “democratized” world that Digg helped create.
This latest version of Digg also has a certain undeniable elegance; Personally, I haven’t seen anything that makes this clear, and it makes sense at first glance. But this iteration of Digg doesn’t feel like it’s about to change the internet as we know it.
