Digg is trying again, but this time as an AI-powered news aggregator

This time, the site is focusing on categorizing news — specifically, AI news to start.

In an email to beta testers, the company said the site’s goal is to “track the most influential voices in the space” and show stories that are actually worth “paying attention to.” Artificial intelligence is an area where it is testing this idea, but if it succeeds, Digg will expand to other topics.

The email warned that the site was still raw and “buggy,” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut.

On the current homepage, Digg displays four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, the story with increasing discussion, the fastest-rising story, and one “in case you missed it” headline.

Below is a ranked list of the day’s top stories, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But what’s interesting is that these metrics are not the ones created on Digg itself. Instead, Digg ingests content from X in real time to determine what’s being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and mention detection to determine what’s most important.

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This might be something interesting for data nerds, because it reveals the impact of X-based interaction with charts and graphs, and provides a way to track signal among what can be a lot of noise on X. But it’s unclear whether there’s enough fundamental value here for the everyday user, other than seeing that a @sama tweet can make something go viral.

The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and top politicians focusing on AI issues.

For those who don’t have enough time to spend on X tracking breaking news related to AI, Digg can be a useful resource. But it’s not clear why people would regularly turn to Digg via their favorite news app, an RSS reader, or even a “For You”

Digg may also struggle when it moves into other topics, since AI news is one of the few areas where discussions remain intense on Many non-technology discussions now take place outside of X, or outside the general Internet altogether.

However, if Digg ends up gaining more traction, it could serve as a useful source of website traffic for publishers whose businesses have been decimated by a drop in clicks thanks to Google’s changing algorithms and the influence of AI Overviews, the artificial intelligence-generated summaries that Google displays at the top of search results, which often answer users’ questions before they click through to a website.