Digg launches its new Reddit competitor to the public

Reboot Early internet community Digg, a one-time Reddit competitorcoming forward. The company, which today returned to the ownership of its original founder Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, will launch its open beta to the public on Wednesday.

Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds containing posts from a selection of its communities and join other communities that match your interests. There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or “dig”) site content.

Originally a news aggregator site in the Web 2.0 era, Digg was valued at $175 million in 2008, but was eventually overtaken by Reddit. This predecessor was split up in 2012, with the largest stake sold to incubator Betaworks, while LinkedIn and The Washington Post acquired other pieces. This iteration of Digg attracted additional investment in 2016 but was later sold to a digital advertising company in 2018.

Meanwhile, Reddit has continued to grow as a community-focused site that has since gone public and currently generates additional revenue from content licensing agreements with major players in AI, including Google and OpenAI.

However, the rise of artificial intelligence has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through an acquisition backed by True Ventures, Ohanian’s firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and venture firm S32. The company did not disclose its financing.

They’re betting that AI can help address some of the chaos and toxicity in today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they are not taken over by AI bots pretending to be people.

“Obviously we don’t want to force everyone to follow some kind of crazy KYC process,” Rose said in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the know-your-customer verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone’s identity.

Instead, he suggests that Digg picks up “small signals of trust along the way and pieces them together into something meaningful.”

Instead of simply introducing verification tags to set trust, Digg will try new techniques, such as using zero-knowledge proofs (encryption methods that verify information without revealing underlying data) to verify people using its platform. It can also do other things, like asking people who join a product-focused community to verify that they already own or use the product being discussed there.

For example, the Oura ring owner community can verify that everyone who posts has verified that they own one of the smart rings.

Additionally, Rose suggests that Digg could use signals obtained from mobile devices to help verify members — for example, the app could determine when Digg users have attended a meeting in the same location.

“I don’t think there’s going to be one silver bullet here,” Rose said. “We’ll just say…here’s a bunch of things you can add together to build trust.”

Before today’s public beta launch, the site offered 21 more general communities such as gaming, technology, and entertainment, and was open to 67,000 users on an invite-only basis. Now anyone will be able to join and start their own communities on almost any topic, no matter how niche they are – a big request from beta testers. Community managers (i.e. moderators) of these individual forums will be able to set their own rules, and their moderation logs will be shared publicly, so members can see what decisions are being made.

The site has also been redesigned since its private beta, and now offers a new sidebar where you can pin your favorite communities and an improved main feed for visuals.

At launch, communities will only have one admin, but that will change over time as the company adds more features, including those dedicated to customizing the look, feel and functionality of individual communities through integrations and other tools. For example, a movie review community could include results from Letterboxd.

“We kind of chose… let’s keep building this plane as we fly it,” Digg CEO Justin Mizell explained. “This means they will be very lightweight, and we will be shipping them aggressively every week and giving them new features as we go,” he added.

The company also plans to listen to its community managers about what they need and build accordingly, and has hired some Reddit moderators as advisors. Although Reddit was built on the back of volunteer moderators, Digg aims to find a model that improves the moderator experience. However, plans on that front have not yet been clarified, but Mizell said it “should be a conversation.”

“We need to figure out a way to make this a fair experience for everyone who is actually building Digg into what it needs to become,” he noted.

Additionally, the team is considering converting an AI-generated podcast about interesting stories that appear on Digg into a human-hosted version, as users have requested.

Rose told TechCrunch that the current team is small, giving them “years of runway” to find product-market fit.

“The nice thing about this launch is that we’ve finally gotten to the place with Digg where the groundwork is done, and now we can really start having fun,” he said.

Note: The rollout should begin around 4pm ET.