Digg. Reddit. Fark. Stumbleupon. Slashdot. If you were “extremely online” (as the kids say) in the early part of this century — i.e., the early 2000s — these were some of the sites you probably visited a lot, searching for interesting things to read, or just killing time between classes/meetings etc. And around the year 2005 or so, there was arguably no bigger drama in the “social media” space than the battle between Digg and Reddit. Both offered a more modern take on the old bulletin-board forums that ancient internet denizens used to frequent, the Usenet newsgroups like alt.binaries.starwars. While Digg focused on lists of links to news articles and websites, Reddit added a more social element, with “subreddits” devoted to specific topics. Both Digg and Reddit depended on — and to some extent pioneered — a ranking system that awarded points based on how many votes a link got from users. In a way, this was the birth of the kind of algorithmic filtering we now associate with Facebook and Twitter.
For a time, hitting the front page of either Digg — which called itself “the internet’s homepage” — or Reddit more or less guaranteed that your link and/or website would get swamped by literally millions of clicks and hits. In some cases, being one of the top links on either site could cause websites to crash and become completely unavailable, something that at the time was seen as almost a badge of honor.
In case you missed the headlines, these two formerly fierce competitors have now joined forces — or at least two of their founders have. Kevin Rose, who founded Digg in 2004, and Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit a year later with his friend Steve Huffman, announced on Wednesday that they are partners in a new venture that involves a rebirth of Digg, which they acquired earlier this year. It’s hard to overstate the enmity that these two companies once had for each other when they were both young: Ohanian reportedly sent an email to his cofounder in 2005 with a link to the Reddit site saying “Meet the enemy,” and both sites and founders enjoyed taking shots at each other at every opportunity. As I said in a post on X (yes, I still use it, but not without feeling like I need a shower) to anyone who was a social-web user in the early 2000s, this was like the Hatfields and McCoys holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
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“I really disliked you for a long time,” Ohanian told Rose during an interview with Fast Company. “Reddit had raised $12,000 at YC. We felt like outsiders. Here was a tech celebrity who had VC funding, was in Silicon Valley … This was the birth of the new web 2.0 era. And he was getting the press, he was getting the funding.” According to Rose, the animosity was mutual. “I remember somebody was like, oh, there’s this site that does voting like you guys do,” Rose recalled during the same interview. “And I went to the site, and I was like, oh, those motherfuckers — they just copied our shit. And I was pissed.”
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Shoving AI down a tired platform’s throat?
Ohanian said the venture involves “working on something new … but also old … but also very new” while Rose posted that the two were not planning to just “rebuild the past or clone a competitor.” A press release said the new entity would “revive the social platform with a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be.” It seems the new Digg will also be at least partly AI-powered, which not everyone is as excited about. According to the press release, the new site will combine “Ohanian’s and Rose’s historical knowledge and deep understanding of what has and hasn’t worked from their experiences at Reddit and Digg with today’s technological advancements – particularly in AI,” and will become “an online destination with humanity and connection at its core.”
One Reddit commenter said they were cautiously optimistic about the announcement until they got to the part that said AI would “handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections.” This skeptic said that the news sounded like Ohanian and Rose were planning to “shove some AI down a tired platform’s throat.” (Others said they were skeptical about Rose because of his involvement in some cryptocurrency ventures that reportedly didn’t end well). Rose told TechCrunch — another holdover from the go-go times of the early 2000s — that the existing social media landscape has become toxic, messy, and riddled with misinformation, and that AI is well-placed to address many of those problems. He said there are tools “where I can get sub-200 millisecond response times on any comment under about 300 characters and rated across 20 plus different vectors of of sentiment, so violence, toxicity, hate speech — you name it. Like, that just wasn’t possible five years ago.”
In a way, Digg used a form of machine learning — not AI, but what I think many people probably mean when they say AI — before it was cool. The ranking of links was done based purely on votes initially, but eventually a simple vote tally wasn’t enough, because of the emergence of what in many ways were the early forms of the kind of toxic engagement Rose is talking about. In Digg’s case it was things like the rise of the so-called “bury brigades” — loose affilations of users who would team up to downvote links from specific users or to specific websites. This has been a problem since the web was invented.
Slashdot, which wound up being eclipsed by both Digg and Reddit, didn’t use a voting-based model to rank posts, but under founder Rob Malda — known as CmdrTaco — it developed a sophisticated system of moderation and even meta-moderation to compensate for the kind of comment trainwrecks that other sites often fell victim to. Anyone who flagged enough comments could be invited to be a moderator, and then those who did a good job could in turn be offered the job of being a meta-moderator, flagging potential moderation abuses (Footnote: In the mid-2000s, I tried to get the newspaper I worked for at the time to implement Slashdot’s system, which was open source and therefore free, but instead they decided to blow millions on a commercial version).
It’s more than a little ironic that Digg often scoffed at Reddit as a johnny-come-lately to the social web party, and a knockoff that was doomed to fail, and yet it was Digg that flamed out rather spectacularly, and Reddit that continued to grow. At the peak, a youthful Rose was featured on a cringe-worthy cover of Businessweek magazine that read “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months!” and in 2008 Digg was reportedly in talks with Google about a potential $200 million buyout. Instead, four years later it was broken up and sold for parts: the programming team went to the Washington Post, LinkedIn bought some patents and the name and website were acquired by the New York-based incubator Betaworks. Rose said recently that when Reddit sold to CondeNast in 2006, “We kind of thought we had won, and then they spun it back out and did some pretty innovative things. They were a much more nimble startup.”
So do we need a new Digg?
In addition to the comments mentioned above about AI and Rose’s involvement in crypto, a number of people on X and Bluesky scoffed at the idea of Ohanian and Rose coming up with anything worthwhile apart from a press release filled with exclamation marks. Charlie Warzel, who writes for The Atlantic, posted a link to the New York Times story and said “I feel like i’ve read this exact story 350 times in the last decade.” Later, he added that “what the internet and our media ecosystem needs are the same folks who’ve been having the same ideas for the last 19 years to reboot the things they made but with an eye on being nimble and fostering community.” A Gizmodo post said “the dream of the 2000s internet is dead and no amount of elder millennial nostalgia will bring it back.” And there’s no question the announcement felt a little like those supergroups formed by the founders of two once-popular but now-defunct bands.
To be fair, neither Ohanian nor Rose seem to need either the attention or the potential revenue (should there be any). Both men have likely made a comfortable living — how comfortable I do not know — investing in startups: Ohanian has his own investment firm called Seven Seven Six and is now a partner in a consortium that is trying to acquire TikTok (he also just bought Mjolnir, the hammer wielded by the Norse god Thor — or rather, the movie prop version wielded by actor Chris Hemsworth in the Avengers movies), and Rose is a partner at True Ventures and prior to that was at Google Ventures. In Rose’s case at least, some of his interest in trying to revive Digg seems to be driven by a feeling of unease about the decline of the original, and all the things he didn’t get a chance to experiment with. The Times story says he was “itching to get back to his roots in social and community sites, and always regretted the way things had ended.”
What I find the most interesting about the Digg 2.0 announcement is something that wasn’t really teased out in any of the coverage I saw, and that is how it represents an attempt by Ohanian to go into competition with Reddit and his former partner Huffman, who took over running the company in 2014 (Ohanian left the board in 2009) and last year took it public with a $9.5-billion IPO. Although the IPO makes it sound like the last few years have been a raging success, Huffman’s tenure at Reddit has been marked by significant controversy, including changes that led to a revolt by some of the platform’s volunteer sub-Reddit moderators — the workforce that is more or less responsible for most of the company’s value. What Ohanian thinks of all this is unknown, because he has kept his thoughts about Reddit private, but the relaunch of Digg suggests he sees an opportunity there, a market niche that could potentially be filled.
For his part, Kevin Rose made it clear that the moderator uprising at Reddit was directly connected to his interest in reviving Digg. According to the Times, when he saw the uproar, he started “laying the groundwork for a Digg comeback” by running targeted ads across Reddit with detailed questionnaires for moderators, asking about the biggest difficulties overseeing subreddits and other issues. He then ran the results through an artificial intelligence program to think of new ways for addressing the problems. “These moderators are pouring their lives into this,” Rose told the Times. “We think we can do it better.” In the press release for the launch, he said that we have “hit an inflection point where AI can become a helpful co-pilot to users and moderators, not replacing human conversation, but rather augmenting it, allowing users to dig deeper, while at the same time removing a lot of the repetitive burden for community moderators.”
And where else could we use Digg or Reddit-style moderation and collaborative filtering, link recommendation, etc.? Literally everywhere. X, which used to be a key part of how people found useful content, is a zombified version of the old Twitter, where tech bros pay for blue links so they can promote their shitcoins, and both the algorithm and owner Elon Musk promote racist, sexist and other inflammatory content. Bluesky is nominally decentralized (although not in some important ways, as I wrote recently) and users can choose their own algorithms. Slashdot and Fark still exist, and “fediverse” alternatives to Reddit like Lemmy. And of course there is Reddit, which still has lots of good subreddits. Could they be better? Undoubtedly. Will Ohanian and Rose’s new Digg be able to bring anything different to the table? Only time will tell, as the old columnist’s crutch goes, but as a former Digg fan, I will be watching with interest.
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@mathewi Allow me to answer the entire class of questions like this for you. Ask “is it vulnerable to being exploited for profit?” If the answer is yes, then the answer to the question “will it help?” is no.
@mathewi No.
No :/
just how much is it reliant on AI? that will probably dictate the answer