Hyping the return of Digg is a bit like hyping the return of Star Trek. It didn’t quite go away, and, hey, didn’t it just “come back” a year or two ago? Yes, it seems like Digg is coming back without ever really being gone, but it’s back again, and this time as an aggregator of AI news.
Currently a headline on the Digg.com homepage says “Hello Again”. The text on the page directs you to di.gg/ai (“deeh-dot-guh-slash-AI,” perhaps), a new major destination in the Digg universe, where you can find links to AI things like “Papers, Launches, Threads.” [and] The page text, signed by Digg CEO Kevin Rose, reads, “Hot flies faster than anyone.”
This should not be interpreted as the entirety of the latest relaunch. “AI is the first vertical. More are coming,” Rose writes.
Digg appears to have gone through a false start of sorts, having launched in January this year after being re-acquired by original founder Rose along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian last year. Its press release at the time said that Digg would “outpace other platforms by focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance and build the user experience.” human centered The alternative, one that prioritizes transparency, rewards human effort, and fosters rich discussions.” Then about two months ago, that version shut down and Digg laid off most of its employees.
Now we have di.gg/ai. Currently di.gg redirects to this, so it’s actually the entire platform. It is a beige newsfeed with a “Highlights” section at the top. Each story is accompanied by a set of round images that seem to indicate community interest — these are, you’ll notice immediately, X avatars of users posting about a given story on
Digg’s story has been digested in Internet history like this: “It was a rudimentary version of Reddit, later flailed when the real Reddit came along, was defeated by its superior, and has been doomed to obscurity ever since.” This popular account is misleading, and obscures Digg’s role in shaping one of the Internet’s funniest eras.
The “Dig Effect” was one of the original terms for when content goes so viral that it crashes your servers – what we later started calling “breaking the Internet.” Before Digg, there were similar phenomena, notably “The Slashdot Effect”, but that was originally only for Poindexters. Digg’s innovation was the “Dig This” button, which was added to the websites of mainstream publications such as the New York Times.
20 years ago this seemed massively innovative, and it offered the simplest way for ordinary people and ordinary people to experience the vastness of the online world. Yes, the story of Digg’s fall and the accompanying rise of Reddit is legendary (its 2014 makeover is less so), but thanks to the surge of “likes” that apparently followed the “Dig this” button, we’re all still living in the “democratic” world that Digg helped create.
There’s also a certain undeniable elegance to this latest version of Digg; Personally I haven’t seen anything that does this exact function, and it makes sense at a glance. But this iteration of Digg doesn’t look like it’s going to change the Internet as we know it.
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