Digg is back from the dead. Again.
A few months after launching, the relaunch of Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing site was shut down in March, as the company changed course. Redesigned as a competitor to the giant community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it couldn’t handle the bot traffic that was flooding its platform and wasn’t differentiating itself enough from the competition to make an impact.
The former laid off staff and said it was time to go back to the drawing board. Rose, a partner at True Ventures, returned to work full-time on the new version of Digg in April.
On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks like a Reddit clone and resembles the news aggregator it used to be.
This time, the site focuses on quality issues – specifically, AI issues to boot.
In an email to beta testers, the company said the purpose of the site is to “track the most influential voices in the space” and highlight stories that deserve “attention.” AI is where the idea is being tested, but if it’s successful, Digg will expand to include 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 home page, Digg shows four important stories at the top: the most viewed story, the most discussed story, the fastest growing story, and the “In case we missed it” headline.
Below that is a curated list of the day’s top stories, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics are not generated from Digg itself. Instead, Digg ingests content from X in real time to determine what’s being discussed, while performing sentiment analysis, aggregation, and signal detection to determine what’s most important.
As Rose noted at X, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discusses a topic about AI, it almost always sets off a reaction that includes deep discussion and dissemination of that topic throughout X. The new Digg will be able to track that increased engagement.
This may be of interest to data scientists, as it reveals the impact of X-based interactions with charts and graphs, and provides a way to track the signal amidst what can, in X, often be a lot of noise. But it’s not clear if there’s enough underlying value here for the everyday user, beyond realizing that yes, @sama’s tweet can go viral.
The site also features the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as top companies and top politicians focused on AI issues.
For those who don’t have time to spend tracking down AI breaking news, Digg can prove a useful resource. But it’s not clear why people often turn to Digg for their favorite news app, RSS reader, or even their X “For You” feed, if they want to find out what’s trending — especially since there’s currently no discussion happening on Digg’s own site.
Digg may also have difficulty moving on to other topics, as AI issues are one of the few areas where the conversation is still very active on X. Some verticals don’t have the same traction, especially after Musk’s takeover of the site that used to be Twitter has created a rival ecosystem, which now includes Threads focused on the creator of Meta. Many non-technical conversations now take place on X, or are not on the public Internet altogether.
However, if Digg eventually gains steam, it could be a useful source of website traffic for publishers whose click-through businesses have been reduced due to changes in Google’s algorithms and the impact of AI Overviews, AI-generated summaries displayed by Google in search results, which often answer users’ questions before they click through to a website.
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