Digg is coming back from the dead, will use AI to ease the work of moderators

The older among you may remember Digg – a social link sharing site. For the younger among you, it was “the front page of the Internet” before Reddit took over the crown. After a disastrous redesign in 2010, Digg fell off hard and never really recovered – but now it is coming back.

Kevin Rose, Digg’s original founder, and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, have teamed up to “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.”

After the 2010 redesign, Digg took a downward trajectory and in 2012 it was split into three parts and sold off. It has changed hands many times before – so why has Rose decided to go back to Digg and revive it now?

“Just recently we've 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,” says Rose.

Kevin Rose (left) and Alexis Ohanian (right)

The idea is that AI will do the heavy lifting when it comes to spam filtering and removing toxic content, while human moderators and users can focus on finding and discussing cool new things on the Internet.

Rose will serve as Board Chair and key adviser. Justin Mezzell will take on the CEO role. Mezzell has over 15 years of experience and has worked with Google, Facebook, Twitter and PayPal. Rose, Mezzell and Ohanian will sit on the board of directors, alongside Tony Conrad from True Ventures. True Ventures is backing Digg’s return, both Rose and Conrad are partners. Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six is also backing the new Digg.

You can check out the Digg home page – the top post (“Digg is rebooting!”) will take you to a sign-up page for notifications for early access invites. And you can even hit the “digg” (aka upvote) button.

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