Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, 41, has joined forces with former rival Kevin Rose, 48, to revive Digg, a social and link-sharing web site Rose based in 2004 — it was divided up and sold for parts to Betaworks, LinkedIn, and The Washington Put up in 2012. The 2 intend to infuse the brand new Digg with AI content material moderators, a transfer not but carried out by Reddit.
The Digg of 2004 allowed customers to share hyperlinks that others may “digg” and upvote or “bury” and downvote, creating a spot for trending information. Customers may touch upon hyperlinks too, with the most well-liked content material ending up on the homepage.
In its heyday, Digg attracted 40 million month-to-month distinctive customers, however after a 2010 replace eliminated the “bury” button, customers revolted and left the positioning in droves, resulting in its demise.
Ohanian and Rose announced on Wednesday that they’re relaunching Digg as a mobile-first platform, with invitations to the brand new Digg rolling out to customers within the coming weeks. The webpage for Digg’s reboot reveals that over 175,000 individuals have signed as much as get early entry to it on the time of writing.
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In keeping with Bloomberg, Justin Mezzell, a product designer who beforehand labored at Code College and RevenueCat, might be Digg’s new CEO. Ohanian and Rose will serve on the board of administrators.
The staff purchased Digg’s area and property from Cash Group for an undisclosed sum, and have acquired investments from Ohanian-founded enterprise capital (VC) agency Seven Seven Six, in addition to True Ventures, a VC agency the place Rose is a partner. They declined to reveal how a lot they’d raised, per Bloomberg.
Alexis Ohanian. Picture by Patrick Smith/Athlos/Getty Photographs for Athlos
Plans to revive Digg began when Rose reached out to Ohanian final yr with the thought of a brand new Digg that would use AI to assist struggle spam and reasonable content material. In keeping with The New York Times, Rose decided the place AI may assist Digg by spending 1000’s of {dollars} on focused adverts on Reddit, a comparable platform, to ask moderators about their largest challenges.
“These moderators are pouring their lives into this,” he instructed The Instances. “We expect we will do it higher.”
Rose instructed The Verge that he envisions Digg utilizing AI for “all the pieces from an AI agent that converts your complete sub-community into Klingon,” a fictional language within the Star Trek universe, “to a different one the place you do not permit a sure kind of profanity and that is mechanically auto-moderated.”
Ohanian, who served on Reddit’s board until 2020, acknowledged in a press release that AI will tackle the background “grunt work” of combating spam and filtering by means of content material on Digg whereas human moderators deal with “constructing actual connections.”
“I am all in on this chapter,” Ohanian acknowledged.
Digg is a direct competitor to Reddit, a $30 billion firm with 101.7 million every day lively distinctive customers as of its February earnings report. Reddit has made AI a precedence, signing a $60 million cope with Google in February 2024 that allowed the tech big to coach its AI on Reddit content material and following up with an analogous deal with OpenAI in Could 2024.
Reddit has a built-in moderation system known as AutoModerator that mechanically goes by means of posts to examine to see in the event that they violate group insurance policies. Although the platform launched an AI-powered safety feature in March 2024 to detect on-line harassment, it doesn’t but have AI brokers working as moderators and has not acknowledged whether it is engaged on implementing them, per Business Insider.
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