If you find yourself nostalgic for an earlier era of the internet, you may welcome the news that after spending the last decade or so being passed between owners like a Christmas present no one wants, Digg—the site that was Reddit before Reddit—has been relaunched, with its new incarnation now in open beta.
Digg pioneered the idea of an aggregation site where users could vote on the merits of links shared by other users. It launched a year before Reddit, and the two sites fought for supremacy throughout the mid- and late-2000s before the combination of an ill-conceived 2010 redesign and an increasing tendency to highlight content from a small number of sources tipped the balance against Digg for good.
Now, original co-founder Kevin Rose is back to try again; along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, he re-acquired the site last year. Why? Well, Techcrunch’s report on the purchase described Rose’s sadness at seeing the internet having “become toxic, messy, and riddled with misinformation,” and explained that “[Rose and Ohanian] believe the rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg.”
It’s certainly refreshing to see at least one pair of tech types pushing back against AI and taking a stand against the deluge of poisonous nonsense that the rise of consumer LLMs has dumped onto the intern—sorry, what? Oh. Ohhhhhhh.
No, as it turns out, Digg’s resurrection isn’t some sort of brave stand against the machine.
Instead, as the 2025 press release announcing Rose and Ohanian’s purchase made clear, their vision for fixing the damage that AI is doing to the internet involves turning to … AI: “Digg is primed to set itself apart from other platforms by focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative.”
You wouldn’t know this from reading Digg’s “About” page, mind you. That page doesn’t mention AI at all. Instead, it promises to “bring back social discovery built by communities, not by algorithms.” Nor would you know it from the experience of using the new site. This is perhaps a testament to the success of the vision that Ohanian outlined in last year’s press release, in which he opined, “AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections.” The company isn’t getting into all the details of how AI is being used at the moment, but it appears to have something to do with cutting down on human moderators. Rose said last year that “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.”
So with all that out of the way, what’s it like using Digg in 2026? Well, as someone partial to old Digg—it always seemed like Betamax to Reddit’s VHS—the new site is very much like the original version. Digg was always more polished than Reddit, and its new incarnation remains so. Given that the site is in beta, there aren’t many communities to choose from, and new users’ feeds are populated with content from the 21 generic communities with which the site launched, but the site promises that this is as far as algorithmic curation will go: “You decide which communities you’ll join, and that’s what appears in your feed. It’s that simple.”
Much of the discussion so far is about Digg itself, with users debating the merits of the new UI, discussing how to address spambots, and indulging in good old-fashioned nostalgia. Amusingly, one of the top questions in the /digg subreddit community is about how to opt out of the site’s AI-driven “TLDR” feature, which displays pop-up summaries of the contents of links, and its AI-hosted podcast. As per Mashable, Digg’s management has heard user feedback on the latter and is now pondering whether to stoop to “bringing in human hosts” for the show.
The very fact that this is even a question to consider is a reminder of just how much the internet—and, indeed, the world—has changed. When Digg launched for the first time in 2004, podcasts barely existed; the term itself was coined that same year, and iTunes didn’t support podcast subscriptions until 2005. It seems like a tall order for one of the original Web 2.0 sites to flourish again in the dark days of Web3, but given the ongoing problems at its biggest competitor, it’s not impossible—and hey, these are halcyon days for zombies.
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