Touting the return of Digg is a little like touting the return of Star Trek. It wasn’t exactly gone, and, hey, wasn’t it just “back” a year or so ago? Yes, Digg always seems to be coming back without ever actually leaving, but it’s back again, and this time as an aggregator of AI news.
“Hello Again” says a heading currently on the Digg.com homepage. The text on the page directs you to di.gg/ai (“dih-dot-guh-slash-AI,” perhaps), a new marquee destination in the Digg universe, where you can find links to AI things like “Papers, launches, threads, [and] hot takes flying past faster than anyone can keep up with,” says the page text, which is signed by Digg CEO Kevin Rose.
This is not meant to be understood as the entirety of the latest relaunch. “AI is the first vertical. More are coming,” Rose writes.
Digg appears to have undergone a false start of sorts, launching in January of this year after being reacquired last year by original founder Rose along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Its press release at the time said Digg would outcompete the other platforms by “focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative, one that prioritizes transparency, rewards human effort, and fosters enriching discussions.” Then about two months ago, that version shut down and Digg laid off much of its staff.
Now we have di.gg/ai. Currently di.gg redirects to this, so it’s the whole platform in effect. It’s a barebones, beige newsfeed with a “Highlights” section at the top. Each story is accompanied by a cluster of round images that seem to signal community interest—these are, you’ll quickly notice, the X avatars of users posting about a given story on X, from which, according to TechCrunch, the new Digg is pulling and analyzing popularity and sentiment, in order to curate Digg.
The story of Digg has been digested into internet history as something like this: “It was a rudimentary version of Reddit, later outshone when actual Reddit came along, vanquished by its better and damned to obscurity ever since.” This popular account is misleading, and obscures Digg’s role in shaping the internet in one of its most fun eras.
The “Digg Effect” was one of the original terms for when content goes so viral it crashes your servers—what we later started calling “breaking the internet.” Prior to Digg, there were similar phenomena, notably “The Slashdot Effect,” but that was basically for poindexters only. Digg’s innovation was the “Digg This” button, added to the websites of publications as mainstream as the New York Times.
20 years ago this felt massively innovative, and it represented the simplest way for casuals and normies to experience the breadth of the online world. Yes, the story of Digg’s downfall and the accompanying rise of Reddit is legendary (its 2014 makeover less so), but thanks to the rise of “likes,” which clearly followed from the “Digg This” button, we’re all still living in the “democratized” world Digg helped create.
This latest version of Digg also has a certain undeniable elegance; personally I haven’t seen anything that does this exact thing, and it makes sense at a glance. But this iteration of Digg doesn’t feel like it’s about to change the internet as we know it.
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