When a user community overthrew its content moderators: Digg tries to restart

It's been a long time: Digg started out in 2004 as a news aggregator that worked with social bookmarks. After it had largely disappeared from the scene, one of the founders bought the platform back and wants to relaunch it. Many people will remember an incident at Digg in 2007 in which the operators capitulated to their own users.

The old principle of Digg goes like this: Users could save links to news articles from other websites as bookmarks, which other users could also access. Each bookmark could be rated by users as positive or negative and could also be commented on. This is very reminiscent of Reddit, with which Digg was in fierce competition in its early days.

Users protested against Digg

At first, old Digg connoisseurs often think of an incident from 2007: after a moderator on Digg.com deleted posts that contained the "processing key" of HD DVDs in plain text, the service was virtually flooded with posts on this topic. At the time, the key was sufficient to decrypt all content on HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, allowing the copy protection to be circumvented. The Digg operators had apparently received a preliminary injunction from the licensing organization Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA), which judged the corresponding posts to be illegal. However, the fight against its own users proved futile: in the end, Rose publicly declared that Digg would stop removing the posts. Meanwhile, the key also appeared in numerous other places on the Internet, and AACS LA tried desperately to fight it. But in the end it had to renew its copy protection. Further legal consequences, such as fines from Diggs to AACS LA, were not disclosed.

Digg founder Kevin Rose told the portal Techcrunch why Digg wants to get back into the game now of all times: The social media landscape has become very toxic, confusing and full of misinformation. But artificial intelligence (AI) is a good way to address the problem, he believes. This is because the corresponding AI solutions have developed very strongly in recent years. In just a fraction of a second, all short user comments can be checked in detail for things like violence or hate speech. This was not possible a few years ago. The new developments in AI would now also require companies to rethink their own business model from the ground up. This is the aim of the complete overhaul of Digg, which has now begun.

Together with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, Rose recently bought back Digg. Ohanian has since founded another tech startup that specializes in venture capital investment. While Reddit is now a publicly traded company and a platform with hundreds of millions of users, things were not so glamorous for Digg. In 2012, Digg was sold for 500,000 US dollars to Betaworks, which also owns bit.ly and Chartbeat, among others. LinkedIn and the Washington Post also acquired parts of Digg. In 2018, the advertising company BuySellAds finally acquired the majority of Digg shares.

"Millions of monthly users"

The number of users has probably fallen sharply in recent years. On its website, Digg speaks of "millions of monthly users." What sounds very much like a single-digit million figure seems like a big step backwards compared to the 40 million or so users the service had at the height of its popularity.

The two tech founders apparently want to give Digg a thorough overhaul. The preliminary version is currently accessible to a closed user group. Namely those who enter their e-mail address on the website and then pay a one-off fee of five US dollars. According to Digg, this is intended to kill two birds with one stone: Keeping unwelcome bots out of the social network and generating initial revenue at the same time.

Digg promises users willing to pay access to "updates, demonstration designs and experiments" of its new edition. And, of course, usernames that can be secured at an early stage. In addition, paying users in the pre-release phase will be rewarded with a "Groundbreakers badge", a badge that will forever identify its wearer on their Digg profile as one of the first users ever – of the new Digg version –. Around 3,000 users have registered so far (as of April 10), writes Techcrunch. Which can now also be observed outside the select "groundbreaker" circle: Whether the new Digg will manage to position itself effectively between Reddit and Co this time, whether user numbers will increase significantly – and whether AI can be used to quell potential future user uprisings.

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