Digg.com is back: veteran of social networks with a new design
At the turn of the millennium, Digg.com was one of the most popular websites, then a mass exodus followed. Now a restart is underway under founder Kevin Rose.
(Image: Das neue Digg.com)
Ten months after Digg founder Kevin Rose bought back his news aggregator together with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the remodeled site has been released for new users. With the public beta test, a veteran of early social networks is returning and now has to compete primarily against Reddit. The focus at the restart is on topic areas. Anyone who wants to can set up a community, but they should also take care of it. Therefore, each account can only create two communities at a time. This is intended to ensure that a community is not abandoned later. Those responsible have some moderation tools at their disposal, it says in the announcement.
Sharp decline after the heyday
Rose and Ohanian have stated regarding the purchase of Digg.com that they want to solve the current problems of social networks with the help of AI technology. For example, it is now possible to automatically check with great speed whether user-generated comments contain threats of violence or hate speech. AI is also intended to ensure that accounts created on Digg actually originate from humans and are not filled automatically, the two told TechCrunch. At the same time, they have visually revised the site and want to promote a more active network for people and topics with changes. For this, they are asking for feedback from the community.
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Digg.com was founded in 2004 and quickly developed into a particularly popular online destination. In 2007, users made their influence clear when they flooded the site with the “Processing Key” in response to the deletion of a key for HD DVDs. Rose could only stop this when he assured that the information, with the help of which the copy protection could be circumvented, would no longer be deleted. A few years later, a problematic redesign of the site led to a mass exodus of users, from which Reddit primarily benefited. In 2012, Digg was sold for just 500,000 US dollars, followed by another takeover in 2018. In 2024, Rose returned and announced the restart.
(mho)
