Digg Up the Past
David Pierce
If blogging started me down the path to where I find myself today, Digg was an accelerant. The service began the same year I started writing on the internet and I latched on to it as my hangout on the web. And whereas it took me some time to hone my writing through reps, I quickly realized I was pretty good at finding and surfacing interesting content around the internet thanks to Digg. That skillset made me one of the early "power users" of the service, which eventually cleared a path to me writing professionally on the internet. Sort of wild to think back upon, but Digg truly was a key component. And now it's back!
Sometime last fall, Kevin Rose started thinking seriously about Digg again. A smidge over two decades ago, he’d launched a social and link sharing website that, for years, was known as “the homepage of the internet.” Since then, Digg had been through several owners and many pivots, Rose had gone on to several other careers, and the internet had moved on. Rose had thought about building something like Digg again, and had even been approached to buy back the domain and website a few times, but the timing had never been right.
This time, though, things started to click. Rose and a group of what he calls “brainstorming partners,” which included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, design and product exec Justin Mezzell, and even folks like Blogger and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, started to talk about whether AI might be able to help them build a better social platform. “I would call Alexis up and we would chat,” Rose says, “and we’d be like, ‘hey, what if, what if, what if?’ And a lot of those things started giving us both that butterflies-in-the-stomach situation, where you’re like, ‘oh, this could be cool. This could be really cool.’”
All these years later, Rose is both a friend and former colleague of mine – he's the one who brought me over to GV many years ago – so I have some biases here. But I do think think there's an element of timing here that could work in the favor of a new Digg. I've written a lot about the degradation of link sharing on the internet – and in a way, this entire site exists because of that, as a way for me to share links, such as I'm doing right now! – and in general, information has been flooded out by bullshit. I mainly blame Xitter in that regard, but really it too was just an accelerant of a trend already happening as social media "matured" – by which I mean, immatured, which isn't a joke in so much as it's literally what has happened.
Here's Kevin talking to Alex Weprin of The Hollywood Reporter:
Rose says that the new Digg is in part a reaction to the current state of the web, where chaos and viral content (true or not) often reign supreme.
“Digg started in 2004 and the internet was a very different place back then. To watch what’s happened with social media and this idea that the microphone can be handed to anyone and oftentimes the loudest person in the room wins, has created a bit of chaos,” Rose says. “Some of it’s interesting in that we’re seeing the true side of humanity in some regards that we didn’t get to see before or was tucked away or hidden, but there’s also a lot of people that want to connect and share and gather around topics of interest in a way that is thoughtful and constructive and creates real lasting friendships.”
Sure, that transparency is interesting in ways, but mostly it's nonsense and yes, chaotic. It's honestly getting harder to find information and interesting links which is really pretty wild when you consider all the tools we now have at our disposal – including yes, AI. But such technology also runs the risk of simply shoving people down a path of having the same, singular view points. Maybe the Fediverse can solve some of these issues, but it's nascent and not yet clear which way that is going to go (and I remain skeptical that such a decentralized idea can truly scale – unless there's a singular consumer product propelling it).
Anyway, one thing I like about what I'm hearing for the new Digg is that they're going to start as simple as possible. It sounds like the new Digg will launch looking almost exactly like the Digg of old. I think it's a smart way to leverage nostalgia to try to overcome the cold start problem – as long as you have a quick plan of attack once it's live. They're going to need to iterate fast to make Digg modern while being malleable enough to see what direction the community is trying to take it.
Having Alexis Ohanian involved, beyond being a fun unification of two former blood rivals, also helps with the Reddit-like community infusion they're going for here. I actually was also one of the first users/creators of Subreddits back in the day (I had a lot of time as a 20-something kid trying to find my way on the internet). And while I may not have predicted back then that it's what would set the service apart from Digg and on an ultimate path to success – now a $30B public company, even after the recent stock market fall! – there was clearly something fundamental and yet simple with the concept.
Can Digg pull off an end-run-around and come all the way back to create a more modern Reddit – and Digg – in 2025?
One more thing: Lest you question my bonafides here, if you squint, you can see me in the sizzle reel video for the new Digg. Well, not me, but my old Digg handle and avatar in the screenshot of the old Digg they used in the intro.1 👀
1 I've written the story about "parislemon" before (my old AOL screename made in haste!) but I'm not sure I have about using Lord Licorice -- yes, a villain from Candy Land -- as my avatar. That started, actually, with Facebook. Believe it or not, for the first many years on that service I wasn't comfortable having my actual picture on the social network, and thus, the internet. So Lord Licorice was my avatar there and eventually on many other services, including Digg.