Remember Digg? Its founders are bringing it back, with AI's help

Alexis Ohanian attends 2025 Fanatics Super Bowl Party at The Sugar Mill on February 08, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Kaitlyn Morris/WireImage)

Digg, a news aggregator that popularized the up- and down-votes online, is making a comeback more than 20 years after it launched, with the help of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Ohanian, along with Digg founder Kevin Rose, are revamping the early Reddit rival with a focus on "humanity and connection" and aided by the use of artificial intelligence.

What is Digg?

The backstory:

If you remember the pre-Reddit days of Digg, it may be time to schedule a colonoscopy or up your skincare regimen.

Launched in 2004, Digg let people up- and down-vote ("Digg" or "bury") content from users and from sources around the web. At its peak, it had 40 million monthly users — a high number for the time considering that Facebook only hit 100 million in 2008.

LinkedIn bought many of Digg’s assets when it was sold in 2012. When Reddit launched in 2005, it, too, let users vote on what they liked – and didn’t like – on the site.

What will the new Digg be?

What they're saying:

Rose said Digg will take a more nuanced approach to content moderation than banning or not banning content, which is a process that can be easy to get around.

"The social space online is definitely harsher, it feels like, than it’s ever been before," said Justin Mezzell, who will serve as the new company's CEO. "It feels really difficult to connect. I think the platforms have gotten more disconnected. You know, if ever there was a true town hall of the internet, it feels like it has been deconstructed in a pretty big way."

Digg's new leaders say they want to use artificial intelligence to "handle the grunt work" of running a social media site while allowing humans to focus on building meaningful online communities. The goal is for people to "show up and have conversations, to learn from each other, to share something they’re passionate about and do it earnestly." That won’t be easy, especially when some of today's social media algorithms "exist really just optimize for outrage," Mezzell said.

"There is a world where, you know, you show up in (a) meditation (group) and you’re swinging four-letter words all over the place, and you hit submit," Rose said. And "we come back and we say, hey, you can post this, of course, but only 2% of the audience is going to see it, because the way that the moderator set the tone."