Promoting the return of Digg is a bit like promoting the return of star trek. It wasn’t exactly gone and, hey, Wasn’t it just “comeback” about a year ago?? Yes, Digg always seems to come back without ever leaving, but it’s back again, and this time as an AI news aggregator.
“Hello again” says a title currently on the Digg.com main page. The text on the page directs you to di.gg/ai (“dih-dot-guh-slash-AI,” perhaps), a new featured destination in the Digg universe, where you can find links to AI stuff like “Documents, releases, threads (and) hot takes that go by faster than anyone can follow,” reads the text on the page, which is signed by Digg CEO Kevin Rose.
This should not be understood as the entirety of the latest re-release. “AI is the first vertical. More are coming,” Rose writes.
Digg seems to have had something of a false start, launch in January this year after being reacquired last year by original founder Rose along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Is press release at the time said Digg would surpass the other platforms by “focusing on AI innovations designed to improve the user experience and build a human-centered alternative, that prioritizes transparency, rewards human effort and fosters enriching debates.” Then, about two months ago, that version closed and Digg laid off much of its staff.
Now we have di.gg/ai. Currently di.gg redirects to this, so it is the entire current platform. It’s a basic, beige newsfeed with a “Highlights” section at the top. Each story is accompanied by a group of round images that seem to indicate the community’s interest; As you will quickly notice, they are the avatars according to TechCrunchthe new Digg is analyzing popularity and sentiment to select Digg.
Digg’s history has been summarized in Internet history as something like this: “It was a rudimentary version of Reddit, later eclipsed when the real Reddit came along, defeated by its better and doomed to obscurity ever since.” This popular account is misleading and obscures Digg’s role in shaping the Internet in one of its funniest times.
The “Digg effect” was one of the original terms for when content goes so viral that it crashes servers, which we later started calling “breaking the Internet.” Before Digg, there were similar phenomena, in particular “The bar and dot effect“, but that was basically just for experts. Digg’s innovation was the “Digg This” button, added to Digg’s websites. Publications as conventional as the New York Times..
20 years ago, this seemed hugely innovative and represented the easiest way for casuals and regulars to experience the breadth of the online world. Yes, the story of The fall of Digg and the subsequent rise of Reddit is legendary (his makeover 2014 less), but thanks to the surge in likes, which clearly followed the “Digg This” button, we’re all still living in the “democratized” world that Digg helped create.
This latest version of Digg also has a certain undeniable elegance; Personally, I haven’t seen anything that does exactly this and it makes sense at a glance. But this version of Digg doesn’t look like it’s about to change the Internet as we know it.
