The Return of Digg, a Star of Web 2.0

In the summertime of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a tech entrepreneur, despatched an e-mail to his colleague Steve Huffman with an ominous topic line: “Meet the enemy.”

The physique of the e-mail contained only one line — a hyperlink to Digg, a community-focused social message board the place folks shared and mentioned information articles and hyperlinks to different websites they discovered fascinating. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman, who had based the same effort referred to as Reddit, set their aggressive sights on Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.

Within the 20 years since, these entrepreneurs have gone onto different initiatives and, in true Silicon Valley trend, dipped into different components of tech. Alongside the way in which, Digg, which went from common to not, all however died.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rose introduced that he had purchased again Digg for an undisclosed sum from Cash Group, a digital media firm, and would rebuild it to tackle Reddit. And he’s doing it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.

“That is the right time to revisit this concept with contemporary eyes,” Mr. Rose, 48, now a enterprise capitalist at True Ventures, stated in an interview. He stated social media had change into so ubiquitous that “it doesn’t have to be winner take all,” including that “we don’t have to take down Reddit to win.”

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are relaunching Digg when social media is in tumult. Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, has turned the platform right into a mirror of himself. Meta, which owns Fb and Instagram, is turning into extra video-focused to compete with TikTok. And Reddit, which went public a yr in the past, has added gamelike options to nudge customers into spending extra time on the positioning — and extra time promoting.

Amid this upheaval, Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian sensed a chance to reinvent Digg in a manner that would minimize by way of among the pitfalls of recent social media and concentrate on “connection and humanity” on-line.

“The world has modified a lot up to now few years,” Mr. Ohanian, who left Reddit’s board in 2020, stated in an interview. “When Kevin advised me he was shopping for again Digg, there was part of me that thought, ‘Nicely, rattling, may we do it once more?’”

Not way back, Digg was on prime of the world. Based in 2004, it was amongst a category of early social information websites, corresponding to Slashdot, del.icio.us and Reddit, that relied on a neighborhood of unpaid customers to curate articles or subjects of curiosity from throughout the online. Digg stood out for its sturdy consumer base of energetic contributors, who repeatedly returned to the positioning.

The corporate raised tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} and fielded acquisition presents from Google and others. In 2006, Mr. Rose posed for a now-infamous photograph on a BusinessWeek cowl, sporting a large grin and giving two thumbs up, with the headline “How This Child Made $60 Million in 18 Months.” (Mr. Rose hated the photograph.)

The quilt proved sick fated. Digg later launched a redesign of its web site that its neighborhood broadly rejected. Customers finally left in droves, as did executives. Mr. Rose left Digg in 2012. That very same yr, the corporate was divvied up and sold for parts to Betaworks, LinkedIn and The Washington Submit.

In distinction, Reddit grew to become a viable enterprise. Mr. Huffman, who had left the positioning for different initiatives, returned in 2015 and stabilized the corporate. Now 41, he has made Reddit’s as soon as laissez faire content material moderation insurance policies extra stringent, main advertisers to embrace the positioning.

A few of these modifications generated a backlash. Some Reddit moderators of “subreddits,” the boards devoted to subjects like guitars or basketball or cute puppies, stated they felt uncared for by administration. In 2023, hundreds of subreddits went dark after a number of govt selections upset moderators, threatening Reddit’s enterprise.

Seeing the uproar, Mr. Rose, who had dabbled in investing and different start-ups, determined to behave. He was itching to get again to his roots in social and neighborhood websites, he stated, and at all times regretted the way in which issues had ended with Digg.

“I look again on how that firm was run, and I used to be simply very fearful to face up for myself in plenty of circumstances,” Mr. Rose recalled. “I simply didn’t have the maturity to exit and ask the robust questions.”

Mr. Rose started laying the groundwork for a Digg comeback. He ran 1000’s of {dollars}’ price of focused adverts throughout Reddit with detailed questionnaires for moderators, asking concerning the largest difficulties overseeing subreddits and different points. He ran the outcomes by way of a synthetic intelligence program to consider new methods for addressing the issues.

“These moderators are pouring their lives into this,” he stated. “We predict we will do it higher.”

He additionally reached out to Mr. Ohanian, with whom he had bonded over the scars of operating their platforms. Mr. Ohanian stated he had “all love” for his former firm. “On the finish of the day, Reddit was an enormous a part of my life,” he stated.

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian raised an undisclosed quantity of funding to repurchase Digg and to construct a brand new model of the corporate. Their traders embody True Ventures, the place Mr. Rose is a accomplice, and Seven Seven Six, a enterprise agency based by Mr. Ohanian.

In addition they employed fewer than a dozen engineers and designers for the brand new Digg and introduced on Justin Mezzell, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Rose’s, to be chief govt. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian will be a part of Digg’s board, with Mr. Rose as chair.

Invites to the brand new Digg shall be distributed within the coming weeks, they stated, and the positioning will primarily be aimed toward folks on cell units. A.I. will even play a bigger half in making Digg extra accessible to customers, Mr. Rose stated. For example, he stated, a neighborhood of science-fiction fanatics may have their discussions translated into Klingon, the language utilized by the “Star Trek” alien race of the identical identify. A.I. instruments also can assist cut back spam, misinformation and harassment, he stated.

Much less glamorous — however maybe most necessary — shall be their consideration to moderators. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Rose stated they needed to empower moderators with higher instruments to assist keep on-line communities, which retains the positioning welcoming to customers.

“What we by no means centered on is the again finish,” Mr. Ohanian stated, referring to the instruments and options that moderators lean on. “Nevertheless it’s the again finish that actually, actually issues.”

The preliminary response to Digg’s relaunch could also be muted, Mr. Rose stated, with some folks more likely to see the resurrection as a cute nod to a retro model of the social net. However he has grand plans, he stated.

“As a result of there are such a lot of giants on this area which are going to be sluggish to maneuver, it implies that we will be nimble,” Mr. Rose stated. “We gained’t have every little thing we would like Digg to be on Day 1. However a yr from now, we shall be having a really completely different dialog.”