Digg, the rebooted online community platform once known as a Web 2.0 news aggregator, launched its public open beta on Wednesday. Original founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian now own the company following their acquisition last March. The platform positions itself as a Reddit rival, offering a website and mobile app for users to browse feeds of posts from various communities, join interest-aligned groups, post content, comment, and upvote items using the site’s “digg” function.
Digg’s original version reached a $175 million valuation in 2008 but lost ground to Reddit. In 2012, the company split, with its largest stake sold to incubator Betaworks and other assets acquired by LinkedIn and The Washington Post. A subsequent iteration secured additional investment in 2016 before a digital advertising firm bought it in 2018.
Meanwhile, Reddit expanded into a major community site, went public, and now earns revenue from content licensing deals with AI companies including Google and OpenAI. Rose and Ohanian see AI’s rise as a chance to revive Digg. They acquired it through a leveraged buyout involving True Ventures, Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian personally, and venture firm S32. Digg has not disclosed the funding amount.
The duo aims to use AI to tackle social media toxicity and block AI bots masquerading as humans. “We obviously don’t want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process,” Rose told TechCrunch, referencing the know-your-customer identity verification used in finance.
Rose described collecting “little signals of trust along the way and bundle them all together into something that’s meaningful.” Digg plans to deploy technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, cryptographic methods that confirm data without exposing it. The platform could also verify users in product-focused communities by proving ownership or usage of discussed items. For instance, an Oura ring owners’ community might require proof of smart ring ownership for posters.
Additional signals could come from mobile devices, such as detecting when users attend meetups at the same location. “I don’t think there’s going to be any one silver bullet here,” Rose said. “It’s just going to be us saying … here’s a platter of things that you can add together to create trust.”
Prior to the public launch, Digg ran a private beta with 21 generalized communities covering topics like gaming, technology, and entertainment. Access was limited to 67,000 invite-only users. The public beta opens the platform to anyone, allowing users to join existing groups or create new ones on any topic, including niche interests—a key request from testers.
Community managers, equivalent to moderators, can establish their own rules, with moderation logs published publicly for transparency into decision-making. The redesign includes a sidebar for pinning favorite communities and a main feed tailored for visual content. At launch, each community starts with a single manager. Future updates will introduce multiple managers, customization of appearance and functionality, and integrations like Letterboxd scores for movie review communities.
Digg CEO Justin Mezzell outlined a rapid development strategy. “We kind of opted for … let’s just keep building this plane as we fly it,” he explained. “That means that it’s going to be very lightweight, and we’re just going to be aggressively shipping every week and just giving them new features as we go.”
The company intends to consult community managers on needs and has enlisted some Reddit moderators as advisers. The rollout began around 4 PM ET on Wednesday.
