Digg has risen from the grave. Once more.
Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing website shut down in March after just a few months of operation due to a change in the company’s direction. The new Digg, which was initially constructed as a rival to the enormous community forum site Reddit, discovered that it was unable to control the bot traffic that was infiltrating its platform and had not set itself apart enough from the competition to have an impact.
The startup announced that it was time to start over after laying off employees. In April, Rose, a partner at True Ventures, went back to work full-time on a revised version of Digg.
The founder gave a sneak peek at a link to the recently revamped Digg on Friday night. It now resembles the news aggregation it previously was, rather than a Reddit clone.
This time, the website’s primary goal is to rank news, first and foremost, AI news.
The website aims to “track the most influential voices in a space” and highlight news that is truly worth “paying attention to,” according to an email sent by the business to beta testers. Digg is exploring this concept in the field of artificial intelligence, but if it is successful, it will expand to other subjects.
The email cautioned that the website was still unfinished, “buggy,” and intended more for user preview than for public launch.
Digg’s current homepage features four primary stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story with increasing debate, the story that is ascending the fastest, and a headline that reads, “In case you missed it.”
A ranked list of the day’s top stories, replete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves, can be seen below. The catch is that these analytics aren’t produced on Digg. Rather, Digg is using sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal recognition to identify the most important topics while simultaneously absorbing information from X in real-time to ascertain what is being discussed.
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responds to a piece about AI, it nearly always starts a domino effect that involves in-depth discussion and spread of that subject throughout X, as Rose noted on X. This higher involvement will be tracked by the new Digg.
Data nerds may find this intriguing since it reveals the effects of X-based interaction with graphs and charts and provides a means of tracking signal amongst what can frequently be a lot of noise on X. Beyond the fact that, yes, a @sama tweet can help anything go viral, it’s questionable if there is enough underlying value for the average user.
The website also lists the top 1,000 AI professionals, as well as the leading businesses and politicians who are interested in AI-related matters.
Digg might be a helpful tool for people who don’t have time to spend on X tracking breaking AI news. However, given that there isn’t currently any conversation taking place on Digg’s website, it’s unclear why users would frequently choose Digg over their favorite news app, RSS reader, or even their X “For You” feed if they wanted to stay up to date on what’s popular.
AI news is one of the few issues on X where there is still a lot of conversation; Digg might also have trouble moving on to other subjects. Other verticals aren’t as popular, particularly since Musk’s acquisition of the website that was then known as Twitter led to the emergence of a competitive ecosystem that currently includes Meta’s creator-focused Threads. Nowadays, a lot of conversations about topics unrelated to technology take place off X or completely off the public internet.
However, if Digg does manage to gain traction, it could be a helpful source of website traffic for publishers whose businesses have been severely damaged by decreasing clicks as a result of Google’s evolving algorithms and the impact of AI Overviews, which are summaries produced by AI that appear at the top of search results and frequently provide answers to users’ queries before they even click through to a website.