DIGG Returning Thanks To Kevin Rose And Alexis Ohanian

Once known as the ‘Homepage of the Internet,’ DIGG is making a triumphant return with the original founder Kevin Rose teaming up with his once-arch rival, reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. Their plan is to bring DIGG back in a way the Internet desperately needs these days.

As a former ‘Power DIGG’er’ myself, who once had an account that was ranked in the top 10 all-time on DIGG for front page submissions (@casspa), it brings me a lot of joy to see this social network rising like a phoenix from the ashes but a landing page on the new DIGG and a video including Ohanian and Rose suggests it will be returning with AI at the forefront.

DIGG Is Coming Back!

A landing page has been set up at reboot.digg.com that looks like this:

Those who used to visit the ‘Homepage of the Internet’ back in the day will recognize that DIGG button as the original. There is new wording on the page, however. It reads “the front page of the internet, now with superpowers.”

‘Superpowers’ is presumably referring to AI here. And at this point we can only speculate at the ways artificial intelligence will be introduced. My first assumption is that AI will be crucial in spam detection and content surfacing and suggestion. In 2008, back when DIGG meetups were a regular thing like in this video, the site was on top of the world:

It was the DIGG v4 launch in 2010 that will forever be synonymous with the site/network’s downfall. At the time, the new look of the site was meant to mimic the popular features of Jack Dorsey’s Twitter which was the cool new thing in Silicon Valley. Twitter was gaining a ton of steam with its real-time conversations and with the speed at which information was transmitted on Twitter.

DIGG founder Kevin Rose believed some elements of Twitter could be incorporated into the ‘Front Page of the Internet’ but what inevitably happened was DIGG was taken over by SEO spam bots. As a former power user, I had a unique perspective on all of this.

There was, of course, some measure of gatekeeping to it all. Well over 10% of everything I submitted to DIGG hit the front page and it would send so much traffic to websites it would often crash their servers. When DIGG v4 launched and power users were stripped of their ‘power’ on the site.

Suddenly the home page moved incredibly fast so there was no real traffic being sent to websites because articles didn’t stay on the homepage long enough to be seen and the users submitting articles were all spamming the home page with SEO articles from countries notorious for SEO spam.

It was bad. Real bad. And the site didn’t last.

Founder Kevin Rose would eventually leave DIGG and take a job at Google Ventures, join the board of the Tony Hawk Foundation as well as Hodinkee’s Board of Directors, and he would eventually go into VC and work at True Ventures where he’s now a partner.

The Site Returns With Original Founder + Former Arch Rival

Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian once despised DIGG and Kevin Rose. They were the competition. Ultimately, reddit won and it wasn’t even close. Ohanian has an estimated net worth of $150 million after the reddit IPO, he’s married to Serena Williams, and has an ownership stake in multiple professional sports franchises all while reddit has a sweet deal with Google that helps it maintain its status as one of the most visited website on planet earth.

🧑‍🍳🧑‍🍳 two cooks 🤔 pic.twitter.com/dhJhuJPeQE

— Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) February 3, 2025

Reddit.com is currently 9th in the world in daily web traffic, just ahead of Yahoo! and slightly behind ChatGPT.

Back when DIGG still had an thriving community of daily DIGGers, friends I’d talk to online and IRL every single day, friends I’ve maintained over the past 20 years and still talk to daily and who I went on to work with for most of my adult life…There were these comics on DIGG that absolutely killed it. The ‘Great Wars’ came in a series of DIGG vs Reddit where DIGGer whose name is escaping me created these legendary DIGG vs Reddit Wars comics that sadly, are so old at this point they’re categorized under the ‘Museum of Reddit’ subreddit.

The gist is simple though, DIGG and Reddit were essentially doing the same thing and were bitter rivals. DIGG had exponentially more traffic than Reddit did at the time but what Reddit had was a very, very snarky and xenophobic user base who was incredibly wary of outsiders coming in and creating a ‘power user’ system on Reddit similar to what existed on DIGG.

Of course, Reddit is completely full of power users these days and year after year various mods on Reddit get exposed for pay-to-play tactics that are at times worse than it ever was on DIGG. Presumably, in the 2025 version of DIGG there will be ‘superpowers’ (AI) used to cap any outsized influence of power users who will seek to overrun the site.

A New Day, A New DIGG On The Horizon

Ahead of the 2025 DIGG launch, David Pierce who is an editor-at-large at The Verge got the scoop. He writes that sometime last Fall Kevin rRose began to think in earnest about a relaunch. He put together a team including Alexis Ohanian, Twitter cofounder Ev Williams, Design/Product exec Justin Mezzell who is currently listed as the CEO of DIGG on LinkedIn, and others.

For those too young to remember DIGG it’s nearly identical in nature to Reddit… If you like something you ‘DIGG’ it and if you don’t like it you ‘bury’ it. Enough ‘DIGGs’ from the right collection of people due to a catchy headline and engaging content and that submission hits the front page. Enough ‘buries’ and it disappears into the ether.

Speaking with The Verge, Kevin Rose mentioned some of the ways AI will be included in the new version. Saying “I’m just making stuff up here, but there’s everything from an AI agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon, to another one where you don’t allow a certain type of profanity and that’s automatically auto-moderated.” Rose added “If we can create more of a dynamic canvas where agents are layered on top to assist, to help, to do wild things, to create games, to do whatever that community wants them to do, then we have something.”

From what I’m gathering, it feels like the new version of DIGG will be similar to Reddit in the sense that there will be sub-communities akin to sub-reddits. This will be fantastic as DIGG always suffered from being too much of a funnel with the front page representing only a tiny fraction of the content on the site but it was really the only page anyone ever visited.

As for humans vs AI, Kevin Rose told The Verge “one of the things that I believe that made Digg, and makes Reddit, a special place on the internet, is that there are humans behind the scenes with real opinions, real conversation, real stories that they find interesting. The second you start to sterilize that, you’re just an aggregator of information. You’re a fancy RSS reader with some voting on it.”

The launch will be soon. It will be packed full of nostalgia. You can visit DIGG.com to sign up for a preview of the site and be notified once it opens. I look forward to seeing all of you there.