Digg is officially back. After months in closed beta, the rebooted platform is now open to the public, relaunching with a focus on trust signals, transparency in moderation, and defenses against AI-driven spam.
Second time is the charm
Last March, Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, joined forces with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and the duo (alongside multiple investors) acquired Digg back from digital advertising company BuySellAds.
The platform, once a promising news aggregation site, didn’t survive the Web 2.0 era and was split up in 2012, with its assets changing hands multiple times until last year’s reacquisition.
Since then, Rose, Ohanian, and their small team have been working on the new Digg, with interesting ideas to promote healthier discussions across its trust-based community.
As TechCrunch explains it:
They’re betting that AI can help to address some of the messiness and toxicity of today’s social media landscape. At the same time, social platforms will need a new set of tools to ensure they’re not taken over by AI bots posing as people.
With that in mind, the new Digg will apply signals of trust to pick up on patterns of authentic participation. They will bundle multiple verification cues and technologies together to fight AI-driven spam, and may even require proof of product ownership before users can join and post in certain communities.
And speaking of communities, starting today, users will be able to freely create their own communities, rather than being limited to the 21 general-theme communities (such as entertainment and gaming) that were active during the closed beta.
TechCrunch says that “community managers (i.e., moderators) for these individual forums will be able to set their own rules, and their moderation logs will be shared publicly, so members can see what decisions are being made”.
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