Digg is officially back under the ownership of its original founder, Kevin Rose, along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. "Similar to Reddit, the new Digg offers a website and mobile app where you can browse feeds featuring posts from across a selection of its communities and join other communities that align with your interests," reports TechCrunch. "There, you can post, comment, and upvote (or 'digg') the site's content." From the report: [T]he rise of AI has presented an opportunity to rebuild Digg, Rose and Ohanian believe, leading them to acquire Digg last March through a leveraged buyout by True Ventures, Ohanian's firm Seven Seven Six, Rose and Ohanian themselves, and the venture firm S32. The company has not disclosed its funding. 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. "We obviously don't want to force everyone down some kind of crazy KYC process," said Rose in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the 'know your customer' verification process used by financial institutions to confirm someone's identity. Instead of simply offering verification checkmarks to designate trust, Digg will try out new technologies, like using zero-knowledge proofs (cryptographic methods that verify information without revealing the underlying data) to verify the people using its platform. It could also do other things, like require that people who join a product-focused community verify they actually own or use the product being discussed there. As an example, a community for Oura ring owners could verify that everyone who posts has proven they own one of the smart rings. Plus, Rose suggests Digg could use signals acquired from mobile devices to help verify members -- for instance, the app could identify when Digg users attended a meetup in the same location. "I don't think there's going to be any one silver bullet here," said Rose. "It's just going to be us saying ... here's a platter of things that you can add together to create trust."
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