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Digg, the pre-Reddit social news site, is back.
The revived Digg will again compete with Reddit.
The new Digg uses AI, but users will call the shots, not algorithms.
Digg, one of the original Web 2.0 social news darlings, is back from the dead, and this time it is explicitly gunning for Reddit's crown as the "Front Page of the Internet." Under the renewed leadership of founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the resurrected Digg pitches itself as a community‑driven, AI‑assisted, low‑toxicity social news alternative.
To understand this reboot, it helps to consider just how far Digg fell. Launched in 2004, Digg helped invent the crowd‑curated news model years before Reddit's success. In 2006, Digg was one of the top 25 American websites, only to implode after redesign fiascos, acquisition, and a long fall into irrelevance.
Also: Can Digg's return fix what ails social media today? Reddit's cofounder is betting on it
Then, in 2025, Rose and Ohanian quietly engineered a deal to buy the Digg brand and assets. This move set the stage for a 2026 relaunch framed not as nostalgia but as a deliberate challenge to Reddit's dominance. However, Ohanian did tweet, in March 2025, "The early web was fun. It was weird. It was community-driven. It's time to rebuild that." The key element in that statement is "community-driven," especially when compared to the increasingly top-down managed Reddit.
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