is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Digg is making a comeback. With the backing of people like Digg cofounder Kevin Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Digg has ambitions to once again be the homepage of the internet. The revival is still in its very early days — the platform is still invite-only — but Digg launched its new mobile apps this week, and I installed the iOS app on my phone to see what it’s like.
New Digg operates similarly to Reddit: people submit links that others can comment and vote on, and links with a lot of “diggs” (upvotes) will bubble up the feed. You can also tap a downvote-like “bury” button, but on posts (not comments), the bury button functions more as a signal to Digg to minimize that type of content in your own feed.
The Home tab has four main categories: Trending, Most Dugg, Newest, and Heating Up. I’m not entirely sure what the difference between “Trending” and “Heating Up” is, but the content in the latter category did feel fresher.
Previous Next
1 / 4 The Trending tab on Thursday afternoon. Image: Digg
Within each of those categories, you can have the app surface content from “My Feed,” which pulls from communities you follow, or “All Digg,” which pulls from all of Digg. (There are only a few broad communities available right now: /AMA, /art, /digg, /diggnation, /entertainment, /finance, /food, /funny, /gaming, /lifestyle, /music, /news, /offbeat, /politics, /science, /sports, and /technology.) Under the categories, you can also see a horizontally scrolling carousel of different links, though I’m not quite sure how the app picks which ones to show there.
Tapping into individual posts shows things like the text of the post and an included image or a link. For posts with links, you’ll see a seemingly AI-powered “TL;DR” summary written by “Digg Intelligence” at the end of the post. (I haven’t noticed any issues with the summaries so far.) Under the main posts, you can read threaded comments and Digg or bury them.
... continue reading