Here’s a blast from the past: Digg, one of the web’s early news aggregators, is now back under the ownership of its original founder Kevin Rose. Notably, he’s being joined as co-owner by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (both pictured above).
Digg and Reddit were once fierce rivals in the online social news aggregation space, launching within a year of each other some two decades ago. The two platforms enjoyed similar trajectories in the intervening years, going through various owners and spin-offs. But Reddit’s endurance has been particularly notable, with the company finally going public last year in a bumper IPO and its user growth has continued trending upward.
Digg, for its part, didn’t stand the test of time quite so well. The company was split into parts in 2012 and sold to incubator Betaworks, with LinkedIn and the Washington Post acquiring some of the assets. Digg later raised a strategic round of funding from USA Today owner Gannett, before landing in the hands of digital advertising company BuySellAds, which acquired a majority stake in 2018.
A “fresh vision”
Digg never soared to the same heights as Reddit, which is why Rose and Ohanian have now joined forces to “revive” the platform with a “fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be,” says the newly rebooted outfit.
Rose says he has been approached at various times through the years to buy Digg but that it never felt like the right time. More recently, he heard it was for sale, he tells TechCrunch, and began calling friends to brainstorm about it. One of these was Ev Williams, the co-founder of both Twitter and the publishing platform Medium. Another was Ohanian, who Rose once saw as the enemy and to whom he has grown closer in recent years, citing among other things they share in common that both are “girl dads.”
Says Rose of that first conversation with Ohanian about Digg: “I’m like, dude, want to hear something crazy? And then we started just kind of riffing, and I realized that there was so much on the cutting room floor on his side — the stuff that he never built [and] that he wanted to see, and the same was true for me.”
So why now? It’s a combination of reasons, according to Rose, who says that the existing social media landscape has become toxic, messy, and riddled with misinformation — and AI is well-placed to address that. Just the “out of the box stuff” is “insane,” Rose observes, noting there are “Google endpoints already where I don’t even have to mess with a model at all, where I can get sub 200 millisecond response times on any comment under about 300 characters and rated across 20 plus different vectors of of sentiment, so violence, toxicity, hate speech — you name it. Like, that just wasn’t possible five years ago.”
More broadly, says Rose, “We’re at this other inflection point around AI and what it can do. And when you think about these big shifts, they require you to go and step back and revisit first principles and think about how you might change [a business] from the ground up, and that’s what Alexis and I and Justin [Mezzell],” who is a longtime collaborator of Rose and now Digg’s CEO, will be doing, he said.
Ohanian echoes Rose’s sentiments in a press release about the new Digg. “Online communities thrive when there’s a balance between technology and human judgment,” he said. “We’re bringing Digg back to ensure that balance exists. Kevin and I are here to build something better than what social platforms are offering today. AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections.”
Ohanian, for his part, has dipped in and out of Reddit over time. He first left the company in 2009 before returning as its chairman in 2014 and then stepped down from the board altogether in 2020.
Both Rose and Ohanian have invested in other companies through the years, both as individuals and through institutional funds. Just this week, Ohanian joined Frank McCourt’s bid to buy TikTok’s U.S. business.
Their parallel paths as investors have now converged, with True Ventures, where Rose as a general partner, and Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six, both investing in Digg.
While Mezzell, a veteran product designer, will lead the company’s day-to-day operations, Rose will serve as Digg’s chairperson and adviser, and Ohanian will sit on the board.
A new version of the Digg platform is launching soon. Invites will be rolled out in the coming weeks. In the meantime, noted Rose, there is now a landing page that allows people to input their email.
“Then there will be kind of a first come, first served [system] for user name picking and things of that nature,” says Rose. “We’re not spammers,” he continues. “We’re not going to sign you up to some crazy weekly digest or some s—. If you just go over there and input it in your credentials — your email — then we’ll just let you know when it’s live, and you can come grab a user name, kick the tires, tell us where we’re messing up, and and we promise to fast follow and fix all that stuff.”
Even then, says Rose, don’t expect too much straightaway. Turnarounds take time.
“Where we’re really going is, a year, year and a half from now, is when you come to Digg, it’s going to be very much more like the leap that happened to Figma, where it’s free form, it’s dynamic, it’s an interface that is unlike any other that you’ve seen,” says Rose. “It’s not your old-school forums.”
You can hear a much longer conversation with Rose about Digg, his relationship with Ohanian, and also important lessons he has learned as a founder, in our newly released podcast about the big news.
