In the summer of 2005, high-tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian emailed his colleague Steve Huffman with the ominous subject line: “Meet the enemy.”
The body of the email contained one line. This is a link to Digg, a community-centric social message board, where people shared and discussed news articles and links to other sites that people found interesting. Ohanian and Huffman, who founded a similar initiative called Reddit, set a competitive sight for Digg and its founder Kevin Rose.
Twenty years later, these entrepreneurs took part in other projects and in true Silicon Valley fashion, they immersed themselves in other parts of technology. Along the way, Digg died not everything, but everything, from popularity.
On Wednesday, Rose announced that he bought back the dig from the digital media company Money Group for a private amount and restructured it to take on Reddit. And he does it with an unlikely alliance: Mr. Ohanian.
“This is the perfect time to revisit this idea with fresh eyes,” said Rose, 48, now a true venture capitalist, in an interview. He added that “there is no need to be a winner” as social media has become ubiquitous, and that “there is no need to beat Reddit to win.”
Rose and 41-year-old Ohanian are reopening Digg when social media is roaring. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed X, has transformed the platform into his own mirror. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is focusing more on video to compete with Tiktok. And, released a year ago, Reddit added game-like features to tweak users to make users spend more time on their site.
Amid this upheaval, Rose and Ohanian felt the opportunity to cut out some of the pitfalls of modern social media and reinvent the dig in a way that could focus on “connection and humanity” online.
“The world has changed dramatically over the past few years,” Ohanian, who left Reddit's board of directors in 2020, said in an interview. “When Kevin said he was buying back the dig, there was a part where I was like, 'Well damn damn, can we do it again?” ”
Not long ago, Digg was at the top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was one of the classes of early social news sites such as Slashdot, del.icio.us, and Reddit, relying on a community of unpaid users to curate articles and topics of interest from across the web. Digg stands out with a robust user base of active contributors, and he regularly returned to the site.
The company raised tens of millions of dollars and has collected acquisition offers from Google and others. In 2006, Rose took a now-shining photo on a Business Week cover, giving two thumbs with a big smile, headlined “This kid made $60 million in 18 months.” (Mr. Rose hated the photos.)
Cover proved the fate of illness. Digg later began redesigning a site that the community widely rejected. Users eventually left as many people as executives. Rose left Digg in 2012. That same year, the company was split and sold for parts to Bettawalks, LinkedIn and Washington Post.
In contrast, Reddit has become a viable business. After leaving the site for other projects, Huffman returned in 2015 to stabilize the company. The now 41-year-old has made the former laissez-faire content moderation policy even more stringent and has made the site acceptance of advertisers.
Some of these changes produced a backlash. Some Reddit moderators of “subreddits,” a forum dedicated to topics such as guitar, basketball and cute puppies, said they felt ignored by management. In 2023, hundreds of Subreddits went dark after several enforcement decisions disrupt moderators and threatened Reddit's business.
Seeing the fuss, Rose, who dabbled in investments and other startups, decided to take action. He had itching to return to his roots on social and community sites, he said, always regretting the way things ended up digging.
“I look back at how the company operates, and I was often very afraid to stand up for myself,” Rose recalls. “I didn't have the maturity to go out and ask difficult questions.”
Rose began laying the foundations for his dig comeback. He used a detailed survey for moderators to run targeted ads worth thousands of dollars across Reddit, asking about the biggest challenges of overseeing subreddit and other issues. He came up with new ways to implement the results through an artificial intelligence program to address the issue.
“These moderators put their lives into this,” he said. “I think we can do that better.”
He also reached out to Mr. Ohanian. Ohanian said there was “all love” in his previous company. “Reddit was a big part of my life after all,” he said.
Rose and Ohanian raised private funds to buy back Digg and build a new version of the company. Their investors include the true venture where Rose is a partner, and Seven Seven Six, a venture company founded by Ohanian.
They also hired fewer than 12 engineers and designers for the new Digg, and made Rose's longtime collaborator Justin Metzel the chief executive. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian will be on Digg's board of directors, and Mr. Rose will be chaired.
Invitations to the new DIGG will be distributed in the coming weeks, they say, and the site is primarily aimed at people on mobile devices. AI also plays a major role in making Digg more accessible to users, Rose said. For example, he said the community of science fiction enthusiasts could be translated into Klingon, the language used in the “Star Trek” alien race of the same name. AI tools also help reduce spam, misinformation and harassment, he said.
It's not very appealing, but perhaps most importantly, the attention to moderators. Ohanian and Rose said they want moderators to enhance better tools to help maintain online communities.
“What we're never focused on is the backend,” Ohanian said, referring to the tools and features that moderators rely on. “But it's the backend that really matters.”
The initial response to Digg's renewal could be muted, Rose said some people would likely see the revival as a cute nod to a retro version of the social web. But he said he has grand plans.
“There are so many giants moving in this space that it means we can be agile,” Rose said. “Digg doesn't have everything he wants to be on day one. But a year from now, we'll have a very different conversation.”
