Digg will restart, with Web 2.0 ERA’s most prominent names leading the way. Founder Kevin Rose purchased it for an undisclosed amount. Rose’s partner in this effort is very interesting. The co-founder of Alexis Ohanian – at some point the location’s biggest competitor – acquired Digg with Ross.
They certainly hope Digg can again face Ohanian’s former corporate rival. According to Rose and Ohanian, “We have collaborated to restore social platforms with a fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and a real community, making the early network a fun and exciting place.”
The former competitor plans to use their knowledge of not working on Digg and Reddit for years to help make the restart successful. Rose and Ohanian are now venture capitalists and have also been meeting with community leaders from online forums, including Reddit, to better understand their frustrations in their own way or to thwart their frustrations in order to address these factors in the new Digg. The new DIGG will also adopt a mobile-first approach.
Since this is 2025, there is an AI element here. The program is to differentiate DIGG from other services by “focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance user experience and build people-centered alternatives.” Ross suggests The New York Times AI can help control and allow interesting quirks, such as turning discussions among science fiction enthusiasts into Klingon.
“At various times over the years, I was approached to buying back Digg; this was never right. The technology to solve our biggest pain points didn’t exist,” Ross said. “Just recently, we reached a turning point where AI could be a beneficial co-pilot for users and hosts, rather than replacing human conversations, but adding human conversations, allowing users to dig deeper while eliminating many repetitive burdens of community hosts.”
Justin Mezzell is an experienced product design director and a long-time collaborator at Rose’s, and is the CEO of Digg. Ross is the chairman of the company’s board of directors and chief consultant. Ohanian also sits on Digg’s board and will serve as a consultant.
Digg has a long and twisty road that goes straight to this point. This is the early darling of the social media era, as it is very revealing with reddit toes, curating the best internet with submissions from users, and they will do something they like to push it further away on the homepage (or Digg) similar to how Reddit works. However, Digg’s early success gave way to attempts to use the system, and the controversial 2010 redesign led to a large number of users’ Reddit.
The company was sold in 2012, with LinkedIn and The Washington Post Company buying some aspects. A startup studio and venture capital firm called Betaworks serves as a website for editors to curate content.
Until now, even after Digg was sold to an advertising agency in 2018, this approach continues. The latest version of Digg is still very solid as it continues to provide meticulously curated materials around the web as well as some of the original writing it edits.
There are some hints that Rose is back in Digg Mix. A few years later, Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht recovered Digging Podcast last year. Last December, a post on the DIGG X account showed a screenshot of the app’s icon, with a bubble indicating 3825 notifications. The numbers in the title image of the X account are the same. Some people believe the restart will take place on March 8 (3/8/25). Anyway, Rose recommends that the program is to start small in the coming months and improve Digg’s capabilities.
Hopefully, as part of this revival, the company is resurrected, an RSS reader of the Betaworks era. Although we have brought a new life to the staple food of the Web 2.0 era, can anyone bring back all the kind love in this world?
