In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a tech entrepreneur, sent an e -mail to his colleague Steve Huffman with an ominous subject line: “Meet the Enemy.”
The body of the e-mail contained only one line-one link to DIGG, a community-oriented social pin board where people news articles and links to other sites they found that found, shared and discussed. Mr. Ohanian and Mr Huffman, who had set up a similar effort called Reddit, established their competitive sights on DIGG and the founder, Kevin Rose.
In the 20 years thereafter, these entrepreneurs went on other projects and, on real Silicon Valley mode, immersed in other parts of technology. Along the way, Digg, that went from popular to not, but died.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he had bought Digg back for an unprecedented amount from Money Group, a digital media company, and would rebuild to assume Reddit. And he does it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.
“This is the perfect moment to visit this idea again with fresh eyes,” said Mr. Rose, 48, now a venture capitalist at True Ventures, in an interview. He said that social media had become so ubiquitous that “it doesn't have to be the winner,” and added that “we don't need to get Reddit to win.”
Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, his Digg to restart when social media are in tumult. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, has changed a mirror of itself from the platform. Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram, is becoming more and more video -oriented to compete with Tiktok. And Reddit, which became public a year ago, added gamelike functions to push users to spend more time on the site – and view more time to view advertisements.
In the midst of this unrest, Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian found the chance to reinvent Digg in a way that could cut some of the pitfalls of modern social media and concentrate online on “connection and humanity”.
“The world has changed so much in recent years,” said Mr. Ohanian, who left Reddit's board in 2020, in an interview. “When Kevin told me he was bought Digg, there was a part of me that thought:” Well, damn it, can we do it again? “
Not long ago, Digg was on top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was one of a class of early social news sites, such as Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Reddit, who were dependent on a community of unpaid users to put together articles or topics of interest from everywhere on the internet. DIGG stood out for his robust user base of active contributors, who regularly returned to the site.
The company has collected tens of millions of dollars and set up acquisition offers from Google and others. In 2006, Mr. Pos. Rose for a now notorious photo on a business week cover, with a broad grin and gave two thumbs up, with the head “how this boy earned $ 60 million in 18 months.” (Mr. Rose hated the photo.)
The coverage turned out to be poorly forced. Digg later launched a redesign of his site that rejected his community on a large scale. Users eventually left in large numbers, just like managers. Mr. Rose left Digg in 2012. In the same year, the company was divided and sold for parts to Betaworks, LinkedIn and the Washington Post.
Reddit, on the other hand, became a viable company. Mr Huffman, who had left the site for other projects, returned in 2015 and stabilized the company. Now 41, he once made Reddit's Laissez Faire -Hetful policy stricter, leading advertisers to embrace the site.
Some of those changes generated a recoil. Some Reddit moderators of 'Subreddits', the forums that focus on topics such as guitars or basketball or cute puppies, said they felt neglected by management. In 2023, hundreds of Subreddits became dark after various executive decisions made moderators upset, causing the activities of Reddit to threaten.
When he saw the stir, Mr. Rose, who had participated in investing and other startups, to act. He itched to return to his roots on social and community sites, he said, and always regretted the way things had ended with Digg.
“I look back on how that company was run, and I was just very anxious to stand up for myself in many cases,” Mr. Rose remembered. “I just didn't have the maturity to go outside and ask the difficult questions.”
Mr. Rose started to lay the foundation for a Digg -Comback. He ran thousands of dollars on targeted advertisements in Reddit with detailed questionnaires for moderators, and asked about the greatest difficulties that supervise subbreddits and other issues. He led the results through an artificial intelligence program to think of new ways to tackle the problems.
“These moderators dump their lives here,” he said. “We think we can do better.”
He also contacted Mr. Ohanian, with whom he had joined the scars of running their platforms. Mr. Ohanian said he had “all love” for his former company. “At the end of the day, Reddit was a big part of my life,” he said.
Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian collected an unknown financing to buy back Digg and to build a new version of the company. Their investors include True Ventures, where Mr. Rose is a partner and Seven Seven Six, a daring company founded by Mr. Ohanian.
They also hired less than a dozen engineers and designers for the new DIGG and brought Justin Mezzell, an old employee of Mr. Rose, to be Chief Executive. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian will become a member of Digg's Board, with Mr. Rose as chairman.
Invitations to the new DIGG will be distributed in the coming weeks, they said, and the site will mainly be aimed at people on mobile devices. AI will also play a greater role to make Digg more accessible to users, Mr. Rose said. For example, he said, a community of science fiction enthusiasts could have their discussions translated into Klingon, the language used by the “Star Trek” alien-breed with the same name. AI tools can also help to reduce spam, wrong information and intimidation, he said.
Less glamorous – but perhaps the most important – will be their attention to moderators. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Rose said they wanted to enable moderators to help better tools to maintain online communities, so that the site keeps users hospitable.
“What we have never focused on is the back,” said Mr. Ohanian, referring to the tools and functions that moderators tend to. “But it is the back that really, really matters.”
The first reaction to DIGG's release can be filled in, Mr. said. Rose, where some people will probably see the resurrection as a cute nod to a retro version of the social web. But he has big plans, he said.
“Because there are so many giants in this space that will move slowly, this means that we can be agile,” said Mr. Rose. “We don't have everything we want Digg on day 1. But in a year from now on we'll have a completely different conversation.”
