Digg is coming back, with founder Kevin Rose and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian

At some point in the past fall, Kevin Rose began to think seriously Digg once again. More than two decades ago, he launched a social site and sharing links, for years, It was known as the “home page of the Internet”. Since then, Digg was through Many owners and Many axesRose moved to several other jobs, and the Internet moved. Rose has thought about building something like Digg again, and he was contacted until the field and the location were re -purchased several times, but the timing was not right.
This time, although things started clicking. Rose and a group of what he calls “brainstorming partners”, which included the founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian, design and producer EXEC JUSTIN Mezzell, and even people like blogger and the founder of Twitter Ev Williams, they started talking about whether artificial intelligence might be able to help them build a better social platform. “I was inviting Alexis and talking,” we’ll be like, “hey,” hey, what if, what if, what if? ” Many of these things began to give us this situation butterflies in the stomach, where you love, “Oh, this may be great. This can be really great.”
Now, Digg returns. Rose will be her chair, her chief executive, Mezzell, OHANIAL Consultant. (Rose and Ohanian are also the owners of capitalists in the project, and their companies invest in the new project.) They bought the field and other assets of Money Group for a price that they will not reveal and return. The site is restarted today, but only in a limited form. However, her final ambitions are enormous: Digg aims to build a kind of first social social platform that no longer exists on the Internet. Its new founding team believes that artificial intelligence may be the secret of his withdrawal.
If you are on the Internet for a long time enough to remember the old Digg, you have already an approximate idea of how the new Digg works. Everything depends on content and links: someone shares a link, and people can comment and vote on links. (If you love something, you are “Digg”; the Old “Bury” option has ended now). The most popular things on the home page – which tell me Rose and Mezzell that they hoped to be again the Internet home page – but there will also be countless societies from the younger societies that are countless and share in Nich.
Of course, there are many ways to talk about online links. One of them, I wanted, is still very popular! The team is not ashamed of comparing but it is believed to be better engaged with society, and without the requirements of growth in everything because it is a public company, they can build something that takes care of its users better. If Digg does so properly, you will feel the home page as if it is old, and you may feel everything is better.
Rose says that he and Hanian are convinced – and they both learn the difficult way – that the real trick, something that no one has done yet, is to give societies to the tools they already need to work. This is where artificial intelligence comes. Many of the job of the supervisor, says Rose, is just a work of necrosis: anti -random mail, reviewing clear policy violations, and charging unlawful battles. He says: “How can we remove the work of the guard from the supervisors and community managers, and transform what they do every day into a kind of” director of feelings, culture and society “more than one person sitting there to do the arduous things that come across the front door?”
The real trick is to give societies the tools they already need to work
The new Rose New Digg says, and it will include many AI-Forward methods to sort and make decisions on content. He also hopes to use artificial intelligence for fun. “I just make things here, but there is everything from Amnesty International’s agent that completely turns your sub -community into Klingon, to another that does not allow a certain type of profanity, and is automatically modified automatically.” Users will be able to click on artificial intelligence models to build things in their societies as well. “If we are able to create more dynamic painting where agents are placed in the foreground for help, help, do wild things, create games, and do everything this society wants, then we have something,” says Rose.
The new Digg must feel if the team is correct, as if it is a technical project that is driven by society more than the Internet forum in the old school. But both Rose and Mizel say that the whole thing depends on the action of what users want – and nothing else. “One of the things that I think has made Digg, makes Reddit, a special place on the Internet, is that there are human beings behind the scenes with real opinions, a real conversation, real stories they find interesting. The second that begins to sterilize it, you are just a gathering of information. You are a wonderful RSS reader with some vote on it.”
Mezzell says that one of the great challenges is to know how to reward users and promote them to do a good job. Digg will not explain the number of your followers as this creates bad incentives; The same with competition to be the most “Dugg” person on the platform. “There are all these very simple systems that we already have, to comment on systems and branches and all these things. But even if we start there, we cannot stop asking the question about how to give people respect for being really insisting, because we are really fans, because you are really funny.” He has no perfect answer to that, but he knows that this is the key to making him work.
There is a lot that the new Digg team has no perfect answer yet. Both Rose and Mezzell, several times for each of them, say that what is launched today is an initial model. It will have a home page, some sub -societies, some links, and some comments, and this is related to them. The goal is to make people excited because Digg returned, then introduces them to the new platform and built it next to them. “If you come on the first day,” Rose says, it is 99.9 per cent of nostalgia to the past and you are like a curse, this is similar to a slightly updated version of Digg that looks really great. “Give him some time – perhaps even a few weeks, if the new team charges at the speed that Mezzell promises – and it will be a different thing.