In the summer of 2005, Alexis OhaanianA technical businessman sent an email to his colleague Steve Hoffman with a fateful topic line: “Know the enemy.”
Email body contains only one line – a link to DiggA social messages painting focusing on the community, where people participated and discussed news articles and links to other sites that they found interesting. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Hoffman, who established a similar effort called I wanted, Put their competitive scenes on Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.
Within 20 years, entrepreneurs went to other projects, and in real ways in Silicon Valley, he decreased to other parts of technology. Along the way, Digg, which moved from popularity to no, all that died.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he bought Digg for an unknown amount of Money Group, a digital media company, and will be rebuilt on Reddit. He does this with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.
“This is the perfect time to reconsider this idea with new eyes,” said Mr. Rose, 48, who is now a legitimate capitalist in True Ventures, in an interview. He said that social media has become so much that “you do not need to be the winner taking everything,” adding, “We do not need to get a response to win.”
Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are re -launching Digg when social media is in a state of turmoil. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and called X, turned the platform into a mirror for itself. Meta, who has Facebook and Instagram, has become more focused on video to compete with Tiktok. And Reddit, which Open A year ago, Gamelike’s features added to push users to spend more time on the site – and more time search for ads.
Amid these disorders, Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohahanian felt an opportunity to re -invent Digg in a way that could penetrate some of the secrets of modern social media and focus on “communication and humanity” via the Internet.
“The world has changed a lot in the past few years,” said Mr. Ohhanian, who left the Radet Council in 2020, in an interview. “When Kevin told me that he was buying Digg, there was a part of me thought,” well, curse, can we do it again? “
Not so long ago, Digg was at the top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was among the category of early social news sites, such as Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Reddit, which relied on a society of unpaid users to arrange articles or topics of interest from all over the web. Digg has emerged for its strong user base for active shareholders, who regularly returned to the site.
The company raised tens of millions of dollars and attached acquisition offers from Google and others. In 2006, Mr. Rose has now presented a famous picture on the cover of Businessweek, smiles a wide smile and gave the thumbs, with the title “How this child achieved $ 60 million in 18 months.” (Mr. Rose, the picture.)
The cover has proven bad. Digg later launched a redesign of its community, which was widely rejected by its community. Users finally left in large numbers, as did the executives. Mr. Rose Dege left in 2012. In the same year, the company was divided Sold for spare parts to BetaworksLinkedIn and Washington Post.
In contrast, Reddit has become an applicable work. Mr. Hoffman, who left the site for other projects, He returned in 2015 The company settled. Now 41, he has done a more striking Reddit”s Reddit’s policies, which leads to the site’s embrace.
Some of these changes were a violent reaction. Some of the supervisors of “Subreddits” and the forums designated for topics such as the guitar, basketball or gentle puppies said they felt negligent by the administration. In 2023, Hundreds of sub -clients have become dark After many executive decisions, it bothered the supervisors, threatening Redit’s work.
When seeing the uproar, Mr. Rose, who was involved in investment and other startups, decided to act. He said it was to return to his roots on social and societal sites, and he always regretted the way things ended with Digg.
“I look back on how to run this company, and I was very afraid to defend myself in many cases,” says Mr. Rose. “I didn’t have maturity to go out and ask difficult questions.”
Mr. Rose began laying the foundation for the return of the drilling. He operated thousands of targeted ads for thousands of dollars throughout Reddit with detailed questionnaires for supervisors, and asks about the greatest difficulties in overseeing sub -problems and other issues. He has operated the results through the artificial intelligence program to think about new ways to address problems.
“These supervisors pour their lives in this,” he said. “We think we can do it better.”
She also communicates with Mr. Ohanian, who was associated with the scars of their platforms. Mr. Ohanian said it is “all love” for his previous company. “At the end of the day, I was a large part of my life,” he said.
Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohahanian raised an unknown amount of funding to rebuild Digg and built a new version of the company. Among their investors are Ventures True Ventures, where Mr. Rose Sharek, seven seven six, is a project company founded by Mr. Ohanian.
They also rented less than ten engineers and designers of The New Digg and brought Gustin Mizel, a long -collaborator for Mr. Rose, to be the CEO. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohhanian will join the Digg Board of Directors, with Mr. Rose as Chairman.
They said that the calls to the new Digg will be distributed in the coming weeks, and the site will primarily target people on mobile devices. Mr. Rose said artificial intelligence will play a greater role in making Digg easier for users. For example, he said that a society of science fiction lovers can translate their discussions into Klingon, the language used by the foreign “Star Trek” race of the same name. He said that artificial intelligence tools can also help reduce unwanted messages and wrong and harassment.
Less luster – but perhaps the most important – will be their interest in supervisors. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Rose said they want to enable supervisors with better tools to help maintain communities online, making the site welcome users.
“What we never focus on is the back end,” said Mr. Ohhanian, referring to the tools and features that supervisors tend. “But the back end is really, really important.”
Mr. Rose said that the initial reaction to Digg may be silent, as some people will see the resurrection as a nice signal to a reactionary version of the social web. He said he had big plans.
Mr. Rose said: “Due to the presence of many giants in this field, which will be slow to move, this means that we can be smart.” “We will not have everything we want to be Digg on the first day. But after a year from now, we will have a completely different conversation.”
