The Return of Digg, a Star of Web 2.0

In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a tech entrepreneur, sent an email to his colleague Steve Huffman with an ominous subject line: “Meet the enemy.”

The body of the email contained just one line — a link to Digg, a community-focused social message board where people shared and discussed news articles and links to other sites they found interesting. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman, who had founded a similar effort called Reddit, set their competitive sights on Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.

In the 20 years since, these entrepreneurs have gone onto other projects and, in true Silicon Valley fashion, dipped into other parts of tech. Along the way, Digg, which went from popular to not, all but died.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he had bought back Digg for an undisclosed sum from Money Group, a digital media company, and would rebuild it to take on Reddit. And he is doing it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.

“This is the perfect time to revisit this idea with fresh eyes,” Mr. Rose, 48, now a venture capitalist at True Ventures, said in an interview. He said social media had become so ubiquitous that “it doesn’t need to be winner take all,” adding that “we don’t need to take down Reddit to win.”

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are relaunching Digg when social media is in tumult. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, has turned the platform into a mirror of himself. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is becoming more video-focused to compete with TikTok. And Reddit, which went public a year ago, has added gamelike features to nudge users into spending more time on the site — and more time looking at advertising.

Amid this upheaval, Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian sensed an opportunity to reinvent Digg in a way that could cut through some of the pitfalls of modern social media and focus on “connection and humanity” online.

“The world has changed so much in the past few years,” Mr. Ohanian, who left Reddit’s board in 2020, said in an interview. “When Kevin told me he was buying back Digg, there was a part of me that thought, ‘Well, damn, could we do it again?’”

Not long ago, Digg was on top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was among a class of early social news sites, such as Slashdot, del.icio.us and Reddit, that relied on a community of unpaid users to curate articles or topics of interest from across the web. Digg stood out for its robust user base of active contributors, who regularly returned to the site.

The company raised tens of millions of dollars and fielded acquisition offers from Google and others. In 2006, Mr. Rose posed for a now-infamous photo on a BusinessWeek cover, sporting a wide grin and giving two thumbs up, with the headline “How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months.” (Mr. Rose hated the photo.)

The cover proved ill fated. Digg later launched a redesign of its site that its community widely rejected. Users eventually left in droves, as did executives. Mr. Rose left Digg in 2012. That same year, the company was divvied up and sold for parts to Betaworks, LinkedIn and The Washington Post.

In contrast, Reddit became a viable business. Mr. Huffman, who had left the site for other projects, returned in 2015 and stabilized the company. Now 41, he has made Reddit’s once laissez faire content moderation policies more stringent, leading advertisers to embrace the site.

Some of those changes generated a backlash. Some Reddit moderators of “subreddits,” the forums dedicated to topics like guitars or basketball or cute puppies, said they felt neglected by management. In 2023, hundreds of subreddits went dark after several executive decisions upset moderators, threatening Reddit’s business.

Seeing the uproar, Mr. Rose, who had dabbled in investing and other start-ups, decided to act. He was itching to get back to his roots in 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 fearful to stand up for myself in a lot of cases,” Mr. Rose recalled. “I just didn’t have the maturity to go out and ask the tough questions.”

Mr. Rose began laying the groundwork for a Digg comeback. He ran thousands of dollars’ worth of targeted ads across Reddit with detailed questionnaires for moderators, asking about the biggest difficulties overseeing subreddits and other issues. He ran the results through an artificial intelligence program to think of new ways for addressing the problems.

“These moderators are pouring their lives into this,” he said. “We think we can do it better.”

He also reached out to Mr. Ohanian, with whom he had bonded over 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 huge part of my life,” he said.

Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian raised an undisclosed amount of funding to repurchase 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 venture firm founded by Mr. Ohanian.

They also hired fewer than a dozen engineers and designers for the new Digg and brought on Justin Mezzell, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Rose’s, to be chief executive. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian will join Digg’s board, with Mr. Rose as chair.

Invitations to the new Digg will be distributed in the coming weeks, they said, and the site will primarily be aimed at people on mobile devices. A.I. will also play a larger part in making Digg more accessible to users, Mr. Rose said. For instance, he said, a community of science-fiction enthusiasts could have their discussions translated into Klingon, the language used by the “Star Trek” alien race of the same name. A.I. tools can also help reduce spam, misinformation and harassment, he said.

Less glamorous — but perhaps most important — will be their attention to moderators. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Rose said they wanted to empower moderators with better tools to help maintain online communities, which keeps the site welcoming to users.

“What we never focused on is the back end,” Mr. Ohanian said, referring to the tools and features that moderators lean on. “But it’s the back end that really, really matters.”

The initial reaction to Digg’s relaunch may be muted, Mr. Rose said, with some people likely to see the resurrection as a cute nod to a retro version of the social web. But he has grand plans, he said.

“Because there are so many giants in this space that are going to be slow to move, it means that we can be nimble,” Mr. Rose said. “We won’t have everything we want Digg to be on Day 1. But a year from now, we will be having a very different conversation.”