In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a technological entrepreneur, sent an e -mail to his colleague Steve Huffman with a line of threatening subject: “Meet The Enemy”.
The-email body contained only one line: a link to Digg, a social bulletin board focused on the community in which people shared and discussed news articles and connections to other sites that found interesting. Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman, who had founded a similar effort called Reddit, put their competitive places on Digg and its founder, Kevin Rose.
In the following 20 years, these entrepreneurs participated in other projects and, in the true fashion of Silicon Valley, have been immersed in other parts of technology. Along the way, Digg, who went from Popolare to No, is almost not dead.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rose announced that he had purchased Digg for a sum not disclosed by Money Group, a digital average company, and would have reconstructed it to face Reddit. And he is doing it with an improbable ally: Mr. Ohanian.
“This is the perfect time to revisit this idea with new eyes,” said Rose, now 48 years old, a venture capitalist by True Ventures, in an interview. He said that social media have become so omnipresent that “he does not need to be winners to take everything”, adding that “we don’t need to break down Reddit to win”.
Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian, 41, are relaunching Digg when social media are in turmoil. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, transformed the platform into a mirror of himself. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is becoming more focused on the video to compete with Tiktok. And Reddit, who became public a year ago, added Gamelike features to users by pushing users to spend more time on the site and more time watching advertising.
In the midst of this upheaval, Mr. Rose and Ohanian felt the opportunity to reinvent Digg in a way that could cut some of the pitfalls of modern social media and focus on “Connection and Humanity” online.
“The world has changed so much in recent years,” said Mr. Ohanian, who left the Board of Directors of Reddit in 2020, in an interview. “When Kevin told me he was buying Digg, there was a part of me that thought:” Well, damn, could we do it again? “
Not long ago, Digg was at the top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was between a class of first social news sites, such as Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Reddit, which were based on a community of unpaid users to treat articles or topics of interest from all over the web. Digg distinguished himself for his solid use of users of active collaborators, who regularly returned to the site.
The company has collected tens of millions of dollars and acquisition offers on the field by Google and others. In 2006, Rose laid for a photo now not infamous on a businessweek cover, showing off a large smile and giving two inches up, with the title “Like this boy he earned $ 60 million in 18 months”. (Mr. Rose hated the photo.)
The cover proved unchanged. Digg subsequently launched a redesign of his site that his community has widely rejected. Users eventually left to drove, as well as the managers. Rose left Digg in 2012. That same year, the company was divided and sold by Betaworks, LinkedIn and the Washington Post.
On the contrary, Reddit has become a practicable deal. Huffman, who had left the site for other projects, returned in 2015 and stabilized the company. Now 41, has made the Policies of Moderation of Reddit’s moderation more rigorous, once Laissez Faire, leading the advertisers to embrace the site.
Some of these changes have generated a repercussions. Some moderators Reddit of “Sumddit”, the forums dedicated to topics such as guitars or basketball or cute puppies, said they felt neglected by the management. In 2023, hundreds of Sumddit went dark after several executive decisions upset the moderators, threatening the Reddit activity.
Seeing the turmoil, Mr. Rose, who had delighted in investments and other start-ups, decided to act. He wanted to return to his roots on social and community sites, he said, and he always regretted the way things ended with Digg.
“I look back at how that company was managed and I was only very frightening to defend myself in many cases,” Rose recalled. “I didn’t have the maturity to go out and ask difficult questions.”
Mr. Rose began to lay the foundations for a return of digg. He managed thousands of dollars of targeted ads on Reddit with detailed questionnaires for moderators, asking for the greatest difficulties that supervise the Sumddit and other issues. He managed the results through an artificial intelligence program to think of new ways to deal with problems.
“These moderators are pouring their lives into this,” he said. “We think we can do it better.”
Mr. Ohanian also contacted, with whom he had tied the scars of managing their platforms. Mr. Ohanian said he had “all love” for his former company. “In the end, Reddit was a huge part of my life,” he said.
Mr. Rose and Ohanian collected an unmealing amount of funding to regain Digg and build a new version of the company. Their investors include True Ventures, in which Mr. Rose is a partner and Seven Seven Six, a venture capital company founded by Mr. Ohanian.
They also took less than a dozen engineers and designers for the new Digg and brought Justin Mezzell, a long -standing collaborator of Mr. Rose’s, to be a managing director. Mr. Rose and Mr. Ohanian will join the Digg Council, with Mr. Rose as president.
The invitations to the new digg will be distributed in the coming weeks, they said, and the site will be mainly aimed at people on mobile devices. Artificial intelligence will also play a wider role in making Digg more accessible to users, Rose said. For example, he said, a community of science fiction fans could have their discussions translated into Klingon, the language used by the alien breed of “star trek” with the same name. Artificial intelligence tools can also help reduce spam, disinformation and harassment, he said.
Less glamor – but perhaps more important – their attention will be for moderators. Ohanian and Rose said they wanted to enhance moderators with better tools to help keep communities online, which maintains the welcoming site for users.
“What we have never focused on is the back -nd,” said Ohaanian, referring to the tools and characteristics on which moderators lean on. “But it’s the back -End that really, really.”
The initial reaction to the relaunch of Digg can be deactivated, said Rose, with some people who could see the resurrection as a cute mention of a retro version of the social web. But he has big floors, he said.
“Since there are so many giants in this space that they will be slow to move, it means that we can be agile,” said Rose. “We will not have everything we want you to be on the first day. But in a year, we will make a very different conversation.”