In the summer of 2005, Alexis Ohanian, a technical businessman, sent an email to his colleague Steve Huffman with an ominous theme line: “Get to know the enemy”.
The body of the e-mail contained only one line-one link for Digg, a community-focused social messaging board, where people shared and discussed news articles and links on other sites that considered interest. Mr Ohanian and Mr Huffman, who had founded a similar effort called Reddit, put his competitive sights on Digg and his founder Kevin Rose.
In 20 years since then, these entrepreneurs have gone to other projects and, in a real Silicon Valley manner, have been immersed in other parts of the technology. Along the road, Digg, who went from popular to no, everything except he died.
On Wednesday, Mr Rose announced that he had bought back digg for a non -announced amount from Money Group, a digital media company, and will rebuild it to take over the Reddit. And he does it with an unlikely ally: Mr. Ohanian.
“This is the perfect time to re -examine this idea with fresh eyes,” said Rose, 48, a capital business in True Ventures. He said that social media had become so omnipresent that “the winner does not need to get everything”, adding that “we do not need to remove Reddit to win”.
Mr Rose and Mr Ohanian, 41, discover Digg when social media are in turmoil. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed X, has turned the platform into a mirror of himself. Meta, which holds Facebook and Instagram, is becoming more and more focused on the video to compete with Tiktok. And Reddit, which was made public a year ago, has added gamelike features to push users to spend more time on the site – and more time looking at advertising.
Through this turmoil, Mr Rose and Mr Ohanian felt the opportunity to discover Digg in a way that could cut some of the traps of modern social media and focus on “connection and humanity” on the internet.
“The world has changed so much in recent years,” said Mr. Ohanian, who abandoned the Reddit Board of Directors in 2020. “When Kevin told me he was buying the Digg back, there was a part of me thinking,” Well, damn, could we do it again? ”
Some time ago, Digg was on top of the world. Founded in 2004, it was among a category of early social news sites, such as Slashdot, del.icio.us and Reddit, based on a community of unpaid users to clear articles or issues of interest from all over the web. Digg stood out for the strong user base of active contributors, who regularly returned to the site.
The company has set tens of millions of dollars and offers offers from Google and more. In 2006, Mr Rose set for a photo that was now left on a Businessweek cover, fighting in a wide smile and giving two thumbs, entitled “How this child made $ 60 million in 18 months”. (Mr. Rose hated the photo.)
The cover proved to be bad. Digg later began a redesign of his website widely rejected by his community. Users eventually left in diseases, as did executives. Mr Rose left Digg in 2012. In the same year, the company was divided and sold for spare parts to betaworks, LinkedIn and The Washington Post.
On the contrary, 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 the policies of Reddit once Laissez Faire with moderation, leading advertisers to embrace the site.
Some of these changes caused a reaction. Some Reddit coordinators of “Subreddits”, forums dedicated to issues such as guitars or basketball or cute puppies, said they felt neglected by the administration. In 2023, hundreds of subreddits destroyed after several executive decisions, upset the coordinators, threatening Reddit’s operation.
Seeing the upheaval, Mr Rose, who was injured in investment and other newly established businesses, decided to act. It was itching to return to his roots in social and community sites, he said, and always regretted the way things were over with Digg.
“I look back on how this company is running and I was very scared to get up for myself in many cases,” Rose recalled. “I just didn’t have the maturity to go out and ask the difficult questions.”
Mr. Rose began to define the foundations for a Digg return. It ran targeted thousands of dollars’ ads across Reddit with detailed questionnaires for the coordinators, asking the biggest difficulties overseeing subreddits and other issues. He ran the results through an artificial intelligence program to think of new ways to deal with problems.
“These coordinators throw their lives on it,” he said. “We think we can do it better.”
He also arrived at Mr. Ohanian, with whom he had been linked above the scars of executing their platforms. Mr. Ohanian said he had “all the 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 set an un -announced funding for Digg’s repurchase and building a new version of the company. Their investors include real businesses, where Mr Rose is a partner and seven seven six, a business business founded by Mr Ohanian.
They also hired fewer than twelve engineers and designers for the new Digg and brought Justin Mezzell, a long -term partner of Mr Rose’s, to be Managing Director. Mr Rose and Mr Ohanian will participate in the Digg Board of Directors, with Mr Rose as a chair.
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. AI will also play a larger role in making Digg more affordable to users, Mr Rose said. For example, he said, a community of enthusiastic science fiction could translate their discussions into Klingon, the language used by the foreign race “Star Trek” with the same name. AI tools can also help reduce unwanted messages, misinformation and harassment, he said.
Less glowing – but perhaps more important – their attention to coordinators will be. Mr Ohanian and Mr Rose said they wanted to strengthen the coordinators with better tools to help maintain electronic communities, which maintain the website that welcomes users.
“What we never focused is the back,” said Ohanian, referring to the tools and features that the coordinators lean. “But it’s the rear end that really. It really matters.”
The initial reaction to the restart of Digg can be extinguished, Mr Rose said, with some people seeing the Resurrection as a cute nod in a retro version of social fabric. But he has big plans, he said.
“Because there are so many giants in this area that will be late to move, it means that we can be agile,” Mr Rose said. “We won’t have what we want Digg to be on day 1. But one year from now, we will have a very different conversation.”
