Digg to relaunch with focus on ‘humanity and connection’

Before Reddit there was Digg, which popularized up- and down-votes on online posts. Now the founders of both platforms — social media veterans Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian — are relaunching the early Reddit rival with a focus on “humanity and connection” they hope will be boosted by the use of artificial intelligence.

Rose founded Digg, which launched in 2004 and let people up- and down-vote (“Digg” or “bury”) content from users and from sources around the web. At its peak, it had 40 million monthly users — a high number for the time considering that Facebook only hit 100 million in 2008.

Digg was divvied up and sold in 2012, with many of its assets and patents acquired by LinkedIn. Reddit, which launched in 2005 and was co-founded by Ohanian, took a similar approach to let users vote on what they thought was the best and worst content on the site.

But much has changed since 2012 — not just when it comes to advances in artificial intelligence but also how people treat each other online.

“The social space online is definitely harsher, it feels like, than it’s ever been before,” said Justin Mezzell, who will serve as the new company’s CEO. “It feels really difficult to connect. I think the platforms have gotten more disconnected. You know, if ever there was a true town hall of the internet, it feels like it has been deconstructed in a pretty big way.”

Digg’s new leaders say they want to use artificial intelligence to “handle the grunt work” of running a social media site while allowing humans to focus on building meaningful online communities. The question, Mezzell said, is how to get people to “show up and have conversations, to learn from each other, to share something they’re passionate about and do it earnestly?” Especially when some of today’s social media algorithms “exist really just optimize for outrage.”

Rose said Digg will take a more nuanced approach to content moderation than banning or not banning content, which is a process that can be easy to get around.

“There is a world where, you know, you show up in (a) meditation (group) and you’re swinging four-letter words all over the place, and you hit submit,” he said. And “we come back and we say, hey, you can post this, of course, but only 2% of the audience is going to see it, because the way that the moderator set the tone.”

“That is unique. That is different. That’s not like a hard-defining rule,” Rose added “It’s more like just sensing the voice and how it fits within the entire ecosystem and the model that’s behind the scenes for that community.”

Sarah Gilbert, research manager of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University and an expert on content moderation, said much of the moderation that social media platforms like Reddit do is already automated and moderators typically have a lot of control over the automation tools they use.

“The challenge is that a lot of AI isn’t context-dependent, and models built for moderation tend to focus on toxicity, which is only a small portion of what mods deal with,” she said. “The other problem is that these models can be discriminatory and overly censorious of historically marginalized people. So, any AI-assisted moderation tools would need to be able to account for community specific rules and context, as well as keep a human in the loop.”

The new Digg will launch in the coming weeks as a website and mobile app. MDT/AP