Will people Digg a new front page of the internet?

A platform that first launched more than 20 years ago is making a comeback, and one of its original founders is involved. Kevin Rose is reviving content aggregator Digg with help from Alexis Ohanian, the Co-Founder of longtime Digg rival Reddit.

Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, Digg was a popular content aggregator that collected the internet’s top stories and strangest curiosities on a centralized front page. Like Reddit, Digg operated on a democratic system. By “digging” items, users pushed them onto the platform’s homepage. A corresponding “bury” option deranked unpopular posts.

Though Digg reached 40 million monthly users at its peak, it eventually lost market share to Reddit and other social media platforms. Rose and his fellow co-founders departed by 2012, when Betaworks acquired Digg for just $500,000.

At that point, Digg seemed destined for internet obscurity, but more than a decade later, Rose has reacquired his old stomping ground and plans to revive it as a platform that will “restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be,” according to a press release.

Rose’s partner for Digg 2.0 will be Ohanian, who has backed the platform through his firm Seven Seven Six. Given the rivalry between Digg and Reddit, the two tech execs make for strange bedfollows, and they acknowledged their bygone beef in an introductory video. “I really disliked you for a long time,” Ohanian said.

“Rightfully so,” Rose quipped.

Ever since Ohanian and his co-founders sold Reddit to Condé Nast Publications in 2006, he has shifted his focus to investing. Seven Seven Six has been a regular backer of creator economy companies and web3 ventures. Ohanian and Rose’s vision for Digg involves a different emerging technology: Generative AI.

In a statement, Ohanian argued that “AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections.” The resulting platform, slated to launch in the coming weeks, will pair the early internet spirit of discovery with an infrastructure powered by today’s technological innovations.

Rose and Ohanian are right to recognize that today’s internet users are hungry for the curated browsing experience offered by 2000s social media pioneers like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Content aggregators like Zack D. Films, for example, regularly rank among the most-watched creators on YouTube.

But an emphasis on AI may hinder the new Digg’s mission more than it helps. Consumers are exhausted by AI-generated suggestions that have replaced human-centered ranking methods, so much so that Google users are installing browser extensions that remove AI results from search pages. An ill-fated redesign was a big reason why the first iteration of Digg crumbled, so Rose and Ohanian should take care to avoid going overboard with their “innovations.”

If they do want to fold the hottest new tech into their platform, they should take a look at the decentralized web. That’s where many of the users who miss the old-school web browsing experience have gone, and companies like Flipboard are rushing in bring Digg-style content aggregation to that space.

If Ohanian doesn’t make web3 content aggregation work on Digg, he could still have a chance to implement that sort of system on TikTok. The ex-Reddit exec recently joined Frank McCourt’s “people’s bid,” which is attempting to acquire the ByteDance-owned app.