If your eye, like ours, gets to twitching any time big-money tech types start talking about how A.I. is going to improve the “old” internet, then here’s one that might get the ball jiggling right out of the socket: Early internet mainstay Digg is getting a reboot, courtesy of original founder Kevin Rose and former rival (and Reddit co-founder) Alexis Ohanian. And, wouldn’t you know it, both tech guys are very excited to be leveraging artificial intelligence to “revisit first principles and think about how you might change [a business] from the ground up,” which, to our minds, is a whole bullfight’s full of red flags, right there from the jump.
For those of you who don’t remember (or were too un-born yet to remember) Digg in its heyday, it was, well, a lot like Reddit: An evolution of online forums where users could post links or discussion prompts and then let them get bounced around in visibility by the site’s user-drive algorithms. From the TechCrunch article discussing the reboot, it’s not entirely clear what exact ways Rose and Ohanian intend to use A.I. to change the way Digg runs—it also not being entirely clear whether they know at this point—but Rose did note that a lot of it will have to do with how posts are rated, whether for content quality or just as a moderation tool. Specifically, Rose noted he now has access to tech where “I don’t even have to mess with a model at all, where I can get sub 200 millisecond response times on any comment under about 300 characters and rated across 20 plus different vectors of of sentiment, so violence, toxicity, hate speech—you name it. Like, that just wasn’t possible five years ago.”
And, look: We genuinely try very hard, in this space, not to be knee-jerk Luddites, no matter how easy people using this tech make it by, say, setting up bots that “Well, actually” concepts like “the KKK is evil” on the web site of a major paper of record. There’s nothing wrong, fundamentally, with bringing back Digg, either: Reddit is still at least semi-functional because the basic concept of the online forum has survived the colossal amounts of shit humanity throws at it on a daily basis. But if the following press statement from Ohanian doesn’t get your hackles up at least a little, then it feels like you have been experiencing at least a slightly different version of online reality than we have for the last couple of years:
Online communities thrive when there’s a balance between technology and human judgment. We’re bringing Digg back to ensure that balance exists. Kevin and I are here to build something better than what social platforms are offering today. AI should handle the grunt work in the background while humans focus on what they do best: building real connections.
Anyway: If any of this gets your heart racing, Digg now has a page where you can sign up to hear when its new version gets launched.
