{"id":480197,"date":"2026-05-12T02:56:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T02:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/480197\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T02:56:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T02:56:13","slug":"remember-digg-its-back-in-ai-news-outlet-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/480197\/","title":{"rendered":"Remember Digg? It\u2019s Back, in AI News Outlet Form"},"content":{"rendered":"

Touting the return of Digg is a little like touting the return of Star Trek<\/a>. It wasn\u2019t exactly gone, and, hey, wasn\u2019t it just \u201cback\u201d a year or so ago<\/a>? Yes, Digg always seems to be coming back without ever actually leaving, but it\u2019s back again, and this time as an aggregator of AI news.<\/p>\n

\u201cHello Again\u201d says a heading currently on the Digg.com<\/a> homepage. The text on the page directs you to di.gg\/ai<\/a> (\u201cdih-dot-guh-slash-AI,\u201d perhaps), a new marquee destination in the Digg universe, where you can find links to AI things like \u201cPapers, launches, threads, [and] hot takes flying past faster than anyone can keep up with,\u201d says the page text, which is signed by Digg CEO Kevin Rose.<\/p>\n

This is not meant to be understood as the entirety of the latest relaunch. \u201cAI is the first vertical. More are coming,\u201d Rose writes.<\/p>\n

Digg appears to have undergone a false start of sorts, launching in January of this year<\/a> after being reacquired last year by original founder Rose along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Its press release at the time<\/a> said Digg would outcompete the other platforms by \u201cfocusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a\u00a0human-centered\u00a0alternative, one that prioritizes transparency, rewards human effort, and fosters enriching\u00a0discussions.\u201d Then about two months ago, that version shut down and Digg laid off much of its staff<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now we have di.gg\/ai. Currently di.gg redirects to this, so it\u2019s the whole platform in effect. It\u2019s a barebones, beige newsfeed with a \u201cHighlights\u201d section at the top. Each story is accompanied by a cluster of round images that seem to signal community interest\u2014these are, you\u2019ll quickly notice, the X avatars of users posting about a given story on X, from which, according to TechCrunch<\/a>, the new Digg is pulling and analyzing popularity and sentiment, in order to curate Digg.<\/p>\n

The story of Digg has been digested into internet history as something like this: \u201cIt was a rudimentary version of Reddit, later outshone when actual Reddit came along, vanquished by its better and damned to obscurity ever since.\u201d This popular account is misleading, and obscures Digg\u2019s role in shaping the internet in one of its most fun eras.<\/p>\n

The \u201cDigg Effect\u201d <\/a>was one of the original terms for when content goes so viral it crashes your servers\u2014what we later started calling \u201cbreaking the internet.\u201d Prior to Digg, there were similar phenomena, notably \u201cThe Slashdot Effect<\/a>,\u201d but that was basically for poindexters only. Digg\u2019s innovation was the \u201cDigg This\u201d button, added to the websites of publications as mainstream as the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

20 years ago this felt massively innovative, and it represented the simplest way for casuals and normies to experience the breadth of the online world. Yes, the story of Digg\u2019s downfall and the accompanying rise of Reddit<\/a> is legendary (its 2014 makeover<\/a> less so), but thanks to the rise of \u201clikes,\u201d which clearly followed from the \u201cDigg This\u201d button, we\u2019re all still living in the \u201cdemocratized\u201d world Digg helped create.<\/p>\n

This latest version of Digg also has a certain undeniable elegance; personally I haven\u2019t seen anything that does this exact thing, and it makes sense at a glance. But this iteration of Digg doesn\u2019t feel like it\u2019s about to change the internet as we know it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Touting the return of Digg is a little like touting the return of Star Trek. It wasn\u2019t exactly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,89292,18,19,17,1114,82],"class_list":["post-480197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-digg","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116559359904204577","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}