Digg is making a comeback. With the backing of people like Digg cofounder Kevin Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Digg has ambitions to once again be the homepage of the internet. The revival is still in its very early days \u2014 the platform is still invite-only \u2014 but Digg launched its new mobile apps this week, and I installed the iOS app on my phone to see what it\u2019s like.<\/p>\n
New Digg operates similarly to Reddit: people submit links that others can comment and vote on, and links with a lot of \u201cdiggs\u201d (upvotes) will bubble up the feed. You can also tap a downvote-like \u201cbury\u201d button, but on posts (not comments), the bury button functions more as a signal to Digg to minimize that type of content in your own feed.<\/p>\n
The Home tab has four main categories: Trending, Most Dugg, Newest, and Heating Up. I\u2019m not entirely sure what the difference between \u201cTrending\u201d and \u201cHeating Up\u201d is, but the content in the latter category did feel fresher.<\/p>\n
Within each of those categories, you can have the app surface content from \u201cMy Feed,\u201d which pulls from communities you follow, or \u201cAll Digg,\u201d which pulls from all of Digg. (There are only a few broad communities available right now: \/AMA, \/art, \/digg, \/diggnation, \/entertainment, \/finance, \/food, \/funny, \/gaming, \/lifestyle, \/music, \/news, \/offbeat, \/politics, \/science, \/sports, and \/technology.) Under the categories, you can also see a horizontally scrolling carousel of different links, though I\u2019m not quite sure how the app picks which ones to show there.<\/p>\n
Tapping into individual posts shows things like the text of the post and an included image or a link. For posts with links, you\u2019ll see a seemingly AI-powered \u201cTL;DR\u201d summary written by \u201cDigg Intelligence\u201d at the end of the post. (I haven\u2019t noticed any issues with the summaries so far.) Under the main posts, you can read threaded comments and Digg or bury them.<\/p>\n
It all looks good. And it mostly functions well enough; a couple times, the app showed an error message after I opened it, but after a while, things would work as expected.<\/p>\n
But assuming those are just temporary blips and extended issues aren\u2019t the norm, it\u2019s still just way too early to tell if Digg has the juice. A great part of Reddit is finding a hyper-niche community about something you care about, but since users can\u2019t make communities yet, I\u2019ll have to keep getting my Hollow Knight: Silksong<\/a> memes from r\/silksong<\/a>. Since Digg is still invite-only, there just aren\u2019t that many people or posts on the site yet; it might be a while until the platform sees some truly legendary comments<\/a>.<\/p>\n Digg also has far fewer features than Reddit right now. There\u2019s no way to chat privately with users on the platform, for example. But depending on what you think of the current state of Reddit, that could be a good thing.<\/p>\n