Alexis Ohanian and Kevin Rose Revive Digg

Digg, one of the earliest social media platforms, is coming back from the (near) dead after original owner Kevin Rose acquired the assets and teamed up with one of his biggest former rivals — Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian — to reimagine the platform for the modern age.

The Big Picture: Social media was initially designed to connect average people and build community around niche topics, which is what Digg was created to do in 2004 before falling apart in 2012. The major platforms have mostly strayed from that mission, so Digg hopes it can be a fresh and nostalgic alternative.

Behind the Curtain: Can Digg be the comeback story of the year?

• Rose’s True Ventures and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six teamed up to purchase what was left of Digg from digital media company Money Group (yes, that’s a real company name) for an undisclosed amount.
• The new platform will be, at first, designed for mobile use and will empower community moderators (Digg is a social message-board platform like Reddit) to organize, drive conversation, and eventually monetize.
• Digg will also leverage AI to add a layer of fun novelty, such as allowing a science-fiction community to translate their messages into the Klingon language from Star Trek (peak geekiness).
• The company plans to give moderators AI tools that also “help reduce spam, misinformation, and harassment,” Rose told NYT.

The Future: Digg will start sending out invites to users in the coming weeks, which may target some of the biggest community-builders on Reddit. That would make sense, considering Rose spent thousands of dollars on ads to query moderators about their biggest challenges overseeing subreddits (which likely touched on recent battles with current Reddit management).

Rose and Ohanian stress that community moderators will be the backbone of what makes Digg 2.0 work… so they want to build a platform that works best for them. If these future moderators dig the platform (pun intended), then it could become the home for people who have no interest in likes, follows, or shares.