Digg tries again, this time as an AI news aggregator

Digg is back from the dead. Again.

Just months after launching, the reboot of Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing site shut down in March as the company shifted course. Originally redesigned as a competitor to the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it wasn’t able to effectively manage the bot traffic invading its platform and hadn’t differentiated itself enough from the competition to make an impact.

The startup laid off staff and said it was time to go back to the drawing board. Rose, a partner at True Ventures, returned to work full-time on a new version of Digg in April.

On Friday evening, the founder previewed a link to the newly redesigned Digg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was.

This time around, the site is focused on ranking news — specifically, AI news to start.

In an email to beta testers, the company said the site’s goal is to “track the most influential voices in a space” and to surface the news that’s actually worth “paying attention to.” AI is the area it’s testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics.

The email warned that the site was still raw and “buggy” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut.

On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one “In case you missed it” headline.

Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren’t the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real time to determine what’s being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most.

As Rose remarked on X, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman engages with a story about AI, it almost always sets off a chain reaction that includes deep discussion and propagation of that topic throughout X. The new Digg will be able to track that increased engagement.

This might be something that’s interesting to data nerds, as it exposes the impact of X-based engagement with charts and graphs, and offers a way to track signal among what can, on X, often be a lot of noise. But it’s unclear whether there’s enough underlying value here for an everyday user, beyond seeing that yes, an @sama tweet can make something go viral.

The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues.

For those who don’t have time to spend on X tracking breaking AI news, Digg could prove a useful resource. But it’s not clear why people would regularly turn to Digg over their preferred news app, RSS reader, or even their X “For You” feed if they wanted to catch up on what’s trending — especially because there isn’t currently any discussion happening on Digg’s site.

Digg may also struggle when it moves on to other topics, as AI news is one of the few areas where discussion still heavily takes place on X. Other verticals don’t have the same traction, especially after Musk’s takeover of Twitter gave rise to an ecosystem of competitors, which now includes Meta’s creator-focused Threads. Many non-tech-related discussions are now happening off X, or off the public internet entirely.

However, if Digg does end up gaining steam, it could serve as a useful source of website traffic to publishers whose businesses have been decimated by declining clicks thanks to Google’s changing algorithms and the impact of AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries Google displays atop search results, which often answer users’ questions before they ever click through to a website.