The rebooted version of social site Digg<\/a> aims to bring back the spirit of the old web at a time when AI-generated content is threatening to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people. <\/p>\n This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where the people who create content and manage online communities are given a bigger stake in a platform\u2019s success, Digg\u2019s founders think.<\/p>\n A Web 2.0-era news aggregation giant, Digg was once valued at $175 million<\/a> at its height back in 2008 and is now being given new life under the direction of its original founder, Kevin Rose, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The two recently teamed up to announce a new vision for Digg<\/a>, which will focus on enabling discovery and community, the way that the early internet once allowed for.<\/p>\n Speaking at The Wall Street Journal\u2019s Future of Everything<\/a> conference on Thursday, the founders offered more insight as to how they plan to accomplish that goal with the Digg reboot.<\/p>\n Initially, the two touched on problems they encountered in the earlier days of social media, with Ohanian recalling how he chose to resign from Reddit\u2019s board over disagreements about the company\u2019s approach to hate speech that he felt was bad for society and the business. <\/p>\n For instance, the company was allowing a forum on Reddit called <\/a>\u201cr\/WatchPeopleDie\u201d to continue operating up until the Christchurch mass shooting, which caught the attention of the media, he said. It was only then that Reddit decided to adjust its policies<\/a> around violence and gore on the platform.<\/p>\n After Reddit, Ohanian went on to found venture capital firm Seven Seven Six<\/a>, where he says he\u2019s focused on building businesses that are more \u201cvalues-aligned.\u201d He said he sees Digg as another step in that direction.<\/p>\n Rose reflected on the early days of machine learning, where the technology was often used to reward posts on which people would rant about the \u201cmost obscure, kind of fringe-y weirdness,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes that can be good, but oftentimes it\u2019s pushing really weird agendas. And that\u2019s not even getting into the whole bot and AI side of things that are also pushing those agendas,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n With Digg, the founders want to create a new community focused on serving real people, not AI or bots, they said. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve long subscribed to the \u2018dead internet theory,\u2019\u201d Ohanian said, referencing the idea<\/a> that much of what we see online is not created by actual humans, but bots. Ten years ago, this was more of a conspiracy theory, but with the rise of AI, that\u2019s changed, he said. \u201cProbably in the last few years \u2014 since we\u2019ve blown past the Turing test \u2014 [the dead internet theory] is a very real thing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI think the average person has no idea just how much of the content they consume on social media, if it\u2019s not an outright bot, is a human using AI in the loop to generate that content at scale, to manipulate and evade,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n To address the rise of bots, the founders are looking toward new technology, like zero-knowledge proofs<\/a> (aka zk proofs), a protocol used in cryptography that could be used to prove that someone owns something on a platform. They\u2019re envisioning communities where admins could turn the dials, so to speak, to verify that a poster is human before allowing them to join the conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe world is going to be flooded with bots, with AI agents,\u201d Rose pointed out, and that could infiltrate communities where people are trying to make genuine human connections. Something like this recently occurred on Reddit, where researchers secretly used AI bots to pose as real people<\/a> on a forum to test how AI could influence human opinion.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are going to live in a world where the vast, vast majority of the content we\u2019re seeing is in\u00a0\u2026 some shape or form, AI-generated, and it is a terrible user experience if the reason you\u2019re coming to a place is for authentic human connection, and it\u2019s not with humans \u2014 or it\u2019s with people masquerading as humans,\u201d Ohanian said.<\/p>\n He explained that there are a number of ways that social sites could test to see if someone is a person. For instance, if someone has owned their device for a longer period of time, that could add more weight to their comment, he suggested. <\/p>\n Rose said that the site could also offer different levels of service, based on how likely someone was to be human.<\/p>\n If you signed up with a throw-away email address and used a VPN, for example, then maybe you would only be able to get recommendations or engage in some simpler ways. Or if you were anonymous and typed in a comment too quickly, the site could then ask you to take an extra step to prove your humanity \u2014 like verifying your phone number or even charging you a small fee if the number you provided was disposable, Rose said. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s going to be these tiers that we do, based on how you want to engage and interact with the actual network itself,\u201d he confirmed. <\/p>\n However, the founders stressed they\u2019re not anti-AI. They expect to use AI to help in areas like site moderation, including de-escalating situations where someone starts to stir up trouble.<\/p>\n In addition to verifying humans, the founders envision a service where moderators and creators financially benefit from their efforts. \u201cI do believe the days of unpaid moderation by the masses \u2014 doing all the heavy lifting to create massive, multi-million-person communities \u2014 has to go away. I think these people are putting in their life and soul into these communities, and for them not to be compensated in some way is ridiculous to me. And so we have to figure out a way to bring them along for the ride,\u201d Rose said.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Digg.png?w=680\")
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