The New Digg’s Plan to Use AI for Community Moderation

Remember Digg? It started in 2004, as an experiment to crowdsource the Web—to “digg” something was to upvote it—and became known, to some forty million unique monthly visitors, as the “homepage of the internet.” It was a social news site, a community-driven answer to the question of how to navigate a sudden explosion of content—similar to Reddit, which appeared about a year later, calling itself the “front page of the internet.” In time, Digg was bought, sold, and widely forgotten. That made rivals of Kevin Rose, a founder of Digg, and Alexis Ohanian, a founder of Reddit—until recently, when they announced they were teaming up to stage a Digg comeback. (“I really disliked you for a long time,” Ohanian tells Rose in a launch video. “Rightfully so,” Rose replies.) But this time around, instead of human-powered moderation, they would use artificial intelligence.