Digg for relaunching with focus on ‘humanity and connection’

Before Reddit there was Digg who popularized up and won on online posts. Now the pins of both platforms – veterans on social media Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian – Restart the early Reddit rival with a focus on “humanity and connection”, which they hope will be strengthened by the use of artificial intelligence.

Rose founded Digg, launched in 2004 and let people up and down-vote (“digg” or “bury”) content from users and from sources around the web. At its highest, it had 40 million monthly users – a high number of time considering that Facebook only hit 100 million in 2008.

Digg was divided and sold in 2012, with many of its assets and patents acquired by LinkedIn. Reddit, launched in 2005 and was founded by Ohanian, took a similar approach to letting users vote on what they thought was the best and worst content on the site.

But much has changed since 2012 – not only when it comes to progress in artificial intelligence, but also how people treat each other online.

“The social space online is certainly harder, it feels like it has ever been before,” said Justin Mezzell, who will serve as the new company’s CEO. “It feels really difficult to connect. I think the platforms have become more disconnected. You know, if there was ever a real town hall on the internet, it feels like it has been deconstructed in a pretty big way. “

Digg’s new leaders say they will use artificial intelligence to “deal with the grinning work” of running a social media site while allowing people to focus on building meaningful online communities. The question, said Mezzell, is how to make people “show up and have conversations, to learn from each other, to share something they are passionate about and do it seriously?” Especially when some of today’s social media algorithms “really just exist just optimizes for indignation.”

Rose said that Digg will take a more nuanced approach to content moderation than to ban or not ban content, which is a process that can be easy to get around.

“There is a world where you know you show up in (a) meditation (group) and you swing words with four letters everywhere and you hit submission,” he said. And “We’re coming back and we say hey, of course you can send this, but only 2% of the audience will see it because the way the moderator puts the tone.”

“It’s unique. It’s different. It’s not like a hard -defining rule, “Rose” added “It’s more like just feeling the voice and how it fits within the entire ecosystem and model behind the scenes of that community. ”

Sarah Gilbert, head of research for Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University and an expert on content moderation, said much of the moderation, that social media platforms such as Reddit DO are already automated, and moderators typically have a lot of control over the automation tools they use.

“The challenge is that a lot of AI is not context -dependent, and models built for moderation tend to focus on toxicity, which is only a small part of what Mods handles,” she said. “The second problem is that these models can be discriminatory and overly censorial to historically marginalized people. So all AI-assisted moderation tools should be able to explain societal rules and context as well as keep a person in the loop. “

The new Digg will be launched in the coming weeks as a site and a mobile app.