Digg is back from the dead to fix everything I hate about Reddit

If you’re an Apple user of a certain vintage, you probably remember Digg. Back in the mid-2000s, Digg was the place to discover new websites, post and vote on content, and join communities and discussions. You could submit photos or links to other websites and people would upvote or downvote your submission. Sound familiar? In a way, it was Reddit before Reddit.

Digg died a fiery death in 2012, but now it’s been relaunched and readied-up for a new era. Despite being a massive Reddit addict (just look at the trauma I put myself through in its name), I’m excited to use Digg and see if it can beat Reddit at its own game. And there are some very good reasons for that.

A war on bots

The Digg reboot is heavy on intrigue, both for what its creators plan to do and who its creators are in the first place. For one thing, the relaunch is being headed up by original Digg founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The two one-time rivals are now working together to take on the Reddit behemoth.

But I’m much more interested in the service itself than who is working on it behind the scenes. That’s because the new iteration is putting a strong focus on weeding out bots and AI-driven spam, instead giving you the confidence that every post you see on the platform is crafted by human hands.

If you’ve spent any time using Reddit, you’ll know what a gamechanger that could be. I love Reddit for its communities, its humor, and its vast array of topics that teach me new things every day. But at the same time, I hate how flooded with obvious spam it is. Whether it’s posts or comments, you can never be entirely sure if what you’re reading was created by a human or a bot.

Bots are often used on Reddit as a way to build up the “karma” or reputation of an account. A bot might steal a previously popular post and repost it using the exact same title, with the aim of quickly accruing attention. An account with high “karma” is generally seen as more trustworthy by users, and this can then be exploited by the account owner for all kinds of nefarious purposes.

Obviously, that’s bad for any online community – and it can be potentially terminal if enough users get turned off by it and leave for greener pastures. Reddit’s bot infestation is the worst part of using the website, and it’s only the strength of the site’s positive aspects that has kept me sticking around.

Perhaps motivated by Reddit’s cautionary tale, Digg has decided to make a concerted effort to keep these bots from ruining its own online platform.

Interestingly, Digg’s Rose told TechCrunch that he didn’t want users to have to go down “some kind of crazy KYC process,” referring to the stringent Know Your Customer checks financial institutions often impose. Instead, Digg wants to be able to detect “little signals of trust along the way and bundle them all together into something that’s meaningful.” The idea is to make bot detection mostly unobtrusive to everyday humans, yet still effective enough to keep the site working as it should.

Achieving that could involve zero-knowledge proofs, which verify data without exposing it to anyone else. Or you might be required to prove you own a product before posting about it in a dedicated community. Or users could be verified through the Digg app if they meet up in person.

The plan is to use a “platter” of techniques to verify the humanness of users and lock bots out, Rose says. If it works, it could lead to Digg becoming a much healthier place for users that’s less impacted by spam, bots and other unwanted elements – and that in turn could turn it into the kind of destination that Reddit once was.

Bots are just the beginning

There are a few other things that might help set Digg apart from Reddit and similar community-based sites. For instance, “community managers” (moderators) will be able to set rules for their forums, with moderation logs being visible and transparent in an effort to help users understand the decisions that are being made in their communities. There are also plans to link Digg up with other third-party sites. A community dedicated to reviewing movies, for example, might integrate film scores from Letterboxd.

Your feed, meanwhile, is made up entirely of communities you follow. No more promoted communities, no more popular communities that aren’t of interest to you, just things that you know you want to engage with. Call me naïve, but it feels pure, untainted and unmanipulated.

Foundry

Of course, there is an algorithm behind the feed, but Digg promises that it is “built to inform and delight, not to exploit your attention.” Its Most Dugg feed shows the most popular posts over the last 24 hours, with no extra algorithmic calculations factored in at all. The Trending feed, meanwhile, considers both the number and the ratio of positive votes that a post has. Having these two options – and a transparent explanation of how they work – means you don’t have to worry that you’re being fed anything that’s designed to make you angry and outraged for the sake of engagement.

It may be brand new, but the Digg app is already head and shoulders above Reddit’s own app. One of the reasons I sideloaded the Apollo client onto my iPhone is because it is so much better than Reddit’s native app, which is plagued with incessant ads and poor design choices. Digg’s app feels a lot like Apollo: It’s clean, ad-free and fun to use. It’s not as feature rich as Apollo, but even in its early state it’s clear that it’s ahead of Reddit’s in-house app.

Old is the new new

Despite being over 20 years old, the reboot has made Digg feel fresh and exciting to me. Although I didn’t use it much in its first iteration – StumbleUpon was my content aggregator of choice back in those days – this feels like an opportunity to get in on the ground floor and shape the communities I’m part of, all hopefully without the scourge of spam that often rears its ugly head on Reddit.

Foundry

Because as much as I love Reddit, I’ve been put off by some of the site’s recent moves, namely forcing out third-party client apps and signing over user-generated content to be trained on AI models. Digg comes without any of that baggage.

It’s still early days, and Digg needs a tremendous amount of effort – and luck – to reach even a fraction of Reddit’s size. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, though. After its impressive start, I’ve got my fingers crossed.