Does the World Even Want Digg in 2025?

Digg is coming back, and I’m left wondering if anyone will care.

To a certain kind of elder millennial who has spent the last few decades online, news of a return of Digg will trigger a nostalgic fugue. Kevin Rose, the site’s original founder, appears dead set on inducing that feeling in a video he uploaded to X announcing the new venture. The big twist is that Rose is teaming up with Reddit co-founder and once-sworn enemy Alexis Ohanian for the Digg relaunch.

For a while, Reddit called itself “the front page of the internet,” but there was a time when that name belonged to Digg. Along with sites like Slashdot, Fark, Hacker News, and del.icio.us, Digg served a simple purpose in the early days of the web. It allowed people to share news, talk about the news, and vote on whether or not the news was worth seeing.

On the site for its reboot, Digg is promising to once again be the front page of the internet but “now with superpowers.” Those superpowers will have to be quite impressive to dislodge the entrenched interests of how we consume media now.

The thing is, Slashdot, Fark, Hacker News, and Reddit all still exist. People still use them every day, and their audiences are entrenched, if not growing, like they were a decade ago. Reddit is, of course, the biggest of all these sites. It’s a place on the web so popular and so full of useful info that one easy way to fix Google’s shitty search is to add “reddit” to the end of the query.

But there’s turmoil on Reddit, too. Subreddits fight each other. Some users feel there’s too much censorship, others feel there’s not enough regulations. Since going public last year, the site has gamified a lot of its systems. The up and down votes and the karmic scores attached to them used to rule all; now, users can buy badges to reward comments and posts with glowing site-specific emojis.

Rose and Ohanian told The New York Times that the plan is to take on Reddit by making Digg more comfortable for the unpaid moderators who make places like Digg and Reddit run. They ran paid ads on Reddit asking moderators what they wanted in a site and have used the results to shape the new product. They told Bloomberg they plan to launch Digg with AI tools that will make the community managers’ lives easier “so they’re less janitors” and instead “champions of good vibes.”

As an elder millennial that was around when Digg was ascendent, the promotion leaves me cold. The promise of sites like Digg and Reddit is that a community will curate discoverability of information for you on the internet. I think the people who want that already have it.

Most of us either scroll or subscribe. When I was a kid, there was a pleasant joy in having 500 cable channels and nothing on them to watch. You could lay on the couch and just hit the up and down buttons on the remote control and let new channels wash over you.

Sure, there was “nothing on” but that wasn’t the point. The point was inducing a vegetative state and letting your brain turn to mush. That’s how the scroll works, it’s what made Meta a Big Tech juggernaut. The endless feed of TikTok and Instagram, the listless tide of 1,000 Reddit threads I’ll never read, and the grotesque rush of X’s posts are akin to flipping channels on a TV hooked up to cable.

Sometimes, I like to doom scroll like this, and I always do so consciously. I know I’m going to let my brain leave my body for a time. But that’s not the only way I watch videos and read articles. I subscribe to a lot of stuff, including YouTube channels, streaming services, and news organizations.

I run through my news organizations and websites, and I frequently check through NewsBlur, an RSS reader I pay for that lets me actively read and sort the news of the day. I always open NewsBlur before getting lost in the endless tide of social media. I check my subscriptions on YouTube before scrolling past its endless tiles in a daze. I’ve organized BlueSky into lists of valuable contacts and interesting topics. I go through those before hitting the “Discover” feed. I have subreddits I check once a day to see what’s transpired before letting the front page wash over me.

There’s a lot of discussion about “the algorithm,” a nebulous term for the programs Big Tech uses to serve people content. People whisper about “the algorithm” the way they talk about God, as if it’s a deity they’ve no control over that shapes what they see and feel.

That’s bullshit. You have more control over what the internet shows you than you think you do. You can set up RSS feeds and news alerts for the things you want to see. You can block YouTube channels you don’t want to appear in your feed. You can avoid entire websites you’d rather not check.

The tools are available for anyone to shape their own information ecosystem. But, based on the user numbers for TikTok, Facebook, and other slop-driven doom scroll sites, that’s not what most of us want.

So Digg, powered by the nostalgia of 40-year-olds, will enter this information environment. It’s nice to imagine the “superpowers” will help them disrupt the current market. But I have trouble believing it.