Digg tries again, this time as an AI news aggregator

Digg is back from the dead. Again.

Just months after launch, the relaunch of Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing site was shut down in March when the company changed course. Originally redesigned as a competitor to the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it was unable to effectively manage the bot traffic entering its platform and had not differentiated itself enough from the competition to make an impact.

The startup laid off staff and said it was time to go back to the drawing board. Rose, a partner at True Ventures, returned to work full-time in April on a new version of Digg.

Friday evening the founder viewed a link to the newly designed To digwhich now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was.

This time, the site is focused on ranking news – specifically AI news, for starters.

In an email to beta testers, the company said the goal of the site is to “follow the most influential voices in a room” and surface news that is worth “paying attention to.” AI is the area testing this idea, but if successful, Digg will expand to other topics.

The email warned that the site was still raw and “buggy” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as a public debut.

On the current homepage, Digg shows four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story that’s generating increasing discussion, the fastest-rising story, and one “In Case You Missed It” headline.

Below that is a ranked list of the top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saved posts. But the twist is that these metrics are not the metrics generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg ingests content from

Like Rose commented to X, When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tackles a story about AI, it almost always sets off a chain reaction that includes in-depth discussion and dissemination of that topic in X. The new Digg will be able to track that increased engagement.

This could be interesting for data geeks, as it exposes the impact of X-based engagement with charts and graphs, and provides a way to track signals among what can often be a lot of noise on X. But it’s unclear whether there’s enough underlying value here for a regular user, beyond the fact that yes, one @sama tweet can make something go viral.

The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and top politicians focused on AI issues.

For those who don’t have time to devote to X-tracking the latest AI news, Digg could be a useful resource. But it’s not clear why people regularly turn to Digg through their favorite news app, RSS reader, or even their

Digg may also struggle when it moves on to other topics, as AI news is one of the few areas where there’s still a lot of discussion about Many non-technology discussions now take place outside of X, or outside of the public Internet entirely.

However, if Digg gains momentum, it could serve as a useful source of website traffic for publishers whose businesses have been decimated by declining clicks thanks to Google’s changing algorithms and the impact of AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that Google displays above search results that often answer users’ questions before they ever click through to a website.