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Kevin Rose, Alexis Ohanian acquire Digg

⁨140⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨misk@sopuli.xyz⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/kevin-rose-and-alexis-ohanian-acquire-digg/

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Comments

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  • Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    It’s an AI pump and dump attempt.

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    • tonytins@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Shame I really liked young Kevin Rose from the TechTV and Revision3 days.

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    • mspencer712@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It’s ok to fear that someone else could get rich through trickery.

      It’s also ok to have hope that people learn from past mistakes and try to build something good.

      AI can generate slop, but it can also understand, categorize, filter, moderate. It can also be slow to adapt to new attacks, or be analyzed and manipulated.

      I can’t offer much help to people who need to decide right now if it’s good or bad. Predicting the future is a messy thing. But I choose to be cautiously optimistic.

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      • Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I don’t think hope or fear, or someone getting rich or poor is really relevant in this case.

        They first say:

        Rose and Ohanian have now joined forces to “revive” the platform with a “fresh vision to restore the spirit of discovery and genuine community that made the early web a fun and exciting place to be,”

        But then they go on to say:

        So why now? It’s a combination of reasons, according to Rose, who says that the existing social media landscape has become toxic, messy, and riddled with misinformation — and AI is well-placed to address that. Just the “out of the box stuff,” is “insane,” Rose observes, noting there are “Google endpoints already where I don’t even have to mess with a model at all, where I can get sub 200 millisecond response times on any comment under about 300 characters and rated across 20 plus different vectors of of sentiment, so violence, toxicity, hate speech — you name it. Like, that just wasn’t possible five years ago.”

        More broadly, says, Rose, “We’re at this other inflection point around AI and what it can do. And when you think about these big shifts, they require you to go and step back and revisit first principles and think about how you might change [a business] from the ground up, and that’s what Alexis and I and Justin [Mezzell],” who is a longtime collaborator of Rose and now Digg’s CEO, will be doing, he said.

        It’s pretty clear that they are looking to build an AI enhanced social network, so why bring up “the spirit of discovery and genuine community?” That is not their goal, their goal is to leverage AI; without it, they would have never undertaken this initiative. No AI, no social network.

        I will point out that I never mentioned anything about the utility of AI. It’s a tool, what comes out of it depends on how it is used.

        I also don’t see on what basis one should assume a bunch of vapid techbro ghouls would be interested in building “something good”. Their goals revolve around scalability, unit economics and exit plans. If that’s not the case, surely they must have started a non-profit entity and/or implemented independent governance measures that would include stakeholders beyond themselves and investors.

        Am I being unreasonable here?

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      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Wow, I can’t believe this post has gotten so many down votes. It’s such a reasonable statement.

        Probably the only thing in the whole post I could disagree with here is the word “understand”

        AI can generate slop, but it can also understand, categorize, filter, moderate. It can also be slow to adapt to new attacks, or be analyzed and manipulated.

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    • ytsedude@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Yeah, that wss disappointing to read. Based off the new Diggnation episodes, I was hoping Kevin would offer something a bit more genuine and authentic–and who knows, maybe it’ll turn out to be incredible–but I’m not keeping my hopes up.

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      • cazssiew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I watched the first few episodes and he comes off as an entitled techbro moron. The last straw for me was when he went on a rant asking ‘what does NASA even do anyway, just let SpaceX take over’. Typical silicon valley bubble self-aggrandizing, thinking tech disruptors have anything to do with actual scientists, the worst kind of hypercapitalist obscurantist bullshit.

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  • xenomor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Not sure why any developer who isn’t a self loathing masochist would work for these clowns ever again. Rose was an immature bitch who threw his own dev team under the bus when Digg 4 bombed. Somehow I doubt that years of fattening up while marinating in venture capital and crypto wealth have matured that fucker in any meaningful way.

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  • singletona@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    1. Digg was still around?

    2. Yea this is gonna go badly…

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  • gdog05@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Based on the first episode of Diggnation reboot, Kevin Rose is just another empty tech bro now (maybe always?). I have zero positive expectations of this new Digg venture and that’s probably optimistic.

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  • MuskyMelon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I left Digg V2 when it went to shit, to Reddit. Now that the same is happening to Reddit (fuck spez), interested to see what Digg Reboot would be like.

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    • Ickabod@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      AI… AI Everywhere

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  • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Where we’re really going is, a year, year and a half from now, is when you come to Digg, it’s going to be very much more like the leap that happened to Figma, where it’s free form, it’s dynamic, it’s an interface that is unlike any other that you’ve seen,” says Rose. “It’s not your old-school forums

    Umm. Figma’s UI is exactly something people saw before. It’s aggressively based on Sketch’s UI.

    Figma blew up because it was free for non-enterprise use, had Invision-style prototyping built-in, it was a more performant than Sketch, and they were adding features faster than Sketch could.

    And FigJam is just a Miro / Mural clone. But that is also very performant, and they had some silly features / plugins that made work fun.

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  • simplejack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Image

    Image

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    • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Wow, I was confused who it was at first.

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  • MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Who?

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    • CaptDust@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Reddit (and by extension, Lemmy) likely wouldn’t exist without Kevin Rose. He both popularized the concept of user driven link aggregators and royally screwed digg during a big redesign, pushing the users to reddit.

      Ohanian is generally considered a “better” cofounder of reddit (or atleast, not spez). I think the two combining forces to relaunch an OG site is newsworthy.

      If it’s a positive, will remain to be seen.

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      • MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Thank you! I apricot your clear response.

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    • MagnyusG@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Kevin Rose is one of the co-founders of Digg, and Alexis Ohanian is one of the co-founders of Reddit. Considering the “success” of both sites it could be a big deal, but more than likely it’ll just try to pass itself off as a Reddit alternative that’ll eventually go to shit or implement a bunch of AI and crypto bullshit.

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  • giacomo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    meh

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  • TomMasz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    There’s no reason to expect this to succeed, but I put my name on the list to be notified when it launches. We’ll see, I guess.

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  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Oddly enough, I still went to Digg sometimes if I was stuck at work without anything else to look at.

    Looks like another website is going into my website graveyard.

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  • PhoreTwunny@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Wow those sure are some punchable faces

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  • sk8boy204@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The new Diggnation podcasts have been pretty great with that old feel somewhat back. I am holding out hope that this is a good thing and it won’t turn into some crypto bullshit.

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    • Glitterbomb@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      If he rebooted his first show The Broken, I would watch every second. It was seriously his best work.

      www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNjoo9TuCHY

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  • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The only reason I have any hope for this is hoping Alexis Ohanians wife (Serena Williams) has been a good influence on him and making him understand how bad things really are right now.

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