is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Digg is making a comeback. With the backing of people like Digg cofounder Kevin Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Digg has ambitions to once again be the homepage of the internet. The revival is still in its very early days — the platform is still invite-only — but Digg launched its new mobile apps this week, and I installed the iOS app on my phone to see what it’s like.
New Digg operates similarly to Reddit: people submit links that others can comment and vote on, and links with a lot of “diggs” (upvotes) will bubble up the feed. You can also tap a downvote-like “bury” button, but on posts (not comments), the bury button functions more as a signal to Digg to minimize that type of content in your own feed.
The Home tab has four main categories: Trending, Most Dugg, Newest, and Heating Up. I’m not entirely sure what the difference between “Trending” and “Heating Up” is, but the content in the latter category did feel fresher.
Within each of those categories, you can have the app surface content from “My Feed,” which pulls from communities you follow, or “All Digg,” which pulls from all of Digg. (There are only a few broad communities available right now: /AMA, /art, /digg, /diggnation, /entertainment, /finance, /food, /funny, /gaming, /lifestyle, /music, /news, /offbeat, /politics, /science, /sports, and /technology.) Under the categories, you can also see a horizontally scrolling carousel of different links, though I’m not quite sure how the app picks which ones to show there.
Tapping into individual posts shows things like the text of the post and an included image or a link. For posts with links, you’ll see a seemingly AI-powered “TL;DR” summary written by “Digg Intelligence” at the end of the post. (I haven’t noticed any issues with the summaries so far.) Under the main posts, you can read threaded comments and Digg or bury them.
It all looks good. And it mostly functions well enough; a couple times, the app showed an error message after I opened it, but after a while, things would work as expected.
But assuming those are just temporary blips and extended issues aren’t the norm, it’s still just way too early to tell if Digg has the juice. A great part of Reddit is finding a hyper-niche community about something you care about, but since users can’t make communities yet, I’ll have to keep getting my Hollow Knight: Silksong memes from r/silksong. Since Digg is still invite-only, there just aren’t that many people or posts on the site yet; it might be a while until the platform sees some truly legendary comments.
Digg also has far fewer features than Reddit right now. There’s no way to chat privately with users on the platform, for example. But depending on what you think of the current state of Reddit, that could be a good thing.
I think Digg’s iOS app has a great foundation (as does the web app, which launched in July), and there’s a lot of room for it to get better with new features and more users. I don’t know if Digg will be the homepage of the internet once again, but it does at least seem like a place you might want to come back to.
