Digg to relaunch with focus on 'humanity and connection'

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Digg to relaunch with focus on 'humanity and connection'

2025-03-06 07:19 Last Updated At：07:22

Before Reddit there was Digg, which popularized up- and down-votes on online posts. Now the founders of both platforms — social media veterans Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian — are relaunching the early Reddit rival with a focus on “humanity and connection” they hope will be boosted by the use of artificial intelligence.

Rose founded Digg, which launched in 2004 and let people up- and down-vote ("Digg" or “bury”) content from users and from sources around the web. At its peak, it had 40 million monthly users — a high number for the time considering that Facebook only hit 100 million in 2008.

Digg was divvied up and sold in 2012, with many of its assets and patents acquired by LinkedIn. Reddit, which launched in 2005 and was co-founded by Ohanian, took a similar approach to let users vote on what they thought was the best and worst content on the site.

But much has changed since 2012 — not just when it comes to advances in artificial intelligence but also how people treat each other online.

“The social space online is definitely harsher, it feels like, than it’s ever been before,” said Justin Mezzell, who will serve as the new company's CEO. “It feels really difficult to connect. I think the platforms have gotten more disconnected. You know, if ever there was a true town hall of the internet, it feels like it has been deconstructed in a pretty big way.”

Digg's new leaders say they want to use artificial intelligence to “handle the grunt work” of running a social media site while allowing humans to focus on building meaningful online communities. The question, Mezzell said, is how to get people to “show up and have conversations, to learn from each other, to share something they’re passionate about and do it earnestly?” Especially when some of today's social media algorithms “exist really just optimize for outrage.”

Rose said Digg will take a more nuanced approach to content moderation than banning or not banning content, which is a process that can be easy to get around.

“There is a world where, you know, you show up in (a) meditation (group) and you’re swinging four-letter words all over the place, and you hit submit,” he said. And “we come back and we say, hey, you can post this, of course, but only 2% of the audience is going to see it, because the way that the moderator set the tone.”

“That is unique. That is different. That’s not like a hard-defining rule,” Rose added “It’s more like just sensing the voice and how it fits within the entire ecosystem and the model that’s behind the scenes for that community.”

Sarah Gilbert, research manager of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University and an expert on content moderation, said much of the moderation that social media platforms like Reddit do is already automated and moderators typically have a lot of control over the automation tools they use.

“The challenge is that a lot of AI isn’t context-dependent, and models built for moderation tend to focus on toxicity, which is only a small portion of what mods deal with," she said. "The other problem is that these models can be discriminatory and overly censorious of historically marginalized people. So, any AI-assisted moderation tools would need to be able to account for community specific rules and context, as well as keep a human in the loop."

The new Digg will launch in the coming weeks as a website and mobile app.

Arctic air sweeps south as residents of the Pacific Northwest remain on guard after severe flooding

MONROE, Wash. (AP) — A blast of arctic air swept south from Canada and spread into parts of the northern U.S. on Saturday, while residents of the Pacific Northwest braced for possible mudslides and levee failures from floodwaters that are expected to be slow to recede.

The catastrophic flooding forced thousands of people to evacuate, including Eddie Wicks and his wife, who live amid sunflowers and Christmas trees on a Washington state farm next to the Snoqualmie River. As they moved their two donkeys to higher ground and their eight goats to their outdoor kitchen, the water began to rise much quicker than anything they had experienced before.

As the water engulfed their home Thursday afternoon, deputies from the King County Sheriff’s Office marine rescue dive unit were able to rescue them and their dog, taking them on a boat the half-mile (800 meters) across their field, which had been transformed into a lake. The rescue was captured on video.

Another round of rain and wind is in store for the region as early as late Sunday, forecasters said.

“Bottom line at this point in time is we’re not done despite the sunny conditions that we have across western Washington at this point,” said Reid Wolcott, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle.

“There is yet more still to come in terms of in terms of wind, in terms of rain, in terms in terms of flooding,” he said. “And Washingtonians need to be prepared for additional impacts, additional flooding, tree damage, power outages, etc.”

High winds expected at the end of the weekend and into the first part of week are a concern because the ground is extremely saturated, putting trees at risk of toppling, he said.

In Burlington, a farming community about an hour north of Seattle, the receding floodwaters allowed residents to assess damage and clean up their homes.

Friends and relatives helped empty Argentina Dominguez's home, filling trailers with soaked furniture, ripping carpet and mopping muddy floors.

“I know it’s materialistic stuff, but they were our stuff. It’s really hard. But we’re gonna try our best to like get through it all,” Dominguez said. “We’re just trying to get everything off the floor so we can start over.”

In Snohomish County, Washington, north of Seattle, emergency officials on Saturday led federal, state and local officials on a tour of the devastation.

“It’s obvious that thousands and thousands of Washingtonians and communities all across our state are in the process of digging out, and that’s going to be a challenging process,” Gov. Bob Ferguson said.

“It’s going to be expensive,” he said. “It’s going to be time consuming, and it’s going to be potentially dangerous at times. So I think we’re seeing here in Monroe is what we’re going to be seeing all across the state, and that’s what’s got our focus right now.”

As the Pacific Northwest begins to recover from the deluge, a separate weather system already brought dangerous wind-chill values — the combination of cold air temperatures and wind — to parts of the Upper Midwest.

Shortly before noon Saturday, it was minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 24 degrees Celsius) in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where the wind-chill value meant that it felt like minus 33 F (minus 36 C), the National Weather Service said.

For big cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, the coldest temperatures were expected late Saturday night into Sunday morning. In the Minneapolis area, low temperatures were expected to drop to around minus 15 F (minus 26 C), by early Sunday morning. Lows in the Chicago area are projected to be around 1 F(minus 17 C) by early Sunday, the weather service said.

The Arctic air mass was expected to continue pushing south and east over the weekend, expanding into Southern states by Sunday.

The National Weather Service on Saturday issued cold weather advisories that stretched as far south as the Alabama state capital city of Montgomery, where temperatures late Sunday night into Monday morning were expected to plummet to around 22 F (minus 6 C). To the east, lows in Savannah, Georgia, were expected to drop to around 24 F (minus 4 C) during the same time period.

The cold weather freezing much of the country came as residents in the Pacific Northwest endure more misery after several days of flooding. Thousands of people have been forced to evacuate towns in the region as an unusually strong atmospheric river dumped a foot (30 centimeters) or more of rain in parts of western and central Washington over several days and swelled rivers, inundating communities and prompting dramatic rescues from rooftops and vehicles.

Many animals were also evacuated as waters raged over horse pastures, barns and farmland. At the peak of evacuations, roughly 170 horses, 140 chickens and 90 goats saved from the floodwaters were being cared for at a county park north of Seattle, said Kara Underwood, division manager of Snohomish County Parks. Most of those animals were still at the park on Saturday, she said.

The record floodwaters slowly receded, but authorities warned that waters will remain high for days, and that there was still danger from potential levee failures or mudslides. There was also the threat of more rain forecast for Sunday. Officials conducted dozens of water rescues as debris and mudslides closed highways and raging torrents washed out roads and bridges.

Associated Press journalists Manuel Valdes in Burlington, Hallie Golden in Seattle and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed.