Digg relaunches to challenge Reddit with public beta now live

Digg has officially relaunched as a modern alternative to Reddit with a public beta. Digg founder Kevin Rose teamed up with Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit’s original creators, for the comeback.

Before Reddit became the front page of the internet, Digg was where users surfaced interesting links through upvotes. A controversial redesign more than a decade ago pushed much of its community elsewhere to Reddit.

The new Digg is now live at digg.com allowing anyone to sign up and explore features. Prior to the public opening, around 67,000 users were invited to test the platform.

At launch, Digg offers more than 20 broad interest communities covering science, technology, gaming, entertainment, and humor topics. Users can create new communities around specific interests, but each group has a single manager currently.

Rose emphasized that trust and authenticity are central to Digg’s reboot strategy. One safeguard involves verifying users within certain communities, like requiring proof of ownership for hardware focused groups.

Digg CEO Justin Mezzell said the team launched with a lean feature set intentionally. Instead of waiting for a fully built platform, Digg plans to introduce updates on a weekly basis.

Digg also launched Digg Daily, an AI generated podcast summarizing trending discussions on the platform. The company is open to replacing AI narration with human hosts depending on community feedback.