The re -launted version of Digg social sites is aimed at restoring the spirit of the old network at a time when the content generated by AI threatens to overwhelm traditional social media platforms, drowning out the voices of real people.
This is the opportunity to build a social side for the AI era, in which people who create content and manage online communities have a greater share in the success of the platform, the founders of Digg think.
Digg, a giant of aggregation Web 2.0, Digg was once priced at $ 175 million at an amount in 2008, and now he has received a new life under the direction of his original founder Kevin Rose and co -founder Reddit Alexis Ohanian. They both recently joined forces to announce a new vision of Digg, which will focus on enabling discovery and community, as it used to allow early internet.
Speaking in the Wall Street Journal's The future of everything The conference on Thursday founders offered more insight into how they plan to achieve this goal by restarting Digg.
Initially, they both raised the problems they encountered in earlier days of social media, and Ohanian remembered how he decided to give up Reddit's management board because of misunderstandings about the company's approach to hate speech, which in his opinion was bad for society and business.
For example, the company has allowed Forum on Reddit called “R/Watchpeopledie” to continue to operate to a mass shooting in Christchurch, which drew the attention of the media, he said. Only then Reddit decided to adapt his rules on violence and circulate on the platform.
After Reddit, Ohanian took seven Seven Six Venture Capital companies, where he says that he focuses on building companies that are more “adapted to value.” He said he was seeing Digga as the next step in this direction.
Rose was thinking about early machine learning days, in which technology was often used to reward posts that people would complain about “the most unclear, kind of strangeness,” he said.
“Sometimes it can be good, but it often presses really strange programs. And this does not even enter the whole direction of the bot and the artificial side of things that also push these programs,” Rose said.
They said that thanks to DIGG, the founders want to create a new community focused on serving real people, not Ai or Bots.
“I have been subscribing to” dead internet theory for a long time, “said Ohanian, referring to idea As much as we see online, it is not created by real people, but bots. Ten years ago it was more a theory of conspiracy, but as AI increased, it changed, he said. “Probably in the last few years – since we have been lost to Turing's test – (dead internet theory) is a very real thing.”
“I think that the average person has no idea how much content they consume on social media, if it is not a direct bot, he is a man using AI in a loop to generate this content on a large scale, to manipulate and avoid” – he added.
To deal with the growth of bots, the founders are looking for new technology, like Evidence of knowledge about zero knowledge (aka ZK Proofs), a protocol used in cryptography, which can be used to prove that someone owns something on the platform. They imagine communities in which administrators could reverse the shields, so to speak to check if the poster is human before he allows them to join the conversation.
“The world will be flooded with bots, AI agents,” Rose noted, and this can infiltrate the communities in which people try to establish real human connections. Something like this took place recently at Reddit, where Scientists secretly used AI bots to say as real people In the forum to check how AI can affect human opinion.
“We will live in a world where the vast, vast majority of content we see is … some shape or form, generated by AI, and this is a terrible user's experience, if the reason why you come to the place is an authentic human relationship, and this is not with people-lub is with people masked as people,” said Ohanian.
He explained that there are many ways in which social sites can check if someone is a person. For example, if someone owns their device for a long time, it can increase the weight to their commentary, he suggested.
Rose said that the site can also offer different levels of services, depending on how likely it is that someone will be human.
If you have registered with the e-mail address and, for example, you used VPN, you may only be able to get recommendations or get involved in simpler ways. Or if you were anonymous and entered in the comment too quickly, the site may ask you to take an additional step to prove humanity – like verification of the phone number, and even a small charge, if the given number was one -time, said Rose.
“There will be the levels we do, based on how you want to engage and interact with the network itself,” he confirmed.
However, the founders emphasized that they are not anti-ai. They expect them to use artificial intelligence to help in areas such as website moderation, including in de -escalation situations, in which someone begins to arouse trouble.
In addition to verification of people, the founders imagine a service in which moderators and creators financially use their efforts. “I believe that the times of unpaid moderation by the massive of all heavy lifting to create a huge, multi-million community-Musch.
As one example, he indicated how Reddit marked the term “WallStreetbets”, which is the name of the forum created by Reddit. Instead, Rose believes that the company should help creators who add community values and not try to take over their work as Reddit.
By combining the improved experience of the user and the model, which allows creators to earn on their work, the founders believe that Digg will benefit. “I want to believe that the business model that will make Digg a success is one that equalizes all these interested parties. And I think it is very, very possible,” said Ohanian.
