Digg

And there's still time, probably the next five years, to be one of the OGs.

As far as I know, you returned, but you returned to social platforms, right? Recently by backing the revival, how should I call it, the revival of Digg.

Yes, Digg 2.0. Let's talk about this for a moment because it's a real case, right? That was around a promise of more human community.

And then the 2026 public better encountered an overwhelming bot problem and required a hard reset, how it was at least mentioned in the press release.

But that experience makes the question more immediate than theoretical, which is great.

Try not to go overboard with spam so you don't lose it.

This happened with Digg.

We saw all of this at the beginning of the year with Digg.

Digg relaunched, had tremendous authority, was ranking.

was being used for Parasite SEO a ton.

People were creating communities for SEO, messages for SEO, best decks for while lists, everything.

SEO was going crazy on the relaunched Digg.

Digg tried to fight back, banning users, banning communities.

Jessica Adekie here.

Today, for my Digg Inspiration episode, I'm able to chat with Joel Armstrong.

He is VP of AI here at Digg.

And we're going to chat about my episode with Sean Burress from Kimberly-Clark, who talked a lot about AI.

So I was like, who else am I going to call? Ghostbusters? No.

If you haven't heard it in a while, it's worth a listen.

Worth going back to.

If the AI uprising happens, which Digg teammate is negotiating on our behalf?

But it's the first time we've had someone outside Meta run Glimmer against the field, and it doesn't flatter it.

One commenter on the Digg thread who's used past Nanbeige models expects the results to mostly hold, but warns it may be fragile and prone to doom loops.

That's the failure I'd test first.

A model that gets stuck repeating step 7 isn't an agent.

No, not at all.

Since, I don't know, I don't remember, I don't know if everybody remembers the time when we had this, how was it called, Digg, we had Digg.com, D-I-G-G.com, if you remember, up and down vote and then leaving comments under blog posts, you know, that times maybe 15 years ago.

Back in the day, Google was using this human interaction, thumbs up, thumbs down, bookmarking, leaving comments, as a social validation that this post is good enough for higher rankings.

I firmly believe that similar logic is used here as well.

I, I'm curious, like did David Filo know that people were literally had a black market of servers? Like I assume he probably did know, but it didn't, didn't change the kind of the top-down mandate.

Then after Yahoo!, is that when you ended up at Digg?

Yeah.

Uh, at the time, very famous company for a very amusing story.

C- can you tell us about like how, how you decided to, to switch? 'Cause it was a startup, right? Digg was a startup back then.

S- so depending who you talk to, there are gonna be different narratives, but I, I think the, the Digg narrative is basically it was like the, before Reddit, it was the The, the, the big community site, but it was centrally curated.

And so Reddit had these sub-communities where the communities kind of voted with the algorithm on what they wanted, the, the Reddit algorithm.

Digg was actually centrally curated on what, what went onto the front page.

I was watching a video.

Tim Ferriss was being interviewed by, I can't remember his name, the creator of Digg.

It's escaping me, and I'm sorry.

Great interview, by the way.

So when we were at Yahoo and trying to figure out what the hell MyBlogLog was going to be, um, it, since, you know, we weren't gonna get a lot of support from, from Yahoo, we really started trying to integrate, uh, try to, to further this, um, this global profile.

And so we started integrating with Twitter and with, uh, with all of the other, you know, Digg and whatever else, the, the social, uh, media sites at the time, trying to, um, leverage that API to create a unified dashboard, if you will.

Um, you know, again, Ben Weiss, this is what he recently said across, you know, Reddit and, you know, if, if we were th- talking about this today, here's his Reddit posts, his Insta posts, his TikToks, his, his, his Twitter posts all in one place.

And again, that was pretty novel back in 2007.

It's just- ... friction.

And that's why we launched Gnip, was the idea of we would do all of that work for everybody and just create effectively fire hoses of content where you could say, "I want this, this, this, and this.

I want blog information, I want Twitter, I want Digg, I want whatever else.

And these are my credentials, so I have access to this much information." And then we would just manage it and send them a normalized stream of content across all of those different websites, and people could just consume it, you know, companies could consume it.

We're gonna slowly kill our competitor.

[laughs] And you know, you look at, like, Digg versus Reddit and, you know, this is back in, like, the 2005 era.

Digg was the big guy.

Digg, like, was the cool company.

Everybody used Digg and it's, like, the awesome thing, and it was just so cool.

And Reddit was, like, the underdog.

And they hated Digg.

They hated Digg.