Digg to relaunch with focus on ‘humanity and connection’

Before Reddit there was Digg, which popularized up- and down-votes on online posts. “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. 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. 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.