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THE Restarted version of the Digg Social Site aims to bring back the mind of the old web at a time when the content generated by AI threatens to overwhelm the traditional social media platforms, drowning the voices of real people.
This presents an opportunity to build a social site for the AI era, where people who create content and manage online communities receive greater participation in the success of a platform, think the founders of Digg.
A giant to aggregate news from the web 2.0 era, Digg was once evaluated at $ 175 million To its peak in 2008 and is now given a new life under the direction of its original founder, Kevin Rose, and the co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian. The two recently teamed up for Announce a new vision for DIGGwhich will focus on activating discovery and community, the way the first internet used to be allowed.
Speaking at Wall Street Journal Future of everything Conference Thursday, the founders gave more information on how they plan to achieve this objective with the restart of Digg.
Initially, the two addressed problems they encountered in the first days of social media, Ohanian recalling how he chose to resign from the Board of Directors of Reddit concerning the disagreements of the company’s approach to hatred speech which, according to him, was bad for society and the company.
For example, the company authorized a Reddit forum called “R / Watchpeopledie” to continue working to the mass shooting of Christchurch, which drew media attention, he said. It was not until the time that Reddit decided to adjust its policies Around violence and gore on the platform.
After Reddit, Ohanian went to Found the venture capital company Seven Seven SixWhere he says he focused on creating companies that are more “aligned with values”. He said he considered Digg as another step in this direction.
Rose reflected at the first days of automatic learning, where technology was often used to reward the publications on which people would bask on “the most obscure and strange way,” he said.
“Sometimes it can be good, but often it pushes really strange agendas. And it is not even in the entire bot and AI that also push these agendas,” Rose said.
With Digg, the founders want to create a new community focused on real people, not an AI or robots, they said.
“I have long subscribed to the” theory of the dead on the Internet, “said Ohanian, referring the idea Much of what we see online is not created by real humans, but bots. Ten years ago, it was more a conspiracy theory, but with the rise of AI, which changed, he said. “Probably in recent years – since we have exceeded the Turing test -” [the dead internet theory] is a very real thing.
“I think that the average person has no idea of the amount of content they consume on social networks, if it is not a botright, is a human using AI in the loop to generate this large-scale content, to manipulate and escape,” he added.
To approach the rise of robots, the founders turn to new technologies, as Zero knowledge tests (AKA ZK Proods), a protocol used in cryptography that could be used to prove that someone has something on a platform. They envisage communities where administrators could turn the dials, so to speak, to verify that a poster is human before allowing them to join the conversation.
“The world will be flooded with robots, AI agents,” said Rose, and this could infiltrate communities where people try to make real human connections. Something like it recently happened on Reddit, where Researchers secretly used AI robots to pretend to be real people On a forum to test how AI could influence human opinion.
“We are going to live in a world where the large and vast majority of the content we see is … A form or a form, generated by AI, and it is a terrible user experience if the reason you arrive in a place is for an authentic human connection, and it is not with humans – or it is with people who mask as humans,” said Ohanian.
He explained that there are several ways to test social sites to see if someone is a person. For example, if someone has their device for longer, it could add more weight to their comment, he suggested.
Rose said the site could also offer different levels of service, depending on the probability that someone is human.
If you have registered with an email address to throw and you have used a VPN, for example, you may only be able to get recommendations or make yourself easier. Or if you were anonymous and hit a comment too quickly, the site could then ask you to make an additional step to prove your humanity – like checking your phone number or even invoice a low amount if the number you provide was disposable, said Rose.
“There will be these levels that we will do, depending on how you want to commit and interact with the real network itself,” he confirmed.
However, the founders stressed that they are not anti-ai. They expect to use AI to help in areas such as site moderation, including the demorative of situations where someone is starting to arouse problems.
In addition to verifying humans, the founders are considering a service where moderators and creators benefit financially from their efforts. “I believe that the days of moderation not remunerated by the masses – do everyone to create massive communities of several million people – must disappear. I think these people put their lives and souls in these communities, and so that they are not remunerated in one way or another, “said Ridiculous.
As an example, he underlined how Reddit marked the term “Wallstreetbets”, which is the name of one of the forums created by a Reddit user. Instead, Rose thinks that a business should help creators like this who add value to a community, not try to appropriate their work as Reddit did.
With the combination of an improved user experience and a model that allows creators to monetize their work, the founders think that DIGG itself will benefit. “I want to believe that the business model that will allow Digg to succeed is the one who aligns all these stakeholders. And I think it’s very, very possible,” said Ohanian.
