Digg is officially back. The once-influential social news site has quietly relaunched in open beta, marking an unlikely return for a platform many people assumed had been left behind in the Reddit era.
Now available via a refreshed website and mobile apps, the new Digg looks to revive the core idea that made it popular in the first place: community-driven discovery. Users can read, post and comment on stories, join topic-based communities, and upvote content though here it’s still called “digging” rather than liking or boosting.
Digg CEO Justin Mezzell says this isn’t a finished product, but a starting point. “We’re ready to grow in the open,” he wrote in a launch post, emphasising that features will evolve based on user feedback as the beta rolls out more widely.
What makes this relaunch particularly interesting is who’s behind it. Kevin Rose, Digg’s original founder, is back on board — joined by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who now co-owns the platform. It’s a pairing that immediately gives Digg some credibility, especially as conversations around the future of online communities resurface.
The timing also feels deliberate. As AI-generated content and bot accounts continue to flood major social platforms, Digg says it plans to experiment with verification tools to ensure real people are behind real accounts. Rose has suggested this will focus on legitimacy rather than status, verifying users who have a genuine reason to be there, not just a large following.
In practice, the new Digg feels familiar but stripped back. There’s no heavy algorithm pushing content into your feed, and no obvious attempt to mimic TikTok or X. Instead, it leans into discussion, discovery and voting — ideas that once defined social news sites before feeds became optimised for engagement above all else.
Digg is currently available to download from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, with the public beta expanding globally over the coming weeks. Whether it can reclaim even a fraction of its former influence remains to be seen, but its return taps into a growing appetite for smaller, more human-scale online spaces.
In 2026, a Digg comeback wasn’t on many people’s bingo cards, but in a social web that’s increasingly noisy and automated, its return suddenly makes a bit more sense.
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