Digg’s founders explain how they’re building a site for humans in the AI era

The restarting version of the Social Site Digg aims to restore the spirit of the old network at a time when the content created from artificial intelligence calms down to overcoming traditional social media platforms, which is drowned in the voices of real people.

This offers an opportunity to build a social site for the era of artificial intelligence, where people who create content and manage communities via the Internet are granted a greater stake in the success of the platform, as Digg founders believe.

Digg, a news collection giant in the Age of the Web 2.0, was evaluated at a value of $ 175 million at its peak in 2008, and a new life is now granted under the supervision of its original founder, Kevin Rose, and the founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian. The two recently cooperated to announce a new vision of Digg, which will focus on enabling the discovery and society, the way early internet allowed once.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal in the future of everything on Thursday, the founders presented more insight on how they planned to achieve this goal by restarting Digg.

Initially, the two touched on the problems they faced in the previous days of social media, with Ohanian remember how he chose to resign from the Reddit Board of Directors due to differences about the company’s approach to hate speech that he felt was bad for society and business.

For example, the company allowed a forum on Redait called “R/Watchopledie” to continue working until the group shooting at the Kreisters, which caught the attention of the media. Only then Reddit decided to set his policies on violence and vanity on the platform.

After Reddit, Ohanian has followed the Seven Seven Seven, where he says he focuses on building more “valuable”. He said he sees Digg another step in this direction.

He said that Rose was reflected in the early days of machine learning, as technology was often used to reward the posts that people were bothering about “the most mysterious mystery, somewhat of strangeness full of existence.”

“Sometimes this may be good, but it often pays truly strange business schedules. This does not enter the other side of the robot and the Amnesty International that also pays these works,” said Rose.

With Digg, founders want to create a new community that focuses on serving real people, not artificial intelligence or robots.

“I have long participated in” dead internet theory “, noting that the idea that many of what we see on the Internet is not created by actual humans, but robots ten years ago, this was more than conspiracy theory, but with the rise of artificial intelligence, this has been changed.” Perhaps in the past few years – since we succeeded in bypassing the Torring test – [the dead internet theory] It is a very real thing. “

He added: “I think that the average person does not have an idea of ​​the amount of content they consume on social media, if it is not an explicit robot, it is a person who uses artificial intelligence in the episode to create this content on a large scale, to manipulate and evade.”

To treat the rise of robots, the founders look forward to a new technique, such as the zero proofs (also known as ZK evidence), a protocol used in encryption that can be used to prove that someone has something on the platform. They imagine societies where officials can turn the faces, if it is permissible to speak, to verify that the poster is human before they are allowed to join the conversation.

Rose pointed out that “the world will be overwhelmed by robots, with artificial intelligence agents,” and this may infiltrate the societies that people are trying to make real humanitarian links. Something like this happened recently on Reddit, where researchers secretly used male robots to form as real people in a forum to test how artificial intelligence affects human opinion.

“We will live in a world where the vast majority of the content that we see in … shape or shape, is created by artificial intelligence, is an terrible user experience if the reason that you come to somewhere is an authentic human connection, not with humans-or with people who move as human beings.”

He explained that there are a number of ways to test social sites to see if someone is someone. For example, if someone has his devices for a longer period of time, this weight may add to his suspension.

Rose said that the site can also provide different levels of service, based on the possibility of a human being.

If you register with a away email address and use VPN, for example, you may just get recommendations or engage in some of the simplest ways. Or if you are unidentified and wrote in a comment very quickly, the site may ask you to take an additional step to prove your humanity – such as checking your phone number or even imposing a symbolic fee for you if the number you provided can be disposed of, Rose said.

“There will be these levels that we do, based on the way you want to engage and interact with the actual network itself,” confirmed.

However, the founders emphasized that they are not hostiles. They expect artificial intelligence to help help in areas such as moderation on the site, including cases of escalation as someone begins to stimulate trouble.

In addition to checking humans, the founders imagine a service as supervisors and creators financially benefit from their efforts. “I think that the days of moderation are not paid by the masses-doing all the heavy lifting to create huge societies and billions of people-they should disappear. I think these people put in their lives and spirit in these societies, and for them they are not compensated in some way, we must get to know a way to turn them along the ride.”

For example, he pointed out how Reddit Tradial organized the term “Wallstreeetbets”, the name of one of the forums established by the Reddit user. Instead, Rose believes that the company should help creators like this who add value to a society, not trying to obtain their work ownership as Reddit did.

With a mixture of improved user experience and a model that enables creators to liquefy their work, the founders believe that Digg itself will benefit from it. “I want to believe that the business model that will make Digg successful is a model that corresponds to all stakeholders. I think it’s very possible,” Ohaanian said.