The reboot of early-internet social news site Digg is underway. Original founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have launched an early-access community for some of the first people who signed up after last month’s announcement that the pair had bought Digg and planned to relaunch it as something new.
The early-access program is being called “Groundbreakers” and costs $5 to join — a one-time fee that Digg says is about keeping out bots versus making money. In fact, Digg says the proceeds will go to a nonprofit “we’ll choose together inside the community.”
People who join Groundbreakers will get access to “updates, mockups, and experiments” and a “front-row seat to how Digg is being rebuilt,” according to an email that went out Thursday morning. They’ll also get first dibs on usernames and a “Groundbreakers badge” on their profile to mark “those who built [Digg] from the beginning.”
Practically, the community experience is being run on Circle, a web-based community platform for creators. It’s not immediately clear how many people made it into the early-access program.
The signup process and the chat on Circle were initially a little slow and buggy Thursday morning. By the time this story was published, nearly 3,000 people had joined.
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
