Digg Groundbreakers: In The Trenches Vol.000

Normally, all information gets posted on Digg as well, but not this one. So, here’s the recent email: - Hey Digg Groundbreakers, Back in mid-2004, I realized the entire media landscape was created by a handful of people deciding whatever everyone else should care about. So I created Digg, a place users could submit stories and people could vote on what actually mattered. It was a success and left its mark on the internet. The "digg" was the original upvote, like, or thumbs up. These are now the fundamental building blocks of social media. And I had achieved my goal of helping make the internet something that everyone was able to contribute to. So, here we are, 20+ years and quite a few stumbles later, back and ready to rock again. But why? Similar to how I felt in 2004, I believe that the media landscape needs a shake-up. AI agents are flooding the internet, and with our new vision, I believe that Digg has a real shot at making the internet a better place to connect with humans. For all of us on the Digg team, that means more transparency, better tools for communities, new ways for community builders to own and monetize their audiences, and hopefully a place you'll actually want to hang out. Here's what you can do to help: 1. Jump on the beta app here. If you're more of a desktop person (Justin, Digg’s CEO, calls me a boomer for loving desktop, but I do), we've got you covered. Access it here. 2. Get in there and start digging, poke around and definitely let us know if anything breaks. 3. Invite your friends (soon). This might be THE most important thing for us, getting more people like you on the platform. 4. Lastly, let’s break bread (or beer, or pizza). LA folks. We're hosting our first meetup this Thursday, and we’d love to hang in-person. For those of you already in the trenches with us, here's what we're building right now/next: 1. Invites rolling out to active users 2. User following with custom feeds of your favorite diggers 3. Smart duplicate detection – we'll spot trending themes and route you to the main story 4. Rich editor with linking and @mentions 5. Build Your Own Community (BYOC) – build /AnythingYouWant 6. A few surprises we're keeping under wraps (can't let the alien get a head start) That's it for now. We'll be dropping fresh updates every week from here on out. Let's build something great together. – Kevin Rose