Digg, once a popular link-sharing site, has returned as an AI news aggregation site, TechCrunch reported on May 11.

Digg unveiled a new beta service that reflects real-time data from X, formerly Twitter, to track AI issues and reactions from influential people.

While the previous version resembled Reddit, the new one is closer to early news aggregation sites.

Digg is focusing on AI news rankings. In an email sent to beta testers, Digg said its goal is to "track the most influential voices in a field and uncover news that is actually worth watching."

Digg plans to start in AI and expand to other topics if it delivers results. Its homepage currently highlights four items at the top: most-read stories, stories with surging discussion, fastest-rising stories and "did you miss this." Below, it shows a list of the day's top stories along with engagement metrics such as views, comments, likes and saves.

Those metrics do not originate on Digg itself. Digg collects X content in real time to determine what is being discussed as an issue and uses sentiment analysis, clustering and signal detection to decide importance.

Kevin Rose (케빈 로즈), Digg's founder, explained on X that when Sam Altman (샘 알트먼), OpenAI's CEO, reacts to an AI-related article, the topic almost always spreads across X as a whole, and the new service can track such increases in engagement. It also provides lists of the top 1,000 people in AI, top companies and top politicians focused on AI issues.

Digg's previous version halted service in March after it failed to manage bot traffic effectively and failed to differentiate itself from Reddit. Rose said, "The version released this time still has bugs and is a first preview rather than an official launch."