Do you feel overwhelmed by the immense amount of content being pushed on you everyday? (Btw, here are 26 Ron Swanson quotes and 21 time-saving hacks that you should totally check out!) At Digg, our goal is to make it easier for you to find high quality articles and videos from all over the internet, without having to wade through the excess. That’s the intent behind the Digg frontpage, our Roundups, and our Explainers. Our users (voracious readers all) rely on us to fill their quality content void.
So we are super excited today to announce 2 new ways to make content discovery even easier!
Digg Editions
Since Digg’s relaunch in 2012, we’ve sent out The Daily Digg email each weekday to those who want a digest of 5–6 of the day’s top stories, selected by our amazing editors. But we think we can do even better.
Introducing Digg Editions, an evolution of the daily email.
Digg Editions are published twice every weekday, and once on the weekend. Each is a collection of articles and videos that catches you up on the best of the internet. We have expanded on The Daily Digg by adding top news to keep you up-to-date, and additional content categories to give you a more complete view of the world. We are also using Digg’s deep data to cluster articles around emerging trending topics. And while Digg Editions will be the same for everyone at launch, they will soon become personalized (and customizable) based on your specific interests, networks, and behavior.
Our goal is to make Digg Editions the one email you *want* to read in the morning. Sign up for it here! (Current Daily Digg subscribers will be migrated to Digg Editions automatically.) If you really don’t like email, don’t worry, Digg Editions is also available on the web and directly in chat via …
Digg on Facebook Messenger
We aim to provide world-class content discovery wherever our users are, and increasingly, you are sharing and discussing the best of the internet in messaging apps. So instead of making you switch between multiple apps to find and share content, we are bringing it directly to you in chat. Starting today, Digg’s deep well of articles and videos will be accessible through Facebook Messenger!
Digg on Facebook Messenger can be used in 2 ways:
- Find Interesting Stuff For Me! You can get Digg Editions delivered to you daily right in Facebook Messenger, helping you catch up on the most important news and the best of the internet. Additionally, Digg will send you trending articles and videos that we think you’d like to see (not too often, because that would be annoying).
- Let Me Search For All The Contents! Digg gives you access to millions of new articles and videos everyday, based on your interests and preferences. You can search for content on Facebook Messenger in the following ways:
Category - find stories based on vertical by searching for tags like “news”, “sports”, “technology”Keyword - use simple keywords to search for anything that the internet is talking about, like “trump”, “copa america”, “sharks”Domain - find the top articles from many of the internet’s best publishers by searching for URLs like “nytimes.com”, “espn.com”, “wired.com”Trending - just type “trending” to see what articles and videos are on the rise across the Digg networkDigg - and of course, you can read our frontpage right in Facebook Messenger by typing “digg”
Click here to start using Digg on Facebook Messenger!
So, Is This Thing A Bot?
2 months ago, we launched Digg’s Slack integration and called it DiggBot. Our launch post even explicitly answered the question: “Why Build A Bot?” So why are we staying away from bot-language this time?
As more and more chatbots are launched, there’s been a deluge of opinion about this new shift in platforms. We can generally categorize these opinions into 3 buckets:
- Love them bots! Artificial Intelligence is the future of computing, and the emergence of a new runtime means that chatbots will define the next 10 years of online interactions. Oh and publishers should definitely get on this train.
- Hate them bots! Artificial Intelligence really isn’t far enough along to be helpful yet, and bots are making things more difficult than they need to be. And most of the chatbots being launched right now are just a big pile of disappointment.
- Lots of potential, but lots of progress needed! There really is immense potential in chat apps as the new browser, but there’s still a lot of work to be done, especially in conversational intelligence. So for now, solve for a specific use case and don’t try to do too much.
Here at Digg, we agree with opinion #3. We see the massive potential of the aggregate messaging marketplace that continues to grow at an incredible rate (2.5 billion unique users now). We see chat interfaces on mobile as an exceptional channel for distribution and ubiquity. And we see an exciting design challenge that, when perfected, could be the best and easiest content discovery experience in history. So, instead of fighting to be noticed in a crowded, noisy, and collapsing app economy, we have decided to take our talents to chat and address a large but specific problem for which we are the right solution.
Which is why we aren’t (yet) going to call this a bot. Because admittedly, the need we’re filling should not require artificially intelligent conversation. Discovering great articles and videos doesn’t have to involve full dialogue with a machine. Instead, it should require only minimal input or, at best, none at all. So instead of focusing upfront on natural language processing and conversational intelligence, we have decided to:
- Address the specific use cases of a) passive habitual content discovery, and b) high quality content search
- Leverage our deep and proprietary data (10 million RSS feeds, 200 million daily tweets, 7.5 million new articles ranked each day!) to find the best of the internet
- Keep it simple, and don’t pretend to be smarter than we are
Yes, this is a (slight) revision of what we’ve said in the recent past, but that’s because we’re learning!
Now Go Discover The Best Of The Internet!
We are very excited about the launch of Digg Editions and Digg on Facebook Messenger. Please send any questions or feedback to support@digg.com, and we look forward to chatting with you!
