For more than a decade, Digg has been known to help people discover little-known pockets of the Internet.
Since its re-founding in 2012, the social news site has mainly focused on aggregating quality journalism that's worth checking out. Now, Digg aims to give users an even deeper look at those stories.
Digg introduced Digg Dialog Thursday, a new feature that allows the Digg community to connect with the journalists, experts or creators behind the content people are talking about. Users will be able to start posting questions on the Dialog page a few hours before the live conversation with the guest begins. After the guest leaves, the Dialog page will remain open to allow users to continue the discussion until the moderators decide to close it, after which the page will be accessible so users can revisit the conversation in the future.
Digg will host its first Dialog session on Friday, Oct. 9 at noon EST with Paul Ford, who will be discussing his recent New Republic article "The Chaotic Wisdom of Wikipedia Paragraphs."
Dialog sounds a lot like Reddit's popular Ask Me Anything, or AMA, feature, where anyone can take questions posted by users in a designated thread. In a lot of ways, Reddit has usurped Digg as the go-to online destination to discover new content. However, since guests have to be invited to lead Dialogs, Digg seems to be attempting to regulate these conversations more and cut down on the chaos that Reddit sometimes breeds.
Another major difference is that Digg has designed Dialogs to look and feel more like live chats with new content appearing in real-time rather than a message board that you have to refresh in order to see up-to-date posts. Digg is also setting more parameters on who it would like to be guests for Dialogs, keeping it mainly to journalists, authors, experts in a field and persons-of-interest, such as those profiled in an article or video that people want to know more about, not just celebrities looking to promote something, which also seems to be a bit of a dig at Reddit's AMAs.
In keeping with Dialog's focus on the news, Digg has partnered with 25 publications at launch, including The New York Times, BuzzFeed News and Vice. In fact, The Verge described Dialog as something of an updated comments section for news outlets, some of which have ditched the comments box altogether because of its toxicity.
On the contrary, Digg is hoping Dialog will be a more positive and productive experience for commenters and guests alike. Last month, Digg created new community guidelines, and it will be pre-moderating Dialog comments "to ensure that the conversations are interesting, thought-provoking, and civil," Digg COO Gary Liu wrote in a blog post introducing Dialog.
Users will be able to access Dialog on the desktop, mobile Web and through a new iOS app. An Android app is currently in the works.
