Alexis Ohanian relaunches Digg with Kevin Rose and joins Frank McCourt's TikTok bid

Summary

Alexis Ohanian is relaunching Digg in partnership with Kevin Rose — the man he spent years treating as a rival — and has joined Frank McCourt's bid to acquire TikTok.

The two stories share a common thread: Ohanian betting on consumer platforms at a moment when most institutional capital has moved elsewhere.

Digg relaunch

Ohanian and Rose only met five or six years ago, despite running competing platforms through the mid-2000s. Reddit launched roughly a month before Ohanian learned Digg existed, giving Rose's platform a seven-to-eight-month head start. Reddit won the long run. Now, about five months ago, Rose asked Ohanian to co-own the relaunch, and Ohanian said yes.

Version one is deliberately modest: get something live that hits the nostalgia notes, roughly where Digg was before its disastrous v4 redesign, with obvious modernisation. The more interesting product argument is what comes after. Rose surveyed thousands of community moderators to identify what they actually wanted, and the answer points to AI-assisted moderation tools that eliminate the inbox-clearing janitor work so volunteer moderators can focus on community building. The pitch is that less than 1% of users do the heaviest lifting of running communities, and today's LLMs can take most of the manual burden off them.

Ohanian also sees a structural opening from X's decision to suppress links in the feed. It makes sense for X's business, he says, but it leaves a gap for a platform built around link sharing. He floats a second tailwind: vibe-coded apps, pointing to the developer Levels building a flight simulator, as evidence that apps themselves are becoming a content format — one that needs URLs to spread.

The early beachhead for the relaunch is likely the same demographic Ohanian describes himself as: early-40s tech-native users with nostalgia for the pre-Facebook internet. He draws a parallel to the broader consumer appetite for vintage — cars, records, Pokémon cards — and argues there is genuine demand for a vintage internet experience.

Algorithmic slop

On the question of why recommendation feeds across every major platform trend toward outrage and low-quality content, Ohanian's argument is structural rather than specific to any one company. Optimising for time-in-app inevitably rewards content that generates emotional reaction, and that dynamic plays out on Instagram and YouTube as much as it does on X. Community-based platforms have the best shot at escaping it because users arrive with declared intent — they signed up for a specific topic, not an engagement feed. He traces this back to Reddit's own early history: r/gaming, which he founded, had a nostalgic bent that eventually caused younger users to splinter off and create r/games for new releases.

TikTok bid

Ohanian is a supporting investor in McCourt's Project Liberty bid, not the lead. McCourt called him in because of the crypto angle: the plan is to migrate TikTok's user base onto a blockchain-based identity layer, giving creators portable ownership of their reputation and following. Ohanian's interest is less in the social platform mechanics and more in whether TikTok's scale — hundreds of millions of US users — could be the mass-adoption moment that crypto has never managed to manufacture organically. He has been an early crypto investor since Coinbase's seed round in 2012 and the Ethereum pre-sale.

He is agnostic about which bid wins. His stated position is that any outcome that removes the platform from Chinese Communist Party control is a win, and he would support any American buyer.

Consumer investing

Ohanian's broader investment posture is contrarian-consumer. His cleanest example: in 2020 he paid roughly $1 million for a stake in Angel City FC, a women's soccer franchise. An equivalent expansion fee today is $110 million, and Angel City is now valued at just under $300 million, making it the most valuable women's professional sports team in the world. He frames that as the same instinct driving the Digg relaunch and his current AI consumer bets.

His most recent disclosed investment is Doge, an AI avatar app that generates realistic clothing try-on images from a small number of reference photos. He positions it as the latest example of a consumer use case — virtual try-on — that has existed and underdelivered for decades, now finally viable because of foundational model improvements paired with good UX.

His read on the current moment: the first wave of AI consumer apps was novelty and get-rich-quick. The second wave, which he thinks is starting now, is rebuilt versions of familiar products that are demonstrably better, plus genuinely new experiences. He expects more legacy consumer platforms to relaunch in the coming weeks and points to South by Southwest as a likely venue for some of those announcements.