We rebuilt Digg in 2023 because the open web still deserves a front page edited by people, not algorithms.
DiggHits is a community-owned newsroom that turns the chaos of the open web into a clean, crowd-ranked feed of the stories that matter most this hour. Every link on the front page was submitted by a member and voted up or down by another. No opaque recommender engine decides what you read next — 41,000 contributing members do, in the open, with timestamps.
We exist because the original Digg spirit — a small, principled public square where curious readers edit the day together — was worth saving. When we relaunched publicly in March 2023, we made three promises: the voting ledger would be public, the methodology would be auditable by independent researchers, and the front page would never carry a paywall, a native ad, or a sponsored slot above the editorial rule. Two years and 2.3 million submitted stories later, every one of those promises still holds.
This page is for the journalists, researchers, and skeptical power users who need to know who runs this and how the sausage is made. The short answer: fourteen people in Brooklyn and Lisbon, a $6.2M seed round led by Betaworks and Lerer Hippeau, and a voting engine audited end-to-end by an independent firm in Q1 2025. The longer answer is below.
Fourteen people, two cities, $6.2M, one mission: keep the front page human.
We are a deliberately small newsroom — half engineers, half editors and community leads — split between a converted warehouse in Bushwick and a co-working floor in Príncipe Real. We took one seed round in late 2022 and have not raised since. Below is every full-time employee, the round that pays for our coffee, and a paragraph on what we will not do with the money.
Plus six more — two editors, two engineers, a newsletter lead, and an ops generalist — listed in full on the public roster.
$6.2M Seed, Closed November 2022
Led by Betaworks and Lerer Hippeau, with participation from SRB Ventures, the Knight Foundation (newsroom sustainability grant), and fourteen angel checks from former editors at The Verge, Nieman Lab, and the original Digg team. We have not raised since. The cap table, lead investors, and SAFE terms are filed publicly on the transparency page.
Servers, Salaries, and Two AP Interns a Year.
Roughly 58% goes to payroll for the fourteen of us and the two annual reporting interns we host with the Brooklyn Newsroom Fellowship. 22% covers infrastructure and the public voting ledger. 11% funds the Daily Dig newsletter and its part-time freelance fact-checker. The remaining 9% is legal, audit, and a small emergency reserve. We do not pay dividends, do not have a secondary offering, and the founders hold a single class of common stock alongside every employee.
Sponsored Slots. Engagement Bait. Paywalls.
There is no "boost" button for advertisers. Promoted stories — when we accept them, which is rarely — are clearly labeled and ranked on a separate page that never touches the front-page algorithm. We have never run a native ad above the editorial rule. We will not. If a future board ever proposes one, the answer is in our bylaws: no.
By the numbers, audited and open.
Every figure below is verified by our Q1 2025 independent audit (filed by West & Crane LLP, methodology published in full on the methodology page). The voting ledger behind these numbers is downloadable as a daily-updated CSV from our public API — no auth required.
The Voting Engine
Every account gets one vote per story, weighted by contribution history — not by clicks or tenure. A new account's first five votes count at 0.6×. A member with 200+ accepted submissions and a 12-month clean audit record votes at 1.0×. No account exceeds 1.0×, ever. The full weight table is published as plain JSON.
Manipulation Resistance
We rate-limit by subnet, fingerprint new accounts on first submission, and quarantine any upvote cluster that shares an ASN, a screen fingerprint, or a sub-30-second voting cadence. In Q1 2025 we quarantined 1.4% of all votes — down from 6.1% in Q1 2024. The flagged vote log is public.
Time-to-Front-Page Audit
A submission's "time-to-front-page" is measured from the moment it passes our spam quarantine (median: 47 seconds) to the moment it crosses the top-30 threshold on the public front page. The 14-minute median figure is verified by West & Crane LLP across 38,400 submissions in January 2025.
Public Ledger & API
Every vote, every submission, every moderator action is written to an append-only ledger mirrored at ledger.digghits.com and re-streamed hourly. Researchers, journalists, and academic institutions can request an API key at no cost; the rate limit is generous by design.
Read the front page, then help edit it.
Account creation takes 28 seconds, requires only an email address, and grants you five votes and three submissions on day one. The first story you submit will reach the new queue in under a second — and from there, it's up to the crowd. Join 41,000 contributing members and add your voice to the front page.
No paywall. No tracking sold to third parties. One unsubscribe link in every newsletter. The full privacy policy fits on one page — read it in 90 seconds.