Reddit’s cofounder doesn’t miss working at the company he started more than 20 years ago.
Alexis Ohanian, who left Reddit’s board five years ago, conducted an “Ask Me Anything” on the platform on Monday to promote the relaunch of the old Reddit rival, Digg.
A Reddit user asked Ohanian, “Do you miss anything about being in leadership at Reddit?”
His answer was curt: “I do not.”
Ohanian stepped down from Reddit’s board of directors in June 2020 following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis. At the time, he wrote on Reddit that it was a “long overdue” move to “do the right thing.”
He urged the Reddit board to fill his seat with a black candidate, after the company had been criticized for providing a platform for racist and hate speech.
Ohanian said in the AMA on Monday that he left Reddit “to pressure the company to make policy changes like banning racist/hate communities.”
Digg is a Reddit-like forum page founded in 2004 by entrepreneurs Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson.
In 2008, Google floated a deal to buy the platform for $180 million, which did not come to fruition. Venture capital fund Betaworks bought it in 2012 for $500,000.
But last year, TechCrunch reported that Rose had reacquired the platform, joined by Ohanian.
Ohanian said on his AMA that Digg will be a community-first platform, with a transparent algorithm “based on what you actually follow.”
He also promised not to feed Digg’s users with “AI-driven enshittification.”
“We are not using AI to rank content, shape discourse, personalize feeds, or decide what you should see,” he said. “There is no black box recommendation engine optimizing for engagement. Our feed logic is simple, published, and human readable.”
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