Awesome. Hi all. All right. Yes, we're gonna do this. Um, I think most of you, maybe all of you in this room know DIG, but in case you don't, DIG was the place where everyone went to find out what mattered on the internet starting in 2005 when you founded it.
2004 day. Yeah. So, you know, like Reddit, there was upvoting, down voting. People shared links. The site would sort of crash routinely under the weight of all the traffic. It sold later on. You just bought it and are rebooting it. Yeah. Why?
Well, um, you know, Alexis Ohanian, who started one of the co-founders of Reddit, you know, he left that firm and it's very public how he left. Um, largely because there was a bunch of content that he didn't want to see on the site. Um, you know, I had walked away from Dig quite a while ago and so we wanted to reboot what was possible for social, like reinvent some of the stuff. We started kind of comparing notes around the unfinished business, the features and things that we hadn't launched and the asset came up and was available and we thought gosh, like let's pick this up and just bring in a great CEO. So, we hired a fantastic CEO and then Alexis, myself and Justin, we get together and we just brainstorm the future of social and we have a long way to go. It's early days, but come kind of Q1 of next year, we'll unveil some of the things that are really unique and novel and that we haven't seen done before.
That's really great. So, you kind of took the wraps off this plan back in maybe March. And I'm seeing some screenshots here that I'm not sure if the audience can see, but do you want to maybe walk us through?
This right here is just some of the community creation that we'll have coming up here in January of next year sometime around there which is basically opening up the taxonomy allowing people to create custom communities for anything they might have interest in. So, you know, very similar to subreddit but what gets really interesting is what happens above and beyond this because we're not just building to create feature parity with Reddit. We really want to create some novel things here that are exciting. And I think what's sort of interesting to me about this, we had talked about it when you were launching in March or sort of soft launching is there's a new monetization piece here that is not true of Reddit. Um, you want to sort of compensate moderators for their time in some way. I don't know if this is through equity or sort of a straight payment, but can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, I, you know, when we first started DIG in 2004 before Reddit launched, we were very lucky because we had thousands and thousands of people and eventually millions of people that would come in and contribute content and they're not getting paid. They're just unpaid, you know, moderators, admins, whatever you want to call them. And then, you know, Reddit took that further and they opened up the taxonomy. Um, but it is a lot of work. Whenever we talk to some of the bigger Reddit moderators that are out there, they talk about just, you know, the ones that have millions of members have to have round the clock, like call it a dozen plus people working on making sure to kick out bots, to deal with all the spam issues they have, the fights that are happening and they're not seeing any slice of that revenue and they don't control the audience either. So, you're talking about something where you're signing up and creating all this value for a platform, but you can't port that platform anywhere else. You can't capture any email addresses. You can't stay in touch with that platform. You can be ousted at that platform. In fact, when communities get too large, they're oftentimes trademarked. And so, you actually don't have the ability. Wall Street Bets is a great one where the creator, one of the co-creators of Wall Street Bets tried to write a book called Wall Street Bets and was sued by Reddit for doing so when they're the actual ones that came up with the name. And that just, when I talk to Alexis and we think about these things, that seems a little backwards. Like if anything, we should be more similar to Substack or Patreon or some of the others that are actually giving you much more control of your community and where that belongs. And if we're not the best platform for you, then by all means take your audience someplace else and port it because that should be on us to provide the best platform.
That must be, I mean, pretty liberating to think about for these people. I'm just wondering, do you see this community management as a potentially like a full-time job or just sort of a nice way of saying we appreciate what you've done and here's, you know?
Yeah. In our conversations with some of the moderators, they would appreciate anything because you're getting nothing today. One of them said, 'Yeah, it would be nice if I did this full-time.' We had another one that said, 'I would love a cup of coffee a month or something.' Just some acknowledgement, something, right? And so, I think if your audience is big enough, it should be, you know, properly compensated. One of the, there's a bunch of different models that we're exploring, but one that I like, you know, I think there's death by a thousand subscriptions. I think the idea of like paying $5 for every community is just like a non-starter. It's like really difficult to do. People have so many, you know, paid substacks or all the things that they're subscribing to. We like the kind of Netflix model, which is essentially where attention goes, money flows. And so if we have some type of platform where they can join and receive the attention-based rewards for that. So whether it be either ads-based or subscription-based and you see transparently how that's flowing throughout the ecosystem. So if you're part of, say, Japanese woodworking, you can see, oh, they have this many subscribers, it's going because they have this much attention, here are the dollars that are flowing in, it's flowing to this moderator, this co-creator, and then they're going to throw parties, events, whatever it may be with the use of these proceeds. So we want to do that as transparently as possible and make it really simple. So if you only spend a day there a month and you're paying $10 a month for your subscription, you know, maybe it's a few cents that go your way. But in aggregate, that's actually really meaningful if you get to millions of users.
Yeah, that's great. I mean, I asked because in part we were talking backstage about the future of the workforce and how so many more people are going to be entrepreneurs whether they realize it or not from now and looking for new ways to work. Um, you know, one thing I also wondered was, you know, you mentioned toxicity and it's obviously a huge problem. I do, and you're using AI tools to sort of combat that. I do always wonder if that is a technical issue or a cultural issue because we're still seeing, you know, on X, you know, investors who we know have taken on these sort of very combative personas to get attention. I mean, I just think it's a very hard thing to overcome.
Yeah, I think, you know, everyone is on social for different reasons. Some people say that they are tired of the toxicity, but they're the first to comment and jump in and dunk on someone socially online. Um, that said, we think of these things as almost like smaller micro communities of really trusted people that you can eventually, with all these agents and everything that's coming online where they can befriend you and they can fake like they're an actual human, we have to break these apart into verifiable, trustable, small, micro communities around a theme, a topic. And if we can create that intimacy and that idea of real connection with other humans, I think that's a huge win. You don't need many people coming together to create really highly valuable content and community around that. Um, so when we think about some of these things here like dig for fun, dig to learn, dig for today, like those are kind of curated feeds that you can customize and say I want more of this or less of that and you will have fine grain control over how you view and slice the data. So one of the things that we did some data analysis on which is, back in the old social days if we had a politics section or category that would largely encapsulate, call it like 95% of all political commentary would be inside of that arena. And so it was very easy because you could say oh turn this off and I just won't see anything more that's political. But now politics is so pervasive and it's everywhere that we're having conversations and it shows up around, you know, the name of a restaurant or whatever, like the things are popping up all over the place. And so what you have to do and what we can do now is essentially every single comment and story that comes in to dig, we can hit a ML pathway that we have to Google that will classify it in 15 different ways. So is it hate speech? Is it political? Is it this or that? And we get back these scores. And then we can say, okay, to the user, if you don't want to see political chatter, you don't want to take place or see the more controversial kind of topics that are causing a lot of hate and really anxiety-provoking topics, you can kind of slide that slider any way that you want and then immediately that content filters out for you sitewide. And so we want to give users the control over that. Whereas if you are into politics, you can jump into that arena and have fun and or whatever it is that you do over there. But you can jump into that and you'll know what you're about to walk into when you do. So it's more of an opt-in. We almost think of politics in some sense as like a lightweight not safe for work community these days.
That seems apt. Um, you know, I just wondered how it's going. I guess I read somewhere maybe it was last month that there were 17 communities and again I know this is sort of still invite only. So I guess what are your learnings so far? Has anything surprised you? And also when are you officially launching so that everybody can?
Yeah, I, we don't have a hard date but it's like call it Q1 of next year is when we're really going to go out and open it up. So, we've got a couple hundred thousand people that are waiting on that wait list to get in and we've been slowly opening that up, but we really have a lot of kind of table stakes functionality, which is the boring stuff that you just need to have as a platform. And then there's the crazier stuff, which is really kind of what you're seeing here, which is the ability to turn on agents inside of community. So, you can come in and say, 'Hey, listen. I have my community is for movie fans or my community is for X, you know, I work and I have a conversation with my agent. I want to build custom modules and a custom interface for my community almost like a Replit or a Bolt for social communities but within those kind of guard rails.' And so we want to wake up pleasantly surprised and be like oh look what somebody deployed, they deployed this new agent that anytime a movie is mentioned automatically when you hover over it the Rotten Tomato scores appear or if it's political in nature they're automatically going out and crawling and hitting the Brave search API so that we can show you know left, middle and right takes on the same topic all in the same place. And so those are like the magical unlocks, but you have to build the scaffolding and framework and kind of infrastructure to pull that off.
And there's still sort of the like, I mean, is there a like function?
Yeah, like the voting itself is all via digs the way it was back in the day. Um, but what we're not doing this time around, and this is where we got into trouble, is back in the day, you know, I had the first patent for socially liking something and then feeding it back into an algorithm, which is like if we can pause there for a second. That's huge. Like you are, it was the most valuable thing. It was funny. It's like the site sold off for next to nothing. LinkedIn bought all the social patents for millions of dollars because they found that to be their defensible way against the Facebook like and all of that because we had prior IP to all of that. But um, yeah, so that ended up being the most valuable thing. The thing that was brutal about that is it was used in a way to kind of amplify a lot of things that we didn't anticipate, right? We had no idea that if we showed you more things of the things that you like, if you're a bad person in that arena, then you're going to amplify things that can cause a lot of bad things to happen. So this version of dig is very much like we're very transparent algorithms, very much you're able to fine-tune that for yourself and really see fully and truthfully like how am I getting this information versus some black box there.
Well, so you are involved in dig but you're not the CEO. You mentioned Justin CEO. You are also a general partner at True Ventures and I wanted to maybe spend the rest of our time talking about what you're funding because I've always loved your insights. One thing I wanted to ask, I see that you're wearing, I guess is that an Aura?
Yeah, that's the Aura. Yeah.
Um, and I had talked to the CTO of Aura on stage a couple weeks ago. Aura is so dominant, 80% of market share. It feels very hard to compete with it. But I did notice on Twitter that you had tweeted out a ring that looked a little bit aura-esque called the Sandbar. And I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that.
Well, that's an unreleased product in that it hasn't been publicly announced yet. Um, well, so I was on the board of Aura for a few years and I'm still a shareholder there. So Sandbar is not Aura in that I don't want to disclose anything, but it's not health and fitness.
