For the past few years, we’ve been describing Digg as “What the Internet is talking about right now.” Today, all that “talking” happens in countless places all over the web, but it’s consolidating on an increasingly smaller number of networks. Facebook, for example, can be a good place for conversation, but it’s also a good place for vacation pics and birthday wishes. Twitter is the best for breaking news and realtime chatter. Reddit can be a great platform for underserved voices, other times… well. We think there’s space for conversation on Digg – conversation that’s focused on stories (or “links” if you’re old-school). A place for discovering great content and a great place for conversation. That’s the next phase of Digg.

We’re approaching conversations on Digg the same way we did the original Digg relaunch three years ago (our CTO, Mike, recounted the whole epic tale in his post.) Our goal during that six-week sprint was to launch a new Digg that was full of great links. We set a high bar for what could make it on the front page. For conversations, we’ve got the same high bar. It’s gotta be good.

We’re planning our first iteration of conversations on Digg this fall. Here’s an outline of the features we have so far:

• Conversations will be based around a story
  Not just about anything or anyone
• The author(s) of the story are encouraged to participate
  (Or “content creators” if you’re new-school) 
• It’ll be open and high-quality
  Our aim: conversations that are just as interesting as the stories themselves
• Clear community guidelines will be in place
  We’ll define these in our next blog post 
• We’ll be moderating
  It’s definitely not our long-term goal to moderate every comment, but we’re going to err on the side of civility to start  
• You can digg comments 
  We want help to surface the best of the community
  

We’ll be revealing more in the coming weeks about what this will look like, what we’re going to call it, and when exactly it launches.

-Justin, Design Director at Digg

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(Gif via Diagonal View/YouTube)