 The falsity of the digraph reconstruction conjecture caused doubt about the reconstruction conjecture itself.Stockmeyer even observed that “perhaps the considerable effort being spent in attempts to prove the (reconstruction) conjecture should be balanced by more serious attempts to construct counterexamples.”

In 1979, Ramachandran revived the digraph reconstruction conjecture in a slightly weaker form called the new digraph reconstruction conjecture.In a digraph, the number of arcs incident from (respectively, to) a vertex "v" is called the outdegree (indegree) of "v" and is denoted by "od"("v") (respectively, "id"("v")).