Digg

Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Digg was formerly a popular social news website, allowing people to vote user-generated and web content up or down, called ''digging'' and ''burying'', respectively. Digg quickly faced competition from similar sites such as Reddit.

History

Digg started as an experiment in November 2004 by collaborators Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. The original design by Dan Ries was free of advertisements. To monetize, the company originally used Google AdSense but switched to MSN adCenter in 2007.

Digg allowed users to discover and share web content by submitting links and voting them up ("digg") or down ("bury"). The platform aggregated these votes into dynamic lists of trending content, with voting accessible both on Digg.com and through "digg" buttons embedded on external websites..

Digg underwent several updates in its early years, including the release of Digg v2 in July 2005 with a redesigned interface, friends list, and streamlined voting. In 2006, Digg v3 introduced content categories like technology, science, and entertainment, along with a "view all" section, followed by additional interface changes in 2007.

By 2008, Digg's homepage was attracting over 236 million visitors annually, according to a Compete.com survey. Digg had grown large enough that it was thought to affect the traffic of submitted web pages. Some pages experienced a sudden increase in traffic shortly after being submitted; some Digg users refer to this as the " Digg effect".

In July 2008, the former company took part in advanced acquisition talks with Google for a reported $200 million price tag, but the deal ultimately fell through. It underwent a controversial 2010 redesign.

In 2012, Quantcast estimated Digg's monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million. After the departure of co-founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, in July 2012 Digg was sold in three parts: the Digg brand, website, and technology were sold to Betaworks for an estimated $500,000; 15 staff were transferred to The Washington Post Companys "SocialCode" for a reported $12 million; and a suite of patents was sold to LinkedIn for about $4 million.

In April 2018, Digg was purchased by BuySellAds, an advertising company, for an undisclosed amount.

In March 2025, both Rose (the original founder of Digg) along with Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit), acquired Digg and are relaunching it. Invitations to the new Digg will be distributed in the coming weeks and the site will primarily be aimed at people on mobile devices. Artificial intelligence will also play a larger part in making Digg more accessible to users, Rose said.

Then, in June of 2025, Digg is being revived by founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian with a focus on authentic human interaction and community-building amid the rise of AI-generated content. The reboot aims to empower moderators and creators, explore technologies to verify human users, and offer a more values-aligned platform model that resists bot-driven manipulation while still responsibly using AI for tasks like moderation.

Redesign and mass exodus to Reddit

CEO Jay Adelson said in 2010 that the site would go through some major changes. In the interview with ''Wired'' magazine, Adelson said that "Every single THING has changed" and that "the entire website has been rewritten." The company changed from MySQL to Cassandra, a distributed database system; in a blog post, VP Engineering John Quinn said that the move was "bold". Adelson summed up the new Digg by saying, "We've got a new backend, a new infrastructure layer, a new services layer, new machines—everything."

Adelson stepped down as CEO on April 5, 2010, to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, months before the launch date of Digg v4. He had been the company's CEO since its inception. Kevin Rose, another original founder, stepped in temporarily as CEO and Chairman.

Digg's v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called "power users" who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another's postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page. Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's. High staff turnover included the departure of head of business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's release.

Following the redesign debacle, Digg experienced a mass exodus of users to rival site Reddit. While Digg’s traffic plummeted by a quarter in the following month, Reddit’s traffic grew by 230% in 2010. The site never recovered from the Digg v4 design and continued to languish over the next two years. By July 2012, Digg's monthly unique visitor count had fallen 90 percent from its peak.

Betaworks era, 2012-2018

In July 2012, Digg was sold in three parts:

# the Digg brand, website, and technology were sold to Betaworks for $500,000;
# 15 staff were transferred to ''The Washington Post''s Code3 project for $12 million;
# the patent portfolio was sold to LinkedIn for approximately $4 million.

On July 20, 2012, new owners Betaworks announced via Twitter that they were rebuilding Digg from scratch, "turning iggback into a start-up". Betaworks gave the project a six-week deadline. Surveys of existing users, collected through the website ReThinkDigg.com, were used to inform the development of a new user interface and user experience.

The "rethought" Digg reset its version number and launched as ''Digg v1'' a day prior to the Betaworks project deadline, on July 31, 2012. It featured an editorially driven front page, more images, and top, popular and upcoming stories. Users could access a new scoring system. There was increased support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Digg's front page content was selected by editors, instead of users on other communities like Reddit.

In response to the announced shutdown of Google Reader, Digg announced on March 14, 2013 that it was working on its own RSS reader. Digg Reader launched on June 28, 2013 as a web and iOS application. An Android app was released on August 29, 2013. Digg announced that it would shut down Digg Reader on March 26, 2018.

BuySellAds/Money Group era, 2018-2025

In April 2018, ad-tech company BuySellAds bought Digg's assets, as well as its editorial and revenue teams, for an undisclosed amount with Todd Garland becoming CEO of the company.

During the BuySellAds era, Digg was kept as an editorially curated homepage in the mold of the Betaworks version, staffed with an editorial team of five responsible for the day-to-day content, producing 150 to 200 posts per day, with 12 of them curated into a daily email. "We sought out people who (were) in tune with the heartbeat of the internet and are familiar with how content bubbles up and becomes viral. While Digg's purpose isn't necessarily to showcase all the viral content of the web, we try to find the things that are most interesting that should get more attention." explained Garland.

Digg was later acquired by Money Group for an undisclosed amount.

Rose-Ohanian era, 2025-

In March 2025, it was announced that Digg founder Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian bought the website back for an undisclosed amount. Justin Mezzell was named the new CEO of Digg. The site will primarily be aimed at people on mobile devices. The new Digg will use a combination of AI tools and humans for content moderation.

In April 2025, an early access community called Groundbreakers was opened with a $5 sign-up fee, capped at 23,000 signups. Groundbreakers hit their maximum capacity on April 21st, 2025. Groundbreaker members were promised "updates, mockups, and experiments" and a "front-row seat to how Digg is being rebuilt." Users who joined Groundbreakers reserved their username and will receive a badge on the new platform.

Issues relating to former Digg website

Organized promotion and censorship by users

It was possible for users to have disproportionate influence on Digg, either by themselves or in teams. These users were sometimes motivated to promote or bury pages for political or financial reasons.

Serious attempts by users to game the site began in 2006. A top user was banned after agreeing to promote a story for cash to an undercover Digg sting operation. Another group of users openly formed a 'Bury Brigade' to remove "spam" articles about US politician Ron Paul; critics accused the group of attempting to stifle any mention of Ron Paul on Digg.

Digg hired computer scientist Anton Kast to develop a diversity algorithm that would prevent special interest groups from dominating Digg. During a town hall meeting, Digg executives responded to criticism by removing some features that gave superusers extra weight, but declined to make "buries" transparent.

However, later that year Google increased its page rank for Digg. Shortly afterwards, many 'pay for Diggs' startups were created to profit from the opportunity. According to TechCrunch, one top user charged $700 per story, with a $500 bonus if the story reached the front page.

Digg Patriots was a conservative Yahoo! Groups mailing list, with an associated page on coRank, accused of coordinated, politically motivated behavior on Digg. Progressive blogger Ole Ole Olson wrote in August 2010 that Digg Patriots undertook a year-long effort of organized burying of seemingly liberal articles from Digg's Upcoming module. He also accused leading members of vexatiously reporting liberal users for banning (and those who seemed liberal), and creating "sleeper" accounts in the event of administrators banning their accounts. These and other actions would violate Digg's terms of usage. Olson's post was immediately followed by the disbanding and closure of the DiggPatriots list, and an investigation into the matter by Digg.

AACS encryption key controversy

On May 1, 2007, an article appeared on Digg's homepage that contained the encryption key for the AACS digital rights management protection of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Then Digg, "acting on the advice of its lawyers", removed posting submissions about the secret number from its database and banned several users for submitting it. The removals were seen by many Digg users as a capitulation to corporate interests and an assault on free speech. A statement by Jay Adelson attributed the article's take-down to an attempt to comply with cease and desist letters from the Advanced Access Content System consortium and cited Digg's Terms of Use as justification for taking down the article. Although some users defended Digg's actions, as a whole the community staged a widespread revolt with numerous articles and comments made using the encryption key. The scope of the user response was so great that one of the Digg users referred to it as a "digital Boston Tea Party". The response was also directly responsible for Digg reversing the policy and stating: "But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

Digg v4

Digg's version 4 release was initially unstable. The site was unreachable or unstable for weeks after its launch on August 25, 2010. Many users, upon finally reaching the site, complained about the new design and the removal of many features (such as bury, favorites, friends submissions, upcoming pages, subcategories, videos and history search). Kevin Rose replied to complaints on his blog, promising to fix the algorithm and restore some features.

Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose:

Disgruntled users declared a "quit Digg day" on August 30, 2010, and used Digg's own auto-submit feature to fill the front page with content from Reddit. Reddit also temporarily added the Digg shovel to their logo to welcome fleeing Digg users.

Digg's traffic dropped significantly after the launch of version 4, and publishers reported a drop in direct referrals from stories on Digg's front page. New CEO Matt Williams attempted to address some of the users' concerns in a blog post on October 12, 2010, promising to reinstate many of the features that had been removed.

Timeline

See also

* Delicious
* diggnation
* Facebook
* Fark
* Menéame
* Mixx
* Propeller.com
* Reddit
* Slashdot
* Social bookmarking
* StumbleUpon
* Virato Social News
* Web 2.0
* Wykop.pl

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://digg.com/

News aggregators
American news websites
Social bookmarking websites
Internet properties established in 2004
Social information processing
2004 establishments in California
Companies based in New York City
Censored works
Social software
Shorty Award winners