What Happened to Digg?

Digg was a news site where users voted links onto the front page, and in the late 2000s it was huge. A 2010 redesign sent many of its users to Reddit.

current mood: curiouscurrently listening to: ♫ a front page refreshing itself

Written by Daniel Rivera · October 9, 202656k: ~2 min

Digg was a website where people submitted links to news and interesting pages, and other users voted them up with a "digg" or down with a "bury." It launched in December 2004, and the links with the most diggs reached the front page, where millions of people saw them. For a few years in the late 2000s, Digg was one of the most visited sites on the internet. A redesign in 2010 drove many of its users away to Reddit, the site was sold off cheaply in 2012, and it has been relaunched several times since.

How Digg worked

You found something interesting online and submitted it to Digg with a short title and description. Other users saw it in the "upcoming" section. If enough people clicked the digg button, it moved to the front page. Each link had a big number next to it, showing how many diggs it had collected.

Getting a link onto the front page felt like winning a small trophy. Top users built reputations for finding the good stuff first, and some had huge followings. A link they submitted had a much better chance of making it, which we'll get to.

Being on the front page could also break a website. A small blog that suddenly got thousands of visitors from Digg often crashed, and people called it the Digg effect. Plenty of us remember clicking a hot link and getting an error page instead, much like the broken pictures from Photobucket.

Kevin Rose and the early days

Kevin Rose started Digg with Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky and Jay Adelson, and it went public on December 5, 2004. Rose was already known from TV. In 2005 he started Diggnation, a weekly video podcast where he and Alex Albrecht sat on a couch and talked about the week's top links. Around then people also started watching clips on early YouTube, so a podcast on a couch fit right in.

A second version of the site came out in July 2005. A third in 2006 split links into categories, so news and sports got sections next to tech, with entertainment alongside.

In August 2006, BusinessWeek put Rose on its cover with the headline "How this kid made $60 million in 18 months." The number was about what Digg might be worth, not money in his pocket, and the cover got a lot of teasing. Still, it showed how big Digg had become.

By 2008, Digg's homepage was getting hundreds of millions of visits a year. Google even talked about buying it that summer for a reported $200 million, but the deal never happened, which looks like a bullet dodged now.

The HD DVD number

In May 2007, users started posting a long string of letters and numbers that unlocked the copy protection on HD DVD movies. Lawyers sent cease and desist letters, and Digg started removing the posts. Users fought back by posting the number over and over until it filled the front page.

After a day of this, Digg reversed course and let the posts stay. Rose wrote that users would "rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company." For a lot of people, that moment showed how much power Digg's users had over the site.

▶

What happened to Digg?

Digg lost most of its users after a big redesign called Digg v4, which launched in August 2010. The new version gave publishers an easier way to push their own links and removed the bury button. It was also full of bugs at launch. Users were furious. On August 30, 2010, many of them flooded the front page with links to Reddit, a rival site, and a lot of them never came back.

Reddit had been around since 2005, but the Digg exodus helped make it the bigger site. Digg kept shrinking.

In July 2012, the company was sold in pieces. The investment firm Betaworks bought the Digg name and website for about $500,000, which was a tiny fraction of what it was once thought to be worth.

The power users

As Digg grew, a small group of very active users ended up with a lot of control over the front page. They submitted links all day and dugg each other's submissions. Regular users noticed the same names on the most popular links, and people argued about it constantly in the comments.

Companies noticed too. Getting a link on Digg's front page could send a flood of visitors, so some tried to game the system with fake accounts and paid diggs. Digg kept changing how it ranked links to fight that, and every change upset somebody.

The relaunches

Betaworks turned Digg into a cleaner, smaller news site that picked links with editors and data. It also built Digg Reader in 2013, after Google shut down its own feed reader. That closed in 2018.

In March 2025, Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought Digg back, with plans to rebuild it as a community site again. Since then it has gone through more test versions and relaunches. Go looking for Digg today and you'll find a site with the same name, but very different from the one people checked between classes in 2007.

Things people remember

• The big digg count box next to every link
• Refreshing the upcoming page to see if your submission was climbing
• Comment threads where the top reply was funnier than the link
• Clicking a front page link and finding the site already crashed
• Watching Diggnation on a laptop with a mug of coffee
• The day the front page turned into one long Reddit ad

You are visitor # 00002847

Where people went next

Before Digg, a lot of people found interesting sites by clicking StumbleUpon over and over. After Digg, most of them moved to Reddit, and then to whatever their phone showed them. Others just went back to the websites we rushed home from school to check.

The old idea is still good, though. Friends sharing links with friends, without a computer picking what you see. FriendCrib keeps it simple, with no algorithm deciding anything. Post the things you love on your crib and your friends will find them. Sign up and bring some links with you.

You Might Also Remember

• When Did Club Penguin Shut Down?
• Bidding Wars and Sniping: eBay in the 2000s
• Browsing MySpace by Zip Code
• 16 Things Everyone Had on Their Profile in 2006
• Trading Pokémon With a Link Cable
• The Hampster Dance and the First Viral Pages
• Begging for a Gmail Invite in 2004
• Printing MapQuest Directions Before Every Road Trip