Digg launched in 2004 on a promise that made the community itself the product. Anyone could submit a link, and the crowd decided what was worth seeing by voting: a story that collected enough “diggs” climbed toward the front page, while a “bury” vote pushed it back down. No one at Digg had to curate the homepage, because tens of thousands of users did it for free. “Give the power back to the people” was part of the founding pitch, and for a while the mechanics lived up to it.
The crowd ran the front page
Members submitted web pages, voted them up or down, and the results fed a public ranking. The most-dugg stories reached the front page, where even more people could click through to the original source. That made the site a shaping force: a story could blow up because Digg users put it there. Power users, people who submitted early and often and appeared able to move the front page on their own, accumulated real influence, and the site both relied on and worried about them. Bury buttons let ordinary members police quality too, until organized “bury brigades” — coordinated vote-downs of particular stories — became part of Digg’s folklore.
A redesign that changed the deal
In late August 2010, Digg replaced the whole machine at once. Version 4 dropped the bury button in favor of a “hide” button, temporarily killed the upcoming stories page, and made the default view a following-based feed called “My News” that encouraged connecting Facebook and Twitter accounts. Submissions were joined by newsroom pages and the prominence of a handful of large publishers, and some users found their histories mangled. To members who had shaped the site for years, the contract had changed: their votes still mattered for individual stories, but the essential levers were gone.
The reaction was immediate. Users flooded the front page with links to rival aggregators and demanded the old Digg back, as the Guardian reported within days of the launch. Founder Kevin Rose responded with a blog post promising to “release, iterate, repeat,” but the damage was financial as well as emotional. Hitwise measured United States visits down 26 percent and United Kingdom visits down 34 percent within a month of the redesign. Digg restored the bury button and other favorites soon after, but polls and comment threads showed the trust was not coming back with them.
Who owned the community
The episode was a lesson in the limits of user power. Digg had built its value on the idea that the audience decided what appeared, then discovered that deciding what appears is not the same as deciding how the site is governed. When the company changed the underlying rules without a say from the people who wrote them into existence, the users’ only real vote was their feet. They left in large numbers, most of them to Reddit, where links, votes, and a front page still worked the way Digg’s used to. Reddit overtook Digg in traffic late in 2011, and in July 2012 Betaworks bought the brand and technology for about $500,000.
That might look like the end of a ghost town, but the communities became more complicated than the headline. The site passed through several owners over the next decade, and in March 2025 founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought Digg back and began another relaunch. The original voters are scattered, yet the arrangement they built — submission, discussion, and community-determined ranking — turned out to be portable and durable. What died in 2010 was not community-driven aggregation but a specific product in which the people supplied the content while the company reserved the right to change the deal.