Digg is a web-based social news aggregator that lets people submit links to articles, videos and other online content, vote on submissions, and discuss them. Founded in the mid-2000s by a small team led by Kevin Rose, Digg popularized a simple community-driven mechanism in which the visibility of a story was determined by user votes and editorial choices. The site helped define early social bookmarking and viral distribution patterns on the web.
Core features
Basic elements of the service include user submissions, short descriptions or headlines, tags or categories, a voting mechanism that affects prominence on listing pages, and comment threads. Historically Digg supported both positive votes and ways to flag or "bury" content, and it offered APIs used by third‑party apps and browser extensions.
Development and changes
Digg experienced rapid growth in the 2000s and several major transitions. A controversial redesign around 2010 changed ranking and social features, which many users felt disrupted community workflows. In the years that followed the product changed ownership and focus; under new management Digg moved toward a mix of algorithmic ranking and editorial curation, mobile apps, and curated feature pieces rather than purely community-driven listings.
Impact and criticisms
Digg influenced how publishers think about referral traffic and how internet audiences discover stories. Its model encouraged link-driven virality but also faced challenges common to social platforms: coordinated voting, moderation issues, and tensions between community control and editorial decisions. It is often compared to contemporaries such as Reddit and older bookmarking services like Delicious, each of which emphasized different community and content-organizing approaches.
Further information and official resources: Digg homepage, help and support, about and history, developer or API information, press and media.