Digg - History

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. The company added Google AdSense early in the project but switched to Microsoft in 2007.

The site's main function is to let users discover, share and recommend web content. Members of the community can submit a webpage for general consideration. Other members can vote that page up ("digg") or down ("bury"). Voting takes place on digg.com, plus many websites add "digg" buttons to their pages, allowing users to vote as they browse the web. The end product is a series of wide-ranging, constantly updated lists of popular and trending content from around the Internet, aggregated by a social network.

Additions and improvements were made throughout the website's first years. Digg v2 was released in July 2005, with a new interface by web design company silverorange. New features included a friends list, and the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a success page. One year later, as part of Digg v3, the website added specific categories for technology, science, world and business, videos, entertainment and gaming, as well as a "view all" section that merged all categories. Further interface adjustments were made in August 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 webpages. Some pages experienced a sudden increase of traffic shortly after being submitted; some Digg users refer to this as the "Digg effect". Whether this spike in traffic can be attributed to Digg is difficult to assess; in many cases, stories appear on several popular bookmarking sites simultaneously.

CEO Jay Adelson announced in 2010 that the site would undergo an extensive overhaul. In an interview with Wired magazine, Adelson stated that "Every single thing has changed" and that "the entire website has been rewritten." The company switched from MySQL to Cassandra, a distributed database system; in a blog post, VP Engineering John Quinn described the move as "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, and some used Digg's own auto-submit feature to flood the site with articles from its competitor, Reddit. Beyond the release, Digg faced dwindling web traffic and 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.

On September 1, 2010, Matt Williams took over as CEO, ending Rose's troubled tenure as interim chief executive.