So it looks like Digg is returning with a reboot. Digg was a link aggregator site launched in 2004 that became massively popular. Serving as an example of what Web 2.0 was capable of, Reddit was launched a year later with similar features.
In the late 2000s, Digg was more mainstream and had a larger audience than Reddit. Then in 2010, Digg v4 was launched. It prioritized content from major publishers over community submissions, totally neglecting the everyday user.Â
The result was the Digg Exodus, when Digg users left en masse and signed up to Reddit. 30th August, 2010 was referred to as Quit Digg Day. 10,000 users signed up to Reddit on that day and Reddit even changed their logo to a Digg-inspired shovel to welcome them.Â
In Digg’s later years, it changed its focus to being a curated editorial homepage, receiving article submissions and posting about 150-200 articles a day. As they said then, they weren’t focused on being the ‘front page of the internet’, but rather the ‘best of the internet’.
The new Digg seems to be a return to what made the original link aggregators so special, a focus on community and the everyday user – with a dash of AI ‘superpowers’; because AI is the running trend with pretty much every tech endeavour at the moment.Â
Interestingly, reboot.digg.com uses Reddit’s old slogan, “The front page of the internet” (now with superpowers), perhaps as an indication that maybe Reddit isn’t what it once used to be. Maybe the new, rebooted Digg is there to fill that hole.
