Digg: A Brief History

Founded in 2004 in San Francisco, California, Digg is an online social news aggregator – a website in which news is not reported by a staff or editors, but instead a community of users. At its peak in early 2010, Digg would receive over 20,000 daily user submissions and 38 million monthly unique visits, with stories on business, technology, gaming, entertainment, science and more.

Deciding popular content through a voting system (colloquially know as ‘digging’ up and ‘burying’ down), the stories with the most votes, or ‘diggs,’ appear on Digg’s front page. Emphasizing users’ personal tastes and custom aggregation, users can choose to filter their front pages through both specific categories and mediums. Though it’s not rocket science, there is a certain ‘science’ behind which stories make the front page, and which do not – the ‘science’ in this case being Digg’s voting algorithm, which supposedly gives all users an equal chance at making the front page.