Digg: The Site That Invented the Like Button and Lost Its Users

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Digg launched in 2004 as an experiment by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Owen Byrne, and Ron Gorodetzky: take the front page away from editors and hand it to the crowd. Users submitted links, then dug them up or buried them. Creative director Daniel Burka's little yellow thumb with a number beside it became the ancestor of every like button. By 2008 the site drew over 236 million visitors a year, and a front page spot could melt a target site's servers.

This episode follows the twenty year arc from that rise to a spectacular fall and an unlikely revival. It covers the paid promoters and voting blocs who gamed the algorithm, the 2007 revolt over a leaked HD DVD encryption key, and the 2010 Version 4 redesign that removed the bury button and drove users to Reddit. It ends in 2026, with Rose and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian relaunching Digg, only to see open voting overrun by bots.

Because early votes carried extra weight, a small coordinated group could steer the front page, and some top users reportedly charged up to $1,200 for placement.
When Digg deleted posts containing the leaked AACS key, users flooded the site with the code in what one called a digital Boston Tea Party, and management backed down.
On August 30, 2010, known as Quit Digg Day, users wired the auto-submit feature to Reddit feeds and filled the front page with links to the rival site.
In 2012 the Digg brand, site, and technology sold to Betaworks for $500,000, after rumored talks with Google at around $200 million.
The public beta opened in January 2026 and closed two months later. Digg rebooted on May 11, 2026 as an AI-driven aggregator built around roughly 2,000 trusted voices on X.

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