Long before the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit ruling today‘s social media landscape, there was Digg – the innovative social news website that paved the way for how we discover, vote on, and share content across the web.
Founded in 2004 by entrepreneur Kevin Rose and launched in December that year, Digg began as an experiment in democratizing the curation of online news and giving power back to the people. Its meteoric rise over the next few years signaled the widespread appeal of social media, while the platform‘s peaks and pitfalls contain valuable lessons for networks to this day.
The Early Days: From $6,000 Investment to Web Sensation
The Digg story starts with Rose, then a 27-year-old American internet entrepreneur known for previous startups like Revision3 and Pownce. Together with friends Jay Adelson, Ron Gorodetzky and Owen Byrne, he invested $6,000 intended for a housing deposit into an innovative concept: a website where users could post links and vote the best ones to the front page.
The platform was initially designed as "open source democracy" – free of ads or hierarchical editing. In Rose‘s words, "the content that was great would rise up, and the stuff that was not so great would fade away." The name "Digg" was chosen because users could dig stories out of submissions to digg them up to the front page.
The website Digg.com went live from Rose‘s home computer on December 5, 2004. Within the first 24 hours, over 1,215 stories were submitted. By mid 2007, over 16 million people had accounts, and Digg was receiving tens of millions of monthly visitors. Google AdSense was later introduced due to site costs, but Digg maintained its merit-based social ranking system.
Key Innovations in Digg‘s Development
In its first few years, Digg saw numerous changes that allowed it to scale rapidly as a social publishing model:
Friends lists (2005): Letting users track friends to see what they were voting and digging
Commenting (2005): Enabling discussion around popular news stories
Categorization (2006): Digg sections for Technology, Science, Business, Entertainment etc. allowed niche interests
Digg API (2007): The launch of Digg‘s API allowed outside apps and developers to tap Digg‘s data, resulting in growth of third-party Digg analysis tools and search functions.
Between its intuitive interface, egalitarian ranking system and constant improvements, Digg had brought social curation and publishing to the mainstream by 2007-08. Copycat competitors from Reddit to StumbleUpon began emerging – a testament to Digg‘s runaway success.
The Mastermind: Kevin Rose and His Vision
None of this may have happened without Rose driving Digg since day one. A college dropout from Las Vegas, he was enchanted by computers and technology from the age of 8. His early years were shaped by enthusiasm for bulletin board systems (BBS), getting exposure to websites and startups during the dotcom boom.
Armed with coding skills and entrepreneurial spirit, Rose was convinced that the nascent social internet could upturn old editorial gatekeepers. At Digg, he sought to create the democracy he wanted to see – "a level playing field, where great stories would rise on their merit."
Charismatic and ambitious, Rose has been described by peers as the Steve Jobs of internet software for his pioneering eye. His track record as a founder and capital raiser long before age 30 cemented his status as a dotcom wunderkind – with Digg as his boldest disruption yet.
Legacy: The runaway rise and reboot of social curation
At its peak, Digg redefined discovery and curation with front-page stories getting over a million views. Yet this also caused growing pains: system exploits, ideological tension between free-speech moderation and corporate control. By 2010, traffic and ad revenue were declining.
However, Digg had sparked an irreversible movement – setting the blueprint for user-powered social feeds that Twitter, Reddit and generations of aggregators enjoy today. After passing hands between investors, the website relaunched in 2012 under new ownership with lessons learned.
While no longer the trending tech darling of yesteryear, modern Digg lives on as a pioneer of the social voting model – its legacy immortalized in every collective public feed we take for granted each day. Through ups and downs, the site gave us a glimpse of the future. Not just for social bookmarking – but for bestowing readers a chance to shape news and narratives. Much like Rose envisioned, the most resonant stories have kept rising on their merit – by the people, for the people.
