In memoriam
Digg
Born 2004. Died August 2010.
Digg passed in August 2010, having lived six years as the place where the crowd decided what mattered. Born in 2004, it offered a button: digg. Users voted. The front page emerged. At its peak it claimed more than forty million monthly visitors. Power users controlled the front page. The company rewrote the site. Digg v4 removed the bury button, favoured publishers over users, and eliminated the upcoming queue. Traffic dropped twenty-six percent in a month. The engineering team had left. There was no way back. The founder announced that v4 was here to stay. It was. The users were not. He is survived by Reddit, which received the exodus, and by the conviction that the crowd, when trusted, will leave.
Digg v4 is here to stay.
Replaced by inferior successor
Mourned by Those who voted before the algorithm, power users who shaped the front page, and anyone who remembers when the crowd could still be wrong.
Reddit, which absorbed the exodus; the bury button, which no platform has dared to revive; and the memory of forty million visitors who left when the redesign landed.