Technology

What is this cursed place?

Oh, boy, where to begin? Digg was originally a content aggregator founded in the middle of 2004 (around 7 or 8 months before Reddit), that was basically Reddit with a slightly sleeker UI. At one point it actually had a higher number of daily active users than Reddit and it was, for several years, Reddit's chief competitor.

The fascinating thing about Digg is that it went through enshittification long before it became the phrase to describe our current internet zeitgeist. It happened incredibly early in its life, but for reasons and in ways that would come to be emblematic of the current internet. The core reason is that the owners of the website were just looking to get out of the game with a pile of fast, easy cash ASAP. They were in talks with Google to sell Digg for $200 million in 2008, but that deal fell through.

The beginning of the end for Digg came in August of 2010, when the site went through a major redesign, referred to as "Digg v4," that fundamentally altered the ranking of posts on the site to heavily favor power users, as well as introducing a metric ton of bugs. It's hard to describe the feeling of waking up one day and have your favorite website totally, completely destroyed. It was a Frankensteinian abomination; a cruel, misshapen doppelganger of an aggregator that now mainly linked to advertisements thinly disguised as "user content" and content posted by literally a handful of users who were able to manipulate post rankings to exclude any and all posts from non-power users from the front page, driving traffic exclusively to where they wanted it. As many of these power users existed on the political spectrum somewhere between Libertarian and outright Fascists, the political content on the website became especially jarring. No boiling of frogs took place here like it did on Reddit. One single code deployment and server restart later and the website was unusable.

The complete catastrophe that was this redesign triggered a mass exodus from Digg to Reddit. Digg was never able to recover and Reddit became the de facto content aggregator site for the internet (and it's where I spent around 8 hours of every day from September of 2010 to some time in 2023 when they finally gutted the API and I moved to Lemmy). In a grand example of historical irony, Alexis Ohanian said, in an open letter to the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose,

this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."

Eventually, Digg was gutted for spare parts and its components and miscellaneous intellectual property sold off piecemeal for a total sum that was less than 5% of the value of the initial deal with Google. And the website Digg itself was ultimately sold in April of 2018 to BuySellAds for an undisclosed, but almost certainly pathetic, sum.

And now, dear reader, you are aware of the sad and tragic history of Digg, whose rise and fall was an unheeded warning of the precipice towards which the internet as a whole is headed.