“Did Reddit kill it, or did Digg kill Digg?”
Both accounts are partly right, and the thing that reconciles them is worth understanding, because it is the most transferable idea on this whole site.
What Digg was, and why that made it fragile
A link-sharing site where users submitted stories and other users voted them up. The votes decided what appeared on the front page, and the front page drove enough traffic to a website to take it offline.
Now notice what the product actually was.
It was not the software. Voting on links is not technically difficult.
It was not the content. The content was other people’s websites.
The product was the collective judgment of the people doing the voting, and specifically of the small group of highly active submitters whose picks disproportionately reached the front page.
A product whose entire value is contributed by users who are not being paid is a product with an unusual vulnerability: the suppliers can all leave at once, together, on purpose.
The redesign, and why it was a different kind of mistake
Digg launched a major redesign that changed what the site was. The details matter less than the direction: it shifted weight away from what the community voted for and toward content from publishers.
From a business perspective the reasoning is legible. Publisher relationships are monetizable and a community’s whims are not, and a site dependent on a small number of power users has a dependency problem it would rather not have.
From the community’s perspective it removed the reason they were there. The people whose unpaid work was the product were told, in effect, that their judgment mattered less than it had.
And this is where the two accounts meet. The redesign did not kill Digg by being unpopular. It killed Digg by giving the people who made the product a reason to leave at the same moment, and by there being somewhere for them to go.
Without Reddit existing, the same redesign produces an unhappy user base with nowhere else to be. Without the redesign, Reddit’s growth is a slower competitive story rather than an exodus.
So: Reddit made the departure possible and Digg made it happen. Neither account alone explains the speed.
The speed is the finding
Social products do not decline gently. They hold their position until the habit breaks, and then the habit breaks quickly for a lot of people at once, because everybody is watching everybody else leave.
That is the same mechanism described in what happened to MySpace, arriving from a different direction. The value is the people, so the collapse is the people, and people move in groups.
What happened to the assets
The site did not simply switch off. The brand and the assets were sold, the site continued in a reduced form under new ownership, and it has changed hands more than once since.
We are not going to state the sale value or the dates, because neither was verified against a primary source for this article, and the figures that circulate for this transaction are widely repeated and rarely attributed.
What is worth saying is that “Digg still exists” and “Digg died” are both true statements about different things. The domain and the name persisted. The thing that made it matter, the front page decided by a community, did not.
The idea that survived
The mechanism Digg established, community voting deciding visibility, is now everywhere. Reddit is the obvious inheritor, and the pattern appears in comment ranking, in recommendation systems and in almost every place where a crowd’s response decides what other people see.
Which means Digg is one of the clearest examples of a recurring shape on this site: the product died and the idea won, and the company that proved the idea got none of the benefit.
The same is true of what happened to Vine, where the format outlived the platform by a considerable margin.
The lesson that actually transfers
If the value of your product is created by people who are not employees, they are stakeholders in every decision you make, whether or not you treat them that way.
That is not a moral claim. It is a structural one. Unpaid contributors have no contractual attachment, no notice period and no switching cost. They can all leave on the same afternoon, and if there is somewhere to go, some of them will organize it.
What we are not going to publish
Traffic figures or user counts. None was verified.
The sale value. Widely repeated, rarely attributed, not confirmed for this page.
Precise dates, where they could not be confirmed against a primary source.
A claim about anyone’s intentions. The reasoning behind the redesign is legible from the outside without anybody needing to be a villain.
FAQ
Why did Digg fail?
A major redesign shifted the site away from community-voted content toward publisher content, which removed the reason the most active contributors were there, at a moment when an alternative existed for them to move to.
Did Reddit kill Digg?
Reddit made the departure possible by existing. Digg made it happen by giving people a reason to go. Neither explanation alone accounts for how fast it happened.
Does Digg still exist?
The brand and the assets were sold and the site has continued in various forms under different owners. The thing that made it significant, a front page decided by a community, did not continue.
What did Digg invent?
Not the idea of voting on links, but the demonstration that a community’s votes could decide visibility at a scale large enough to matter. That mechanism is now everywhere.
Was Digg bigger than Reddit at the time?
This page states no user or traffic figures because none was verified. What is not in dispute is that Digg’s front page could send enough traffic to take a website offline.
This page publishes no user-count figure, traffic figure or acquisition value. Where a specific date could not be confirmed against a primary source at the time of writing, no date is stated.