Digg v4

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Overview

Digg v4 was a version of Digg launched on August 25, 2010. Its release invited a massive backlash from its users, who left en masse to rival site Reddit .

Background

Digg is a social news website where users can submit links and vote on stories submitted by others, which brings the top voted submissions with most “diggs” to the top of the homepage. One of the early adopters of news aggregation model in online publishing, Digg’s voting and submission system went onto inspire many other similar sites, most notably Reddit.

Digg was developed in November 2004 by American entrepreneurs Kevin Rose^[1], Jay Adelson^[2], Owen Byrne and Ron Gorodetzky. The name “Diggnation” was initially suggested^[3] but Rose settled on the name “Digg” after he unsuccessfully attempted to purchase the domain names dig.com and digdig.com.^[4] After Rose invested $6,000 into the site that was meant to be a down payment on a house^[2], the site launched on December 5th, free of advertisements. The initial goal of Digg was to focus on news stories rather than of sharing bookmarks for static sites people would visit regularly.

Previous redesigns

Since its launch in October 2004, Digg has undergone numerous redesigns. In May 2005, Digg 2.0 featuring friends, one-click voting buttons and non-linear promotion algorithm was implemented. In January 2006, Digg 3.0 featuring expanded categories beyond its tech-related news section was unveiled. In August 2007, Digg introduced another redesign to the homepage and profile features.

Development of Digg v4

As early as 2009, Rose said that ’it’s time for Digg to get a little bit more real-time in nature". He hinted that Digg was working on what he considered as “the biggest overhaul to how everything works behind the scenes”^[5], and he expected it to be completed “some time in the next six months”. However, the launch date was pushed back to as far as late April 2010^[6].

On April 5, 2010, Rose returned to his post as the CEO, replacing Adelson^[7]. Despite Adelson wanting a quick launch, Rose opted for further testing and set the launch date two months further^[6]. On May 28, a list of features was released, as well as previews of the new interface^[8].

Registration of new users were temporarily disabled on August 2^[9] in preparation for the launch.

Notable developments

Notable reactions

Aftermath

References