From “promote links by digging”
to “Fastest climbing”.

The December 2004 capture is almost all text. A dark bar carries the word digg and links to login, register, submit a story, report a bug and FAQ. Then come 15 stories. A Toyota walking robot has [+ 19 digs], a Halo 2 trick called Scorpion Jump has 26, and the bylines name a category and a submitter, usually with a number in brackets. The right-hand column lists categories such as apple, gaming and robots, each with its own dig link, and dig all below.

Kevin Rose dates the start of Digg to November 2004. He designed the first version himself and hired its first developer, Owen Byrne, through the freelance site Elance.^[1] WIRED wrote in 2005 that the site launched running off PHP, MySQL and 1 GB of memory.^[2] According to TechCrunch, Rose introduced Digg on TV in a December 2004 episode of The Screen Savers.^[3]

So the rule sits right in the first capture's code. The query picks approved, undeleted stories whose dig count met or passed their category's threshold, or whose top_flag was set.

Six months later, in June 2005, the score has gained a letter: [+ 15 diggs] for a Dell 24-inch monitor at $899. The line under the menu now asks for help, Help promote stories to the homepage - digg here!, and report appears under the stories, with comment links on some. The sidebar adds digg spy, and the footer offers Add digg news to your site!

By October 2006 the score lives in a yellow box. 41 diggs sits over a digg it button, and at the end of each story's row is a new word: Bury.

Tabs split Popular Stories from Upcoming Stories (4,395), the queue of submissions still waiting for votes. A box on the left explains it: Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. The banner over the list is about Digg's lab, not the news: Digg Swarm and Stack, just like mom used to bake. Well... if mom baked real-time flash visualization tools.

This is Digg version 3. TechCrunch's June 22, 2006 preview described its new sections beyond technology and reported about 800,000 unique visitors a day.^[4]

The June 2007 page runs the same machinery at a bigger size. The queue now reads Upcoming Stories (8,149). A ticker at the top reports which member just invited which friend (Spreading the Word...), and a Top 10 in All Topics column ranks the most dugg stories. The footer trademarks the vocabulary itself: DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS. A hidden comment, digg is up 959595, appears in each of our captures from 2006 to 2010.

A month before this capture, the voting turned on Digg. The site deleted posts containing an HD DVD encryption key, and the posts kept coming back: users re-submitted [them] in their thousands, the BBC reported.^[5] Digg gave up and stopped removing them.^[6] Rose's post about the decision gave WIRED its headline.^[7]

“If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”Kevin Rose, May 2007, as quoted in WIRED's headline, on letting the HD DVD key stay up

In June 2008 the logo sits in a blue bar over two green rows of tabs: All, News, Videos, Images, Podcasts, then topics from Technology to Offbeat. The browser title follows suit, Digg - All News, Videos, & Images. Popular and Upcoming have shrunk to two buttons on the right. In the sidebar, Integrating with Digg introduces Flock, a web browser with Digg built in, and further down the page it's an election year: Digg the Candidates lets you Digg and watch the activity of your favorite Presidential candidates.

The last line of the HTML is a comment that only a developer would see: digg is done serving you. It's followed by a few numbers, among them 137.03599911 and 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2.

The June 2009 header adds a blue button between the logo and Join Digg: Connect with Facebook. The sidebar promotes a Recommendation Engine (its image's alt text says BETA!) and the footer advertises Digg Dialogg, where Digg Dialogg lets you choose the questions. In the code a link to a lighter version, Basic Version at diggriver.com, has been commented out.

The June 2010 capture puts a new box above the list. Trending (beta) holds a single story, here Valve: Steam and Portal 2 Coming to PS3, with a digg button, a bury button and a dare: Does this story belong on the homepage? Decide before time runs out!

The countdown runs in the browser, so the HTML keeps both endings. One says Success! This trending story has been promoted to the homepage. The other: Just like nü metal, this trend failed. It won't be promoted.

“Just like nü metal, this trend failed.”Digg's Trending box, June 2010, the losing outcome in the page's code

Below it the familiar list goes on. This is the last capture of version 3.

On August 25, 2010, TechCrunch reported that Digg v4 was rolling out, with more weight on following people and on publishers.^[8] Users protested against the new My News default, a front page they saw dominated by a handful of publishers and the removal of the bury button. The Guardian reported that they flooded the front page with links to rival aggregators, and it pointed to one of them, Reddit, as a place taking in new users. Rose replied with a post answering 16 of the complaints.^[9]

The June 2011 capture is v4. The logo bar now carries Submit Link, My News, Top News and Upcoming. Each story has a thumbnail on the right, a via line with the member who submitted it, a view count, Save and, at the end, Bury again. A Hot Stories From Digg column runs down the side.

A bar fixed to the bottom of the window reads Digg v4: 221.31ms, with Give us feedback and Take the survey on the right, which is a lot to ask of readers less than a year after a revolt. The HTML also has a box of stories Chosen by digg staff, so editors were already picking some links.

Digg was rebuilt in six weeks. TechCrunch reported in July 2012 that Betaworks had bought it,^[10] and The Verge that the new site went live on July 31 after a six-week redesign. Its front page would be editorially driven instead of entirely based on a Digg score algorithm, and the ranking would take sharing on Facebook and Twitter into account.^[11]

Readers who wanted to add a story had another account to make. WIRED reported that submitting a story required a Facebook login, which Digg's FAQ called temporary.^[12]

The September 2012 page looks like a magazine. Big photos, a small v1 beside the logo, and a capitalized kicker over every headline: BLACK HAT over How Hackers Will Jailbreak The iPhone 5, FIRST CLASS OR BUST over a story about FedEx and UPS. The digg count has shrunk to a small number at the foot of each card. The browser title, Digg - What the Internet is talking about right now, stays the same in every capture until 2022.

In June 2013 the cards are a tighter grid, and the top one is NSA Admits To Listening To U.S. Phone Calls Without Warrants under the kicker AT LEAST THEY ADMITTED IT. The separately fetched HTML of this capture has a footer line © 2013 News.me Inc, with Made in NYC beside it.

The June 2014 homepage opens on one large story, Inside Tim Cook's Apple from The New York Times, under the kicker MAKING APPLE HIS OWN. The number under the headline is 2,802. The page's HTML breaks that score down: Diggs: 32, Tweets: 1,677, Facebook Shares: 1,093. The votes on Digg itself make up about one percent of Digg's own score.

The main menu lists Home, Video and Reader. According to TechCrunch, Digg Reader, a Google Reader replacement, opened to everyone in June 2013.^[13] Links to iOS, Android, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook fill the top right, next to The Daily Digg. In the HTML the footer now reads Made in NYC by betaworks.

A year later the top story, What It’s Like To Have Severe Lyme Disease, shows a score of 70. Its HTML breaks that into Diggs: 6, Tweets: 64 and Facebook Shares: 0. A Digg Deeper box sits beside it. The HTML's footer in June 2015 still says © 2014 News.me Inc.

A blue strip tops the June 2016 page: Need to catch up on the latest news? Bored at work? Looking for the freshest videos? Chat with us on Messenger.

Under it the menu reads HOME, VIDEO, EDITIONS, STORE, and a row of sections runs from Technology to DIALOG. The lead story is Microsoft’s New Secret Weapon Is Reid Hoffman, and under the headline it has 1 digg.

From 2017 to 2019 the layout barely moves: one hero story, three cards, a thin row of sections. The sections are the clue to the years. In June 2017, 2018 and 2019 the row includes one person, Donald Trump, between Science and News. In the HTML, the copyright line changes from © 2017 Digg Inc. to © 2018 Digg Holdings, LLC.

By our June 2019 capture a Picks tab is present. One card in the grid sells CBD oil to Digg's own readers: NuLeaf Naturals premium CBD is the oil for you. Use coupon code DIGG for 25% off.

The June 2020 page folds its sections into a closed Frontpage menu, and the HTML of that menu says when it was made: next to Technology, Long Reads and Science sit ₿itcoin and Coronavirus. The lead story, The High Cost Of Panic-Moving, has 2 diggs, and a newsletter bar carries a testimonial: 'It's the only newsletter that always engages me'. Our June 2021 capture shows Explore and Merch at the top left.

The captures from 2021 to 2024 hide a small admission in their code. The message a new member would see after signing up explains the site's own verb: Your accounts lets you Digg (upvote) stories, save stories to revisit later, and more. Seventeen years after promote links by digging, digg needs a gloss.

By October 2023 the browser title has changed, the first change in these captures since 2012, to News and Trending Stories Around the Internet | Digg, and a blue banner asks you to Sign up for Digg's morning newsletter. By June 2024 the menu has Data Viz, Movies and TV, Memes and a section called One Main Character.

On March 5, 2025, Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian announced that they had bought Digg back. Ohanian co-founded Reddit, the site the Guardian had pointed to in 2010 as one taking in new users during Digg's revolt,^[9] and the announcement presented the former competitors as partners in Digg's revival.^[14]

By June the old homepage is gone. Digg.com forwards to reboot.digg.com, titled Digg Reboot: a black page with a white pixel logo, a yellow digg box counting 30,100,412, and one line, The front page of the internet, now with superpowers. Below it, Sign up to get early access when invites go live. and an email field.

According to TechCrunch, Digg's reboot opened its public beta on January 14, 2026. Before that, 67,000 users had been in an invite-only beta, and the new Digg came with communities, comments and votes.^[15]

Two months later it stopped. On March 13, 2026, Digg laid off a sizable part of its staff and shut down its app, while saying the company wasn't closing. TechCrunch reported that Rose would return to work on Digg full-time.^[16] Engadget reported that the CEO admitted bots had flooded the site, so its votes and comments couldn't be trusted.^[17] The 2004 homepage ranked links by votes. Twenty-two years later, by Engadget's account, bots had made the votes themselves unreliable.

On June 15, 2026, digg.com opens on its tech page, Tech News · Digg. The logo is new, DiGG in pixel capitals with a TECH tag. Today's Highlights has four cards with labels that rank stories by behavior: In case you missed it, #1 viewed, Most negative, Fastest climbing. Under Top Stories the page counts its intake for the day, Posts: 3,132 and Clusters: 1,047, with a Next crawl timer beside them.

Under each headline is a row of small avatars and a number like #52. In the HTML every avatar comes with a rank and an X handle, such as #195 @LEVIE or #153 @SATYANADELLA. The meta description says how the list is made: Tech 2K top stories, ranked by what the leading voices in tech and AI are posting and sharing on X.

In 2004 the rule for the front page fit in one SQL comment: enough digs for the category, or a flag. In 2026 it fits in a meta description, and the people promoting links are the accounts on that list. When we opened digg.com on October 9, 2026, the tagline read News, before it trends.^[18]

“promote links by digging” → “ranked by what the leading voices in tech and AI are posting”digg.com, December 2004 → June 2026