Digg started as the social news website in 2004. It allowed people to submit news items and then vote up to down (digging and burying) news stories. By 2012 it was estimated by Quantcast that it was getting 3.8 million unique visits.
In 2004 Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson started Digg as an experiment. The primary function of Digg was to let users discover, share and recommend web content. Originally it was text-only and featured no advertisements.
One way Digg gained popularity was letting other websites add “digg” buttons to their pages (as Facebook and Twitter buttons appear today), allowing users to vote as they browsed the web.
These buttons led to a wide-ranging, and continuously updating lists of popular and trending content from all over the early Internet.
In 2010 a re-design of the website, Digg v4, was poorly received. It marked the start of the decline of the website. As of 2020 the site still exists and focuses on current news events. However, the original design is long gone.