| Title | Watch Out, Digg is BAAACK (Modestly) | |
| Date | Monday September 22 2014, @11:40AM | |
| Author | LaminatorX | |
| Topic | ||
| from the Digg-your-own-hole dept. | ||
Like the vampire at the end of a horror flick, Digg refuses to die quickly. The IT technology forum was founded in 2004 and quickly shot past Slashdot in readership and market valuation, driven by a popular method where users would submit articles and vote on which ones would make the home page. Founder Kevin Rose was featured on the cover of Business Week; Google nearly paid $200 million for Digg in 2008 before walking away. The downturn started in 2010, triggered by a botched site redesign that led to wholesale desertion of the site's regulars.
In 2012, the New York City startup studio Betaworks bought Digg's software, domain name, and records, for $500,000 (Digg's patents were sold separately to LinkedIn for $4 million; the engineering team went to the Washington Post for $12 million).
Betaworks went to work on the site, junking the system of users voting on articles, and replacing it with a combination of AI software (monitoring twitter feeds and other web crawling signals) and human editors. The re-launched site was "data driven", in their words. And the new owners didn't seem to be as full of themselves as the old ones; after Obama stood for an AMA on competitor Reddit, Digg tweeted "We asked Dukakis but he turned us down". Monthly visitors are at 8 million, up from 1.5 million at the site's low point.
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