How Digg Functions

The Internet is a vast resource of information that one person could never fully explore in their lifetime. It would take a collective effort to sift through the endless news reports, narrow them down to something manageable, and then choose the most relevant information that the average Web user might find engaging. And then a further group would need to verify whether or not the average Web user actually finds it intriguing. Welcome to Digg.com, a community-driven news platform where hundreds of thousands of people collaborate to find, submit, review, and feature news stories from every corner of the internet.

Digg operates similarly to Slashdot, but without the editorial oversight, offering a democratic approach to news submissions. At Digg, the community members are responsible for making content decisions. For the most part, this method has proven to be highly effective. Kevin Rose, a former TechTV personality, co-founded Digg in December 2004, with the assistance of Jay Adelson (former CEO of Digg) and Owen Byrne. Rose invested $1,000 to develop and launch Digg.com, utilizing open-source software. Within six months, the site boasted 25,000 registered users. By the one-year mark, Digg had 80,000 users and 500,000 unique daily visitors. By March 2007, Digg had surpassed one million registered users. By 2008, some bloggers estimated Digg's user base at over 2.7 million unique accounts.

The large Digg community consists of users who perform different, often overlapping tasks. Submitters contribute news stories they discover across blogs, professional news sites, and random internet sources. These stories enter the Digg queue. Casual reviewers search through the queue for interesting stories and “Digg it” — meaning they click a button to show their approval. When an article gains enough Diggs (along with meeting other secret criteria), it is promoted to the homepage. There are also dedicated reviewers who spend hours each day combing the queue to push good stories to the front and report bad ones (which are eventually removed if enough reports are filed). These dedicated users play a crucial role in determining which stories make it to the homepage, and thus which stories reach thousands of people, sometimes overwhelming Web servers. Small websites and home servers may struggle when 400 visitors a day suddenly skyrocket to 5,000 in just two hours. Even at Mytour, where we can handle the influx, we notice when we get “Dugg.” Our traffic spikes dramatically, and we check news aggregators like Slashdot, Fark, Yahoo! Buzz, and Digg to see which platform has picked it up.

Lastly, we have the Digg readers, who represent the majority of users and enjoy the fruits of the Digg community's efforts to promote the top stories to the front page. In return, the readers provide Digg with ad revenue, giving both submitters and Digg users a purpose.

While some may consider the idea groundbreaking, the core functionality of the site is straightforward and easy to use. Getting started on Digg is simple. Upon visiting the Digg.com homepage, you'll immediately see the most popular stories of the moment, as they've been Dugg by enough users to reach the front page.

In the following section, we'll explore the layout of Digg and the registration process.

The Digg Layout

If you're ready to explore beyond the homepage stories, here’s a guide to the key actions you'll be taking at Digg.com:

Sign Up

Creating an account on Digg takes just a few moments. Once registered, you'll have full access to all of the site's features and can start submitting and Digging stories.

Explore and Digg

The Popular tab on Digg displays the stories that have garnered the most Diggs from users. Browse through the Digg “Upcoming Stories” queue, and show your support for stories by clicking the “Digg” button next to each title. (Each story you Digg is saved to your account for later access, so you'll have a running list of everything you've ever Digged.) The more Diggs a story receives, the higher its chances of being featured on the homepage. You can also filter the queue by category.

Digg provides tabs that let you filter content by news articles, videos, images, and podcasts. You can even customize the categories that appear in your Digg view. If you're passionate about the tech industry but have no interest in motorsports, simply select your preferences, and Digg will tailor your feed to match your interests.

Leave a Comment

If you come across an article that piques your interest and you want to contribute or discuss it with other Digg members, simply click the "comments" link below the story description. You can leave your own thoughts at the bottom of the comment section.

Flag or Bury

As a Digg user, your assistance is essential in reporting duplicate stories (which are not permitted), dead links, inaccuracies, outdated content, irrelevant material, and spam by selecting the appropriate option in the "problem" drop-down menu beneath each story. When a story garners enough reports or "buries," it is removed from the Digg queue and can only be found in search results and user profiles.

Submit a Story

You can also add your own story to the Digg queue and hope that other users will find it interesting enough to Digg it to the front page. It’s exciting to see if your submission makes it. To do so, click "Submit a Story" in the top right corner of the homepage, perform a keyword or URL search, and if your story hasn’t been submitted yet, provide a title, a link, and a brief description of your story.

Once submitted, your story will appear in the Upcoming Stories queue where everyone can view it.

The story will either gather enough Diggs to make it to the homepage or eventually fade away if it doesn't attract enough attention or is flagged by multiple users. Next, we'll explore some of Digg's unique features.

Special Digg Features

We've gone over the main features, but Digg.com offers even more. It's a comprehensive news site, a blog aggregator, and a "social bookmarking" platform all rolled into one. Some additional features you can take advantage of on Digg include:

In addition to the special features mentioned, the Digg team is constantly innovating with new applications. The Digg Labs houses tools that offer unique ways to interact with Digg, such as tracking the use of images across Digg or using different views to display stories. For instance, the BigSpy app displays stories with varying font sizes – larger fonts represent stories that have received more Diggs.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes at Digg. While it appears as a collaborative effort from its users, consistently producing a compelling homepage, it would be costly to pay people to do the work that the community does for free. Digg employs 75 staff members, with plans to double the team by the end of 2009, and runs hundreds of servers. In the next section, we'll explore the operations behind the Digg platform.

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Digg Technology

Despite handling over 230 million page views per month (as of May 2008), Digg’s technology backbone is surprisingly streamlined. As with any proprietary system, Digg doesn’t reveal everything about their tech stack. However, some insights are available. Digg’s infrastructure relies on the LAMP model (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), a programming approach that integrates server applications like PHP with MySQL databases, enabling smooth communication across various languages and components without major delays.

In a June 14, 2006 Diggnation podcast, Kevin Rose estimated that Digg had around 75 servers. A blog post from 2008 on Digg's technical blog revealed that the company uses between 1.8 and 2.5 times the number of servers it minimally requires to maintain its operations. Interestingly, the exact number of servers Digg has is still unknown. [source: Digg].

In an email interview with Mytour, former Digg CEO Jay Adelson identified the servers as being from Penguin Computing and Sun, with the web servers running PHP and Debian Linux. The database servers use MySQL for database management. Although Digg primarily handles text-based data, Adelson stated that their infrastructure is infinitely scalable. In a December 2005 Mad Penguin interview, Adelson mentioned that Digg was "doubling the infrastructure every month to keep up with the increasing demand." Here’s a general overview of how the setup looks:

In this system, users are able to submit and Digg stories while also taking full advantage of all the features Digg.com has to offer. Unlike many other platforms, Digg does not rely on cookies for tracking. Instead, it uses server-side storage, meaning that all of your user data — such as past Diggs, friends, and comments — is stored in your Digg profile, which is kept within the Digg database. You’ll need to log in when accessing the site, which serves as an initial security measure to verify the user’s identity with each visit. There are several checks, referred to as "karma checks", embedded throughout the system at various points:

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­Adelman assures that Digg maintains a completely hands-off approach in its operations, meaning there’s no editorial control or censorship behind the scenes. This includes no intervention in the submission, promotion, or burying (removal) of stories. The only form of censorship available to users is a profanity filter that blocks curse words. Digg’s system for managing "buries" operates through a proprietary algorithm, known as a "de-promotion algorithm," which decides when a reported story should be removed from the main site pages.

While this system appears to be very democratic and forward-thinking — pushing us closer to a populist Web where everyday users become entrepreneurs, reporters, editors, stock traders, and encyclopedia contributors — a controversy in mid-2006 raised doubts about Digg's entirely user-driven nature. This prompted some vocal criticism from a select group of users. In the following section, we’ll dive into the reactions from the Digg community.

Comments and Complaints on Digg

In April 2006, tech blogger ForeverGeek’s Macgyver remarked, "Digg is 99% fantastic." While he would later revise his opinion after a prolonged dispute with Digg’s founder Kevin Rose, many still agree with his original assessment. Users rush to be the first to share breaking news on Digg; the platform regularly highlights "hidden gem" stories, leading to the discovery of talented bloggers who are doing excellent work. For the most part, Digg’s community genuinely works to promote the best stories and bury the worst. Ideally, this user-driven system should create a news platform resistant to corruption, especially by large corporations or overly controlling editors. However, there are those who challenge this ideal, particularly when it comes to editorial control — a point that became the focus of Macgyver’s complaints, which we’ll discuss shortly.

In any online community, complaints are inevitable. On Digg, the most persistent issue has been the nature of article comments, often dismissed as rude or trivial rather than insightful or discussion-starting. But as the site has expanded, concerns about potential abuses have emerged, particularly regarding the fraudulent activities we covered earlier — such as spamming, fake accounts, and auto-digging. Another possible misuse revolves around the marketing opportunities that come with a platform lacking editorial oversight. Unscrupulous website owners might post seemingly irresistible stories with the sole purpose of driving Digg users to their own sites, generating page views and boosting ad revenue in the process.

One peculiar misuse surfaced on Digg in March 2006, when multiple posts began circulating a rumor that Google was set to acquire Sun Microsystems. Such a move would likely send Sun’s stock price soaring. The submissions came in quick succession, with at least four appearing in a single day, and several being promoted to the front page by Diggers. In each case, it appeared as though the same individuals were behind these posts. However, the rumor was false, leading some to suspect that these posters might have been attempting to manipulate Digg to spread a false story with the intent to artificially inflate Sun’s stock price for personal gain.

Given the previous rating of "99% fantastic," it’s only logical to assume that the remaining 1% could be attributed to the unavoidable challenges Digg faces in handling issues such as spam, auto-Digging, and other malicious uses of the site. With over a million visitors and 1,500 submissions daily, it’s bound to happen. But Macgyver’s main issue — the one that sparked the widely-covered clash in tech blogs — wasn’t about any of these problems.

In the following section, we will delve deeper into the Digg controversy.

The Digg Controversy

It began quietly. Macgyver, a regular contributor to both ForeverGeek and Digg, noticed something peculiar on Digg — two stories submitted by the same user with nearly identical Diggers and in the same order of Digging, both ended up on the front page. What made it even stranger was that one of the Diggers for both stories was Kevin Rose. While Macgyver didn’t jump to conclusions, it was evident that Digg may have overlooked a case of auto-Digging. The involvement of Kevin Rose in both stories raised more questions, which Macgyver simply noted on the ForeverGeek blog without making assumptions.

In an unexpected turn, a ForeverGeek reader (not Macgyver) submitted the blog post to Digg. Shortly after, the story was made un-Diggable (effectively buried), and ForeverGeek’s URL was banned, preventing further submissions from ForeverGeek. The buried story was eventually removed from the site altogether.

Macgyver responded with a blog post titled "Digg Corrupted: Editor's Playground, not User-Driven Website," which quickly gained traction. In reply, Kevin Rose posted on the official Digg blog, denying any misconduct. He clarified that he Diggs stories that catch his interest, and if auto-Digging had occurred, he was unaware of it. Rose stated that ForeverGeek was banned for violating Digg’s policies against spamming and fraudulent accounts.

Macgyver didn’t let Rose's response slide, dismissing it as a mere "(non)response" and persistently questioning the core foundation of the site — its lack of editorial control. This was part of an ongoing narrative he wrote about the event on ForeverGeek. Eventually, and without any explanation, ForeverGeek was unexpectedly unbanned from Digg, regaining full submission privileges.

Aside from this unresolved incident, Digg appears to be thriving, both in terms of traffic and financial backing, with big plans for the future. The latest iteration of Digg introduces new categories that cover all kinds of news, beyond just science and technology. There’s also a new "Top Digg Users" feature, allowing users to follow the most active (and influential) Digg contributors. This feature makes it easy to find users you might want to add to your friends list and keep track of their Digging activity.