Digg v4: The 2010 Redesign, What Went Wrong and Digg Today

Digg v4 was the 2010 redesign of the social news site Digg, which promised more social features and a personal news feed. Instead it became one of the most famous product failures on the web. Here is what Digg v4 changed, what happened to Digg after it, and what to use for social news today.

Quick answer: Digg v4 launched on August 25, 2010 with a personal MyNews feed, automatic RSS submissions from publishers and social following. It launched buggy and removed features users loved, so many moved to Reddit. Digg was sold for $500,000 in 2012 and changed hands several times. Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian bought it back in 2025 and relaunched it in 2026.

What Digg v4 promised

When I wrote about the preview in May 2010, Digg v4 promised more social integration and a new way of promoting stories, closer to other link-sharing services. The main changes were:

• MyNews: a new personal home page showing links from people and publishers you follow.
• Social graphs: import who you follow from Facebook and Twitter, so a story dugg by one user would show in all their followers’ feeds.
• Auto-submission by RSS: publishers could feed every new article to Digg automatically, so stories no longer needed manual submission.
• Simpler submitting: add a URL and Digg would generate the image, title and summary.

I thought this would reduce the power of the top Digg users and make gaming Digg even harder. By then Digg buttons were already disappearing from blogs in favour of retweet and Facebook Like buttons, and it had become nearly impossible to reach the Digg front page. I hoped v4 would make Digg better.

What happened after Digg v4 launched

Digg v4 went live on August 25, 2010, and it was buggy. Many long-time users were upset that favourite features were gone and that publisher feeds seemed to crowd out user-submitted stories. Within days, on August 30, users staged a “quit Digg” protest and filled the front page with links to Reddit. Traffic fell and much of the community moved to Reddit for good.

Our longer Digg story from 2005 to 2012 covers the rise and fall in more detail.

Digg after v4: sales and relaunches

• 2012: Betaworks bought the Digg brand, website and technology for $500,000 and relaunched it as a curated news site.
• 2018: BuySellAds bought Digg’s assets, and the site later passed to another owner.
• 2025: original founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought Digg back.
• 2026: a public beta opened in January and was closed in March over bot problems, then Digg relaunched in May 2026 as an AI-assisted news aggregator.

Social news alternatives to Digg today

• Reddit: the site that took Digg’s crowd, with voting communities for almost every topic.
• Hacker News: a simple, voted front page for tech and startup links.
• Flipboard: personalised magazines built from topics and sources you follow.
• Google News: an algorithmic feed of headlines that you can customise.

FAQ

Why did Digg v4 fail?

It launched with bugs, removed features users relied on, and appeared to favour publishers’ automatic submissions over the community, which pushed users to Reddit.

Is Digg still around?

Yes. After several sales, its founder Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian bought it back in 2025 and relaunched it in 2026.

Who bought Digg in 2012?

Betaworks, for $500,000.

Can I still get my old Digg history?

Digg offered an archive download around the 2012 relaunch, explained in our post on downloading Digg archives, but old v4 accounts are no longer available.