Digg was formerly a popular social news website, allowing people to vote user-generated and web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively.

[8] In July 2008, the former company took part in advanced acquisition talks with Google for a reported $200 million price tag, but the deal ultimately fell through.

[14] Digg started as an experiment in November 2004 by collaborators Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson.

The end product was a series of wide-ranging, constantly updated lists of popular and trending content from around the Internet, aggregated by a social network.

"[17] The company changed from MySQL to Cassandra, a distributed database system; in a blog post, VP Engineering John Quinn said that the move was "bold".

[citation needed] Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg's.

[20] High staff turnover included the departure of head of business development Matt Van Horn, shortly after v4's release.

The "seven figure" investment would give Gannett access to real-time trend analysis of Digg's 7.5 million pieces of content.

Google walked away from negotiations during the deal's due diligence phase, informing Digg on July 25 that it was no longer interested in the purchase.

During a town hall meeting, Digg executives responded to criticism by removing some features that gave superusers extra weight, but declined to make "buries" transparent.

Groups mailing list, with an associated page on coRank, accused of coordinated, politically motivated behavior on Digg.

[44] On May 1, 2007, an article appeared on Digg's homepage that contained the encryption key for the AACS digital rights management protection of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

Then Digg, "acting on the advice of its lawyers", removed posting submissions about the secret number from its database and banned several users for submitting it.

[46] Although some users defended Digg's actions,[47][48][49] as a whole the community staged a widespread revolt with numerous articles and comments made using the encryption key.

We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

Many users, upon finally reaching the site, complained about the new design and the removal of many features (such as bury, favorites, friends submissions, upcoming pages, subcategories, videos and history search).

[55] Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose: this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling.

It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people.

[62] New CEO Matt Williams attempted to address some of the users' concerns in a blog post on October 12, 2010, promising to reinstate many of the features that had been removed.