Digg
The social-news front page of the mid-2000s web, where users submitted links and "dugg" them up or buried them. A single spot on the front page could bury a small website under a flood of traffic — and then a redesign everyone hated handed Digg's entire audience to Reddit.
Kevin Rose co-founded Digg with Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson, launching it on December 5, 2004. The pitch was democratic news: users submitted links, everyone voted them up ("digg") or down ("bury"), and the most-dugg stories rose to a front page curated entirely by the crowd instead of editors.
By 2008 Digg's homepage drew over 236 million visitors a year, and a front-page link could unleash the "Digg effect" — a traffic surge that routinely knocked smaller sites offline. Its community showed its teeth in May 2007, when Digg tried to delete posts sharing the AACS encryption key used to crack HD DVD copy protection; users buried the entire site in the forbidden number until management reversed course and let it stand.
The end came from within. The August 25, 2010 "v4" redesign stripped out beloved features, broke constantly, and looked to many like it favored big publishers over ordinary users. The backlash was instant: Reddit's traffic grew 230% that year while Digg's cratered, and by mid-2012 its monthly visitors had collapsed roughly 90% from their peak. Betaworks bought the gutted brand for $500,000 in 2012. Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian repurchased Digg years later and relaunched it, but the thing it defined — social news, crowd-voted, before the algorithms took over the feed — belongs to the 2000s.
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FML (FMyLife)
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AltaVista
The search engine everyone used before Google — fast, powerful, and the first with a full-text, boolean-searchable index of the web. It also gave the world Babel Fish, the free page-translator named after the fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Candystand
Life Savers' secret weapon for brand loyalty: genuinely good Flash games, free for anyone, with the advertising hiding inside the games themselves. The mini golf alone kept a generation of school computer labs quietly clicking.