The remains of social news sharing site Digg were bought by New York-based incubator Betaworks on Thursday. Betaworks would not comment on the price it paid for the once high flying tech company.
Digg is a social news aggregator that lets users vote up popular stories, and down-vote ones they don’t like. The most popular stories appear on the Digg front page. It used to be one of the most fearsome traffic drivers on the Internet, but faltered with a redesign in 2010 that critics complained gave all the leverage to promote stories to publishers, and took it away from the community that had built the site’s popularity.
Users started leaving in droves, turning to Twitter to find their news, or Facebook to share links with friends, rather than “Digging” a story. For all the competition that Facebook and Twitter represent, news and community site Reddit is the clear usurper of the former Digg throne. The 7-year-old Reddit has captured many of Digg’s users by building lively communities around topics such as photos, sports teams, and hobbies.
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