What is Digg.com?

Digg.com is a popular social bookmarking and content discovery website. Although site management and maintenance is done the website's paid staff, all the content is submitted by the site's visitors on a voluntary basis. These submissions are subject to peer review and are voted upon by other site visitors. Popular submissions are posted on the websites' homepage, exposing the submission to millions of visitors. According to alexa.com, Digg.com is one of the most popular websites on the internet, reaching 1 out of every 100 internet users daily.

While Digg.com currently allows submissions in six categories - Entertainment, Gaming, Science, Technology, Videos, World & Business - the vast majority of submissions fall into the Science and Technology categories. This is partly because the original configuration of the Digg.com website had 14 categories, all subsections of the present Technology or Science categories. This bred a technology-conscious userbase for the website. Another reason is that social bookmarking and sharing services, and the internet in general, are generally frequented by technology-minded people.

Digg.com is not the first website of its type. The first widely used content discovery service was Slashdot.org, which uses editor approval in lieu of Digg.com's visitor approval and moderation. Another very popular site of the same nature is Fark.com, which has a paid version as well as the free version. As many of the same sites are often submitted to Digg.com, Slashdot.org, and Fark.com at the same time, the servers running these sites may not be able to handle the sudden load in traffic. A website that is experiencing difficulty in handling the traffic is said to be "dugg", "slashdotted", or "farked". A more general term for the same phenomenon is the Slashdot Effect, after the original website.