David Pierce: How Digg helped invent the social internet

In its early days, Digg was something like the homepage of the internet. Any user could submit a link, and then any other user could either promote it with a “dig” or demote it with a “bury.” The best and most popular stuff made the homepage, which was seen by tens of millions of people a month. The most controversial stuff had epic comments sections.

For a few years, Digg really was the best place to go to find out what was cool online. It really was the perfect site at the perfect time back in the mid-2000s.

Oh, and this bit from Kevin Rose made me really feel old.

And then, this really weird thing happened where this technology started being supported by browsers, which was Asynchronous JavaScript — they call it Ajax — which allowed you to click on something and see the page refresh without having to go to another page.

Clicking something on a website and seeing the results of that button without reloading the whole page? What a concept! But really, it did feel like magic when the first few sites around that time started doing this (Gmail was another early adopter of this and made it feel very snappy compared to the competition).