In that time period - 2008 to 2011 - if you'd told an internet person you'd never heard of digg, they'd look at you like you'd asked them what their favourite flavour of crayon was. It was the social news aggregator for normal people; all the appeal of news aggregators and comments sections, but without the nerdy belligerence of Slashdot, the lul-so-randum basement humour of Fark, or the primitive interface and sneering elitism of Reddit.

Just took a look at it, and... what am I looking at? It was supposed to be the predecessor to Reddit, but it looks like an early 2010s news site.

That's the now digg, not the then digg.

Here's an example of their frontpage when they were at their peak, in 2009. Then, for contrast, here is the redesigned frontpage that killed them, launched August 25, 2010. ... Ok, only half joking - the bugs and errors were a problem - but this is a stable version of digg 4.0 - the controversial redesign that 'killed' the site, though half of the changes that drove off their userbase were related to the algorithm and how pages/posts/content was promoted. I never really used the site so I don't remember exact details, but it did result in 'poweruser' problems with a few people dominating content, and users also complained that the 4.0 version of the site seemed to promote a lot of content they didn't want while making it hard to access what they were interested in.

After it's collapse the company's assets were broken up and the domain/website/'digg' name were sold off as a package - it looks like the new owners have redesigned the site to look more like a news site and less like a news aggregator.