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Comment by deegles | Hacker News Reader

Is that what happened to Digg?

If I remember right, Digg was a combination of changing the UI drastically in a way that most everyone hated, combined with "power users" having disproportionate ability in getting posts visible.

It's not just that, the new UI hooked the marketers directly in as feeds. So a blog or publication would be something you'd "follow" and upvotes/downvotes as you like. This scared the power users who were no longer the submitters, and also balkanized the experience and gave ghe users the impression they sold out to the actual content creators instead of the users.

Simultaneous with this, they even disabled the comment history. Like you couldn't see what you had commented or what peoples' replies were, unless you were in the thread.

Took several months to get that back, and by then it was too late - all the real content creators had moved to Reddit.

> If I remember right, Digg was a combination of changing the UI drastically in a way that most everyone hated

Although this is common belief, Digg was on the decline well before v4 was released. v4 was a response to the decline, not the cause of it.

They mistakenly attributed the site's decline to the rise of social media apps like Twitter, and v4's was their attempt to become the "Twitter for news".

It's true that Digg didn't do enough to foster a healthy community; threads were often toxic, and yes the top users had too much sway. What's forgotten is some of the dumb things they did to try and monetize, like that full-site ads (background image ads) that I'm pretty sure everyone hates.

Even though Digg was on decline, it was still bigger than reddit. It could've still been a significant site today, or at least something like Slashdot. The day v4 was released, it singlehandedly killed Digg. It was a bloodbath never seen before, or since.

> Even though Digg was on decline, it was still bigger than reddit

It most definitely was not. reddit was already bigger than Digg long before v4 was launched. v4 did cause a bump in reddit's traffic, but it wasn't nearly as significant as people think. Most Digg users were already reddit users too. In fact, a lot of the power users were getting their stories from reddit.

That's why at the time the joke was that if you wanted to see a summary of reddit the day before, you just looked at Digg.

I was going to post it feels like the last days of Digg, but thought I'd check the comments first

It's unfortunate Reddit can't leave a working formula alone - HN has barely changed in 7 years - I really respect the control that must have taken - the lack of category filters on HN means I always need some other source

I do hope this and the imgur change last week doesn't mark the start of the end but it's probably time for a new player ... CIX -> Usenet/Dejanews -> Digg -> Reddit -> ??

I totally agree, I feel like this is the beginning of the end for Reddit. There's also a bunch of other recent changes that make me feel like Reddit is starting to work hard on monetisation but will struggle to do this and maintain the 'vibe' they've had to date. For the record it's right that they seek to make money...they're not a charity.

Having said that I think comparing Reddit to HN is a bit unfair. The HN forums are is a happy byproduct of a successful VC firm. Hacker News forums could be switched off tomorrow and Y Combinator would almost certainly continue successfully. As far as I'm aware they generate zero revenue from the forums, in fact, it's probably impossible (or at least very hard) to measure any ROI on the forums.

> It's unfortunate Reddit can't leave a working formula alone

Working for who? They're not making money, so the service is unsustainable. It has to change.

There's no way a text-only site with 100% user generated content can't be maintained profitably with a traditional ad sales team. They're going for a bigger play, which is fine, but there are definitely easier strategies to sustain a smaller team.

During the censorship fiasco a lot of people moved onto voat.

Check voat's homepage, and look how many upvotes do links have. It's dead, for the most part, although I guess very small communities (like those coming from /r/niggers, or /r/fatpeoplehate) are there to stay. But there is not much more to it.

Voat can have some good content in the sections for general gaming, tech, etc, since it's small enough that the spammers don't seem to be as common. That said, it's not really active enough to be anyone's primary social media/bookmarking platform, and that tends to mean that anything not super popular or controversial is pretty much completely dead there.

So voat is like 4chan but without the charming community?

If you share their ideas, it's charming, believe me. I can assure you hate unites more than love.

>HN has barely changed in 7 years

HN maintenance cost is orders of magnitude smaller. Also it is losing money and nobody cares because this is just like a pet project for YC.

I remember Kevin Rose saying something about "Digg not being something my mom could use." In an effort to grow the audience, v4 was trying to be more of a source for all news and less of interesting links that were posted and dug up by tech geeks. Major news outlets automatically had their headlines inserted into the site and completely changed the character of what Digg was. Unfortunately, being a mainstream news site for tech geeks wasn't enough.

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