A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I wrong.
You make it sound like this came out of nowhere. Reddit has been letting people beta test this for months.
And I told them it is terrible and stopped beta testing within minutes.
And you were wrong. Time to admit it.
You're right. I love it when websites run slow and hog resources to provide less functionality than they used to.
To me Digg died with the AACS censorship debacle. In hindsight, I understand Kevin Rose was trying to protect Digg from lawsuits that would effectively destroy the site, but the censorship did the same.
Digg died for me when they shifted the focus of their front-page from Technology and Headline News to more “mainstream” topics - eventually the frontoage was entirely NFL-related story links - this was a while after the AACS incident.