People forget (or never noticed) all the credible tech press running articles questioning the future of the internet as recently as the early 2000s. Then the 2008 election happened and a lot of tech-hesitant people got online to tweet and blog about it until 2012 when Obama's victory tweet set record numbers that are now routine. Nobody seems to question it anymore, but the internet's future is no more certain. At least the open internet's future.

Digg was a big fish in a tiny pond even as late as 2010 when it launched v4. Most people in the English-speaking world Digg targeted were some kind of online, but usage jumped as smartphones became normal. Twitter took most of that growth in use.