In the end, Reddit became many times larger than Digg ever was. The biggest problem with displacing Reddit as such is that currently most of the users hate most of the users; consequently there is no reason that people leaving Reddit would want to converge on a single alternative.
In some ways, Reddit has already survived its own replacement. The workflow for getting involved with a video game community is to ask on Reddit which Discord you should join. In this case Discord plays the role of a parasitoid wasp.
It hangs on as a less reactionary NextDoor and a gathering place for semi-serious discussion of niche topics (/r/MedicalPhysics, for example). It also hosts some political stuff, but nobody wants to invite Reddit's political elements to their new community.
I think Reddit right now sits in some weird space between Discord/Nextdoor/Quora, with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
But overall it is just a gateway to other platforms where the really interesting conversations are happening and content is being created.
I've read plenty of garbage on Reddit, but what percentage of Reddit content since 2018 do you think you've seen? How many zeros after that decimal point?
That's the equivalent of asking what % of Google Search results have you seen in order to say that there's been a drop in result quality.
Even (or maybe especially) if you spend an unhealthy amount of time on the site, your sample is probably nowhere near representative of the whole.
Is this why it failed? I recall they started doing pay-for-placement, gaming their own voting system at a time when they were neck-at-neck with Reddit, which wasn't. I do remember Digg's UX getting shittier and shittier though; every time I checked back on it to see if it was worth visiting again it was always mind-blowingly worse.
Source: I've been using the app since the alpha started.
They didn't really "sell usernames", unless you also call buying a paid app with social features "buying a username".
And as far as "Gems", looks like bragging rights. This is what clicking (?) currently says:
> Gems are earned by being amongst the very first to Digg a post that trends across the platform. The earlier you are to discovering and Digging the post, the more Gems you’ll earn.
I just can't figure out where people are turning next.
Digg always rolled out its changes in one big update, which replaced the old version of the site overnight. So not only did users get to see all the changes in one big slap to the fact, but they couldn't switch back to Digg v3 if they didn't like Digg v4.
In fact, Digg itself couldn't roll back the entire site to v3 even if they had wanted to, as the v4 rollout required a database migration, and there was no reverse migration path.
pretty common playbook to allow gray and illicit and unattributed content only to clean up once youve hit critical mass.
Digg never had much in the way gray/illicit content; The AACS key was only posted because it was newsworthy (and can a 128bit number even be considered illicit?)
There were a bunch of other issues at the time centering around digg power users (like MrBabyMan), and a perceived lack of action/communication from the digg staff. The disconnect had been boiling away under the surface for years.
The much bigger issue that the front page of digg at that time was increasingly just links that hit the front page of reddit 12-24 hours earlier. Users increasingly choosing to cut out the middle man and get their content directly from reddit. And at the same time, many fell in love with reddit's much better commenting system.
The censorship was just the catalyst for it all to finally boil to the surface, and the only news-worthy event to happen around that time. It might have been the final straw for some people, but for most it was tangentially related, at best.
I spent less time being dumb with other dumb people on the internet, which was nice. Nicer, at least. That kinda feels like something we lost.
You can probably validate this theory with a basic time based analysis.
omg, here we go again