The similarities are amazing, especially considering Reddit was one of the succesors of Digg. They can now enable other successors by making stupid decissions and alienating core users.
I wonder if this speaks to the unsustainability of platforms like these, or the cycle can be broken by making good decissions.
history tends to repeat itself.
Here’s a contemporaneous article with a good amount of info on Digg’s decline.
Know Your Meme has a surprisingly good write-up after the fact.
IMO one of the main factors that even allowed Digg to die as fast as it did was the fact that Reddit was already on the way up.
At the time I was primarily on Slashdot over either, but there were frequently articles about how Reddit was growing, and how people didn’t like Digg. Then v4 launched and Digg’s traffic dropped 25% in a month.
Unfortunately I don’t think Reddit can or will lose that much, that fast. And one of the reasons is that there isn’t already a “drop-in replacement”. Reddit could do everything Digg could do, and more. But crucially it was also mature enough that there was a community and very low barrier to entry.
But crucially it was also mature enough that there was a community and very low barrier to entry.
This is the biggest difference between then and now - back then, Reddit was mostly fully fleshed out and ready to go - it’s problem was scale and being able to handle the influx of a digg migration.
Currently, lemmy isn’t ready yet - although it’s close. The best way I’ve heard it put is that “they’re building the plane while it’s in flight and boarding new passengers.” Version 0.18 seems to hold a lot of promise, they need to get it launched ASAP to get lemmy’s functionality where it needs to be, but also at the same time prepare for the traffic spikes that are also coming. I do not envy the devs.
I also saw that mentioned somewhere, but: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
Then you’re going to love this quote by Steve Huffman (spez) from a Q&A he did with GQ Magazine:
I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticise Reddit is that we weren’t a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time. So I think it’d be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.
That quote was from April 2023; it’s not even that old.
In a sense, yes it speaks to the downfall of all these platforms. But it’s not a new phenomenon. Enshitification, specifically as a result of venture capitalist investment money.
I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago.