I’m way too young to remember Digg. I signed up for Reddit in 2015, and I’ve heard talks here and there about the migration from Digg, but that’s it.
Here’s a fairly comprehensive overview of the Digg situation: https://productmint.com/what-happened-to-digg/
Is the situation with reddit what happened to Digg? Kinda. Digg was a slippery slope of failing to listen to its users and go against the grain of the community, among other things. There’s definitely similarities.
Yes, although Reddit was more mature by then and had some communities already.
Sort of. Digg’s implosion was much more immediate, the changes directly impacted normal users so it was easier to mobilise people, and at the time Reddit was a bit more mature and easier to understand than Lemmy/etc is now.
My guess is we’ll see much more of a Digg-like exodus once Apollo stops working and the average user sees an impact.
Digg tried to make money off it’s communities ASAP and killed it. Reddit tried the slow burn: build up users for 15 years and then pull the rug. It’s hard making money from a site that has all it’s users do the work. The only value reddit has is automated infra, which in the days of auto scaling k8s clusters is not that unique.
