It’s basically the life cycle of the internet. A thing is created for the people, it’s beautiful and loved, it is not profitable at all, they use their newfound user base to generate money, they abuse their user base to generate even more money, a new “for the people” alternative springs up, mass migration.

Skype, digg, and MySpace sort of followed that trend. Now reddit is completing the cycle. YouTube should be next, but it’s significantly more expensive to make an alternative. But I remember when making money from YouTube was a south park punchline. Those were better days.

Don’t forget that before Digg we were all on slashdot. Its like the cylons: What happened before will happen again. Or we’re living in a horrible simulation.

I’d generalize it as Reddit was for people who read the article, and Digg was for people who didn’t. There were other sites for different communities at the time as well like the Chive and their Bill Murray worship.

Notably, Digg updated which also involved a worse interface and didn’t have an “old Reddit” interface you could access. Going to a site that was like the old interface involved leaving Digg and joining Reddit.

That is likely why you can now access older Reddit interfaces. They feel that many people will stay if they can find a way to use the new interface (and they may be right about that). The Digg approach of forcing all to use the new interface was a step over the line for Digg and Reddit likely fears a similar thing could happen to them.