The difference was Reddit had already built up a reasonably comparable audience when Digg imploded so the migration was easy. If you look at a similar graph of Reddit today and Lemmy/Kbin, you probably wouldn't even see these tools register with the active user base of Reddit so high. I think "rhyme" of history is that another service will eventually win, and it might be ours, but it's more akin to the fall of the British Empire than an overnight event.
Digg had bled users to reddit over the course of a few years before the big one. Many users had accounts on both for that period as well.
"This was on reddit yesterday" was a top comment on Digg often enough.
Reddit is more popular now than Digg was back then.
The bad publicity hurts it a lot though. It's not something tangible that people are going to see results in for a long, long time. It's going to be more gradual than immediate.
Also Reddit will retain a huge majority of people, but the quality of it's communities will decline over time. People will find less of a reason to go there, and companies paying for data scraping will pay less as it will become much less efficient to use it.
Think more like Facebook. Still a huge mega company that has a iron grip in the social media sphere... but largely only gets used by tech illiterate older people. It's often quoted as the "place memes go to die" and "a place for grandma" or boomers in general. Reddit, and Twitter will essentially become similarly comparable.
Anyone saying otherwise, is goofy. Either trying to see an immediate result... or those trying to argue there will be no results.
I really hope that Reddit is getting punished for being too greedy. But I’m afraid that it is too big too fail just like Twitter sadly. But I’m glad that I’ve found Lemmy.
Jury is still out on Twitter. It very well could fail.
It just didn't happen the instant Musk entered the building. This type of thing usually happens on longer timeframes. Digg died unusually fast.
They were unprofitable BEFORE the debacle. Whether this sinks Reddit or not, they are absolutely not too big to fail. They haven't yet figured out how to succeed even.
