Lemmy.world grew from around 51000 total users the moment 3rd party reddit apps started to shut down on June 30 to 71000 total users at the time of this post (July 1). That's a 40% growth in about 12 hours!

Welcome new reddit expats!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] trouser_mouse 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's quite a way back now, so my memory is a bit fuzzy! I think there were redesigns and the site was sold to a company who mismanaged a few elements. I seem to remember a lot of noise on the site at the time, people complaining etc and then a large number moved away. I'm sure someone can fill in the details in a more reliable way haha.

I remember Digg used to be great too - between that and Stumble Upon you could find so much awesome stuff!

I suspect Reddit will die a much slower death, as it is just so big and widely used and the exodus of users doesn't feel as huge. It will be interesting to see how everything unfolds.

[–] Buffalox 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

If I recall correctly, Digg made some weirdo policy about officially recognized channels had priority over community posts?

Claiming they were trying to improve the quality and trustworthiness of their content.

They also made a redesign, so frontpage became 90% pictures, more suitable for people with zero attention span.

As I recall it, Digg "died" super fast after that. Of course technically Digg still exist, but it's nothing compared to when at its height, it became an internet buzzword much like "to Google it" still is to day.

[–] trouser_mouse 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yes! Digg was pretty dramatic in how it fell from grace I think, whereas some other platforms have limped along slowly for quite a while after their prime, a bit like me.

[–] Buffalox 4 points 1 year ago

Yes the problem was that they changed the concept entirely, and the change was to a concept that simply didn't work. The idea of "approved" content, was so lame everybody left.

Personally I had already left for reddit at that time, but the original idea with Digg was pretty cute though, they had a little icon of a spade, and you could digg up or down. Same as up/down vote on reddit.

Somehow reddit was just better, with it's way more text based design, maybe because it looked a bit like a colorcoding editor for programmers. for whatever reason reddit quickly had way better content than Digg, despite Digg was more famous and had a clear head start.