this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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I remember this vividly. Opening digg and thinking "by god - what have they done?!" And to reddit I went.
That may be where you went, but you've also bailed on Reddit as soon as they went bad too so you're a biased sample.
If you look at the graphs of the actual traffic visiting each of the sites, it took years for Reddit's activity to surpass Digg's and match its old level of popularity after Digg v4 rolled out. Here's an old article I just dug up with one such graph, I remember seeing a more detailed one recently but can't find the link right now.
We here on Lemmy/kbin are not "typical" users, we're early-adopters and the sorts of users who are most aware of and most sensitive to the sort of problems that Digg and now Reddit are inflicting on their userbase. The rest will follow, slowly, as the degradation grows and reaches their thresholds of awareness.
Your graphs are actually consistent with Digg traffic dropping off a cliff immediately after the redesign. My memory is hazy but according to this a week after the release they replaced the CEO and two months later they layed off 37% of staff.
That graph shows a two-year-long "cliff." Even by the end of it Reddit still hadn't reached the level Digg had been at yet. They may have immediately launched into layoffs and whatnot but the inertia of the userbase carried on much longer than that.
Reddit hasn't gone a month since cutting off the API. This is super early times by comparison.
Your graph only three data points. Lets say hypothetically the traffic was 100m requests/yr and dropped off immediately after the redesigned you'd still expect to see something like
This page has some graphs with more data points but the tl;dr is traffic was down by more than 50% within a month.
Admittedly reddit's growth was much more muted but Digg did really just destroy the site.
Indeed, that's much more of a "cliff." Sorry, I should have spent more time trying to find that more-detailed graph I saw earlier. But as you say, it took a long time for Reddit to grow. And Digg's remaining activity was surprisingly stable for a "dead" website - half the users seem to have stuck around indefinitely.
I don't get your first paragraph. I didn't claim Digg went poof overnight. Just that I was shocked at how the redesign was so different from the day before.
You said "Your graphs are actually consistent with Digg traffic dropping off a cliff immediately after the redesign." My graph actually shows a two-year-long decline, which I don't consider to be much of a cliff.
I didn't say that. Some other commenter did.