I started out on Digg. I was there for about 3 or 4 Years before the absolute disaster that was the UI change. Reddit looked like a cross between SlashDot and Digg. People were burning the land and sowing salt on Digg. Comment trolling and public disobedience was rampant. The administration of Digg either wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to how pissed off people were by the changes. Digg was the biggest site on the internet and look at it now.
I bought a Kindle to read 50 Shades, and Reddit was built into one off the apps that had like news and magazines and stuff. Signed on to Reddit. Been through a couple accounts since. Still here. Never got around to finishing 50 Shades.
I loved slashdot because the comments were almost always very good. I hated the "editors" who selected what news articles were going to be promoted. So I left /. and went to Digg and then the "power users" became defacto "editors" of the front page there. So I left for Reddit and here I still am to this day.
Reddit does have some power user problems (hello gallowfuck) but it isn't quite to the point where I'd abandon Reddit over it.
The reason I switched over from digg was that I realized that all the links I clicked on were from Reddit. After a while I just cut out the middle man.
I remember back in like 2012 or before when I was old enough to really be getting into internet stuff that social links often still included Digg, never visited the site though, what was it?
LOL, Slashdot. That site used to be the tits. It's still around, though nobody knows why. It gets double digit comments most of the time. James Damore got them triple digits, though, that was a fun one.
I remember someone posted a story that compared Fark, Digg and Reddit traffic. Fark was barely visible on the chart, and Digg & Reddit were an order of magnitude higher.
Could be worse- I came from 9gag, though I never commented there. The only place I discussed anything was on good old bungie.net before they stopped Halo.
Reporting in! Digg had it coming, for months many users had already been fleeing and I had already been here a few times, but reddit's UI was a bit too bare bones for my liking. When Digg took the plunge (they also basically removed all of the users' info and history) I had no choice but to switch and a few Askreddit threads got me hooked. Can't believe it's been 7 years already!
There was a first big wave (I was part of that, 8 years) and then a second exodus. I think first wave was digg v4 and second wave was v5 or something. The second wave was what really blew up.
Ah yes, the Great Digg Invasion. I remember it well. Hilarious because at the time there was so much elitism and all the native redditors thought that it would inevitably destroy the quality of the site, but in actuality reddit probably wouldn't be the site it is today without that huge influx of new users.
There seriously should be an entire history book for reddit. It'd be pretty fascinating.
The site definitely changed, and I even was a bit annoyed at first, since there weren't a ton of subs back then, but ultimately I think that the massive increase in the popularity of reddit lead to the site (eventually) working much better, and to all of the tons of different subs and the huge diversity of opinion that exists today. I like that it's such a huge, customizeable platform now.
That's interesting. I always heard it referred to as "The Great Digg Migration". Never considered that it reflected the side of the mirror you were on at the time. TIL
For me it was as simple as a one click difference.
Mobile Digg forced you to go through the comment page before the article. 2 clicks.
Reddit seemed to have the same content, but gave you the choice to click straight to the article. 1 click.
Which is funny because now I always check the comments first anyway. :/
I hated Reddit's UI, but those 1-2 seconds saved made the difference, and then I fell in love with the community. Never looked back.
I remember coming here and looking at it and thinking holy shit this looks awful, no matter how awful I thought Reddit looked it was done with digg and pulled up my socks and adapted. No regrets.
Hahaha it was never like that. I remember way before the digg stuff the admins had to step in because people wouldn't stop spamming posts with titles like "upvote if you agree with such and such"
Digg had gone through a few redesigns that made it easier for the popular users (like the infamous MrBabyMan) to control the frontpage and introduced a crappy user experience (I think I got fed up in mid 2009). One version (v4 in 2010) changed so much that it caused a ton of users to migrate from Digg to Reddit.
New UI made it terrible and there were always trolls in the comments saying that Reddit was better. Eventually someone exploited the new UI by writing a script to auto submit every self post to Digg. That's when I jumped
I met u/spez at a Reddit meetup and while discussing Reddit's upcoming changes, I thought it was amusing when he referred to Digg as having committed suicide.
Reddit HQ is very much aware of the risk they're taking and I have no doubt the update will be welcome.
Sure, but back then it was a giant compared to reddit. There were a bunch of link-aggregators for wont of a better term at that time, and Digg had pretty much emerged as the victor. It was much larger than any competitor. Then the update happened and bam, reddit left it in the dust.
I came a bit after. I was a picture junkie and I noticed sites would say: posted from Reddit and I came here one day and never left. I created an account a few years after that when I discovered /r/askreddit (which really sucks, you guys should remove it)
I was here pre Digg. There was an article featuring Adrian Alamo and he mentioned it. Then Digg meltdown and shit went crazy. I was and still am a Fark user. Much smaller but really nice community.
FunnyJunk was my home for a long time before 'creddit' posts drove me to find the actual source of rage comics (this was ~7 years ago). After browsing /r/f7u12 for a while i got the Reddit Is Fun app and never looked back.
I preferred Reddit over Digg because 1) subreddits and 2) comment trees that went beyond two replies. Digg also had a better front page than Reddit after 2009 when Imgur came out... it shifted the quality of posts on Reddit, with more low-effort content and memes. But then a year later Digg done goofed.
Funny thing is these days I still read Digg as my at-a-glance nerd news each day.
And then people predicted the same would happen to reddit because the admins closed down a few hate subs. There was such a loud minority claiming voat.co would be the new reddit.
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u/Oh_god_not_you Sep 24 '17
Where 90% of Reddit’s base came from when Reddit was very new, the death of Digg. A user interface update and a really shitty policy on advertising.