> The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them.

I'm tired of that false comparison being repeated over and over again.

* reddit traffic surpassed Digg traffic well before the Digg v4 launch [0]. Digg was already in decline [1] while reddit was growing [2], and the Digg v4 exodus just made it happen faster. If anything, Digg v4 can be looked at as a failed last-ditch effort to stop the bleeding. Honestly, reddit can't die yet because there's nothing there to kill it. It's the same reason Facebook is still the king of social media even though everyone hates it.

* Digg had a number of other problems, as well. People had lambasted Digg for years due to power users and a culture of vote manipulation. I remember from that period, almost every post on Digg's front page was from the same 4 people or so. Digg also allowed and encouraged vote brigades: they had a site feature allowing you to send vote requests to anyone on your friend's list, and the power users mostly operated by using pyramid-like organizations where they'd send a link to a group of people, each member of that group would pass the link on to another group, and so on (this was mostly done through offsite tools like AIM and IRC, not the site's vote request feature). Digg was A-OK with that: their only rule was against automated voting using bots (Mark Cuban's brother got banned twice for violating that). At Digg, there was a widespread (and true) belief that if you weren't one of the fabled power users, you'd never get anything on the front page. This is one of the reasons reddit has a site-wide rule against vote manipulation. If you notice, reddit still has a wide variety of posters making the front page.

* Digg was all about the front page, and there was no real community aspect. Digg had a small handful of admin-created categories (which launched with v3), and you could browse the new queue, and that was it. The whole site was about mindless link propagation. On the other hand, reddit's signature feature is its user-created subreddits. Rather than just being a place for people to share links, redditors organized into communities based on things like shared hobbies (think places like /r/makeupaddiction and /r/blacksmith), fandoms (everything from /r/comicbooks to /r/mylittlepony to /r/kamenrider), and support groups for marginalized communities (e.g., /r/asktransgender, /r/actuallesbians). Digg had nothing of the sort. That's a fundamental incentive for people to stay on reddit: even if the front page goes to shit, you're not going to see something like the trans community or any of the numerous fandoms that have a presence on reddit pack up and leave. With Digg, wrecking the front page wrecked the whole site.

* Digg v4 drastically changed the site functionality. They stripped out a huge amount of site features, including downvotes on posts, friend pages, and categories (none of which HN has, by the way), and articles by mainstream publishers were weighted over other links. Nothing reddit has done has changed site functionality like that.

[0] http://trak.in/tags/business/2010/10/04/digg-vs-reddit-traff...

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jun/03/digg-... (published over two months before Digg v4 launched)

[2] http://mashable.com/2010/07/16/reddit-traffic/