@realabdullahhab: In 2004, Kevin Rose launched Digg, a website where people submitted links to cool internet content and users voted them up or down. If something got enough votes, it hit the front page. It became massive. By 2008, Digg had millions of users. If your link hit Digg's front page, your website would crash from traffic — they called it "the Digg effect." Kevin was on the cover of BusinessWeek. Google offered to buy Digg for $200 million. Kevin said no. Meanwhile, there was this smaller site called Reddit. Similar concept — user-submitted links and voting. But Reddit was way smaller. Digg dominated. Then in 2009, Kevin and his team decided to redesign Digg. They wanted to attract bigger publishers and make more money. They called it Digg v4. The plan was to give more power to brands and big companies, making their content more prominent than regular users' submissions. In August 2010, Kevin launched Digg v4. Users immediately hated it. The front page was full of corporate content. User submissions got buried. The voting felt rigged. Comments were broken. Everything people loved about Digg was gone. Users complained everywhere, begging Kevin to roll it back. But Kevin and his team refused. They insisted this was the future and users would adjust. But users didn't adjust. They got angrier. And then they started leaving — not just leaving, but migrating to Reddit en masse. Within weeks, Reddit went from underdog to dominant. Digg's traffic collapsed. By the end of 2010, Digg was dying. Traffic down 25%. Advertisers leaving. Kevin stepped down as CEO. Then in 2012, Digg sold. Not for the $200 million Google offered. They sold for $500,000. Half a million dollars. For a site worth hundreds of millions just two years earlier. Today, Digg technically still exists, but nobody uses it. Reddit became one of the biggest sites on the internet with hundreds of millions of users. The question is: did Kevin destroy Digg by ignoring his users, or did he just bet on the wrong future?

Abdullah Habib

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Tuesday 21 October 2025 20:34:35 GMT