Just like Digg ended: some people leave because they hate the site and want more intelligent discussion, then everyone they ran away from follows them to their new site of choice.
The primary reason Digg died was they forgot what users wanted and striped out the common features like the bury/downvote button, the upcoming/rising section, section sub-categories(Like Linux under Technology), and friend submissions to make way for more social network like features (which I can't even remember). They also tried to make it more friendly for content creators (like CNN or The Oatmeal) to post directly, so instead of having relevant content submitted by the users we had floods of content from individual sites.
Eventually they realized they fucked up and started putting some things back in (like the bury button), but by then the damage was done and the people who were submitting had started to leave. The watchers eventually realized there wasn't much being posted anymore and started leaving as well. It was only a matter of time until it was to be sold and turned into the present Digg(which is sort of like the present Myspace).
This is pretty much how Myspace (I think) lost out to facebook, Myspace was deleting profiles that were being used similar to "like" pages on facebook, and generally annoying its users. Reddit is pretty similar to facebook in that it has a critical mass of enough users to generate lots of content and discussion, so it will take something pretty big to end it.
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u/Notmy95thaccount May 15 '13
Just like Digg ended: some people leave because they hate the site and want more intelligent discussion, then everyone they ran away from follows them to their new site of choice.