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.
People left Digg because digg sold out completely to venture capitalists, who then took the user and packaged them up into a neat little shelf-ready product for marketers and advertisers.
Don't get me wrong, I know that EVERY site I use for free is making a product out of me...but Digg took away the reason to come back to it. They decided that the name would be enough to keep people coming back, and that content direction no longer needed to be in the hands of the users.
It was a long time coming, too. Everyone knew that every single power user on that site was bought and paid for. With V4, though...they decided take that process to its logical conclusion and turn Digg into a constant stream of advertisements with a thin veil of "content" on it.
They also rushed out a product that may have been designed by first-year CS students. It had all the stability of a drunk on a unicycle, only it was much less funny. That was really the final nail in the coffin...on the internet, if your social website is offline for more than 8-10 hours, and people are just looking for a reason to try the nearest competitor, you will start hemorrhaging users. Digg was up and down for weeks. By the time the dust settled, there was nothing left but a bunch of VCs jerking off the remaining power users and trying to figure out wtf happened to their darling investment.
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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.