Digg's best days may be behind it. Once one of the internet's most influential link-sharing social networks, the site has been overtaken by upstarts like Twitter and Reddit, and — as of this weekend — it has lost its founder, Kevin Rose. After a contentious redesign last year, Digg's traffic plummeted — from 18 million visitors a month to 12 million — and commentators suspect that Rose's departure may be the end. Is it time to bury Digg?
Yes. Twitter has replaced it: Digg got "a lot of things right," says Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch, and helped "transform how we consume media." No longer do we need to rely on "media gatekeepers" to tell us what to read or watch. We rely on our friends instead. Unfortunately, we do that using Twitter and Facebook — not Digg. Rose's departure is the "final nail in the coffin."
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No. Digg is simply evolving: Don't toss dirt on Digg's casket just yet, says Brad McCarty at TheNextWeb. Sure, the "glory days" of Digg seem like a distant memory. But the site is still getting 20 million pageviews a month — that's "ten times the pageviews of some sites that are announcing its death." Like Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and other prematurely written-off tech giants, Digg will live on, and continue to evolve.
"In defense of Digg and internet evolution"
Undemocratic Digg has become irrelevant: Yes, Digg still has millions of users, says Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld. "But then, so does MySpace." The sad fact is that Digg's decline is irreversible. Why? It stopped being democratic. It allowed a legion of "Digg Super Users" to game the system, and alienated bloggers, op-ed columnists, and geeks alike. Meanwhile, rivals like Reddit remained "true to [their] purpose and mission."
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