Digg: web history, broken up for parts

Alexia, writing for TechCrunch:

Digg was an extremely influential site for anyone who worked in the early era of online publishing, so it being scrapped for parts is sort of weird, especially for those of us who used to beg friends to vote up Digg stories.

It’s easy to forget how important Digg was to traffic in the mid-2000s, and how Reddit was dismissed as a second-rate failure. As early as 2008, the community manager of Computer Weekly was telling me that she was seeing more results from Reddit than Digg. Sometimes the decline is well underway before we notice it. Two lessons there:

1. Even the most powerful social site can be rendered irrelevant
2. The early winner isn’t always the long-term victor

Bear that in mind as you fire up Facebook and Twitter this morning.