I’m way too young to remember Digg. I signed up for Reddit in 2015, and I’ve heard talks here and there about the migration from Digg, but that’s it.
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Yes, although Reddit was more mature by then and had some communities already.
Digg tried to make money off it’s communities ASAP and killed it. Reddit tried the slow burn: build up users for 15 years and then pull the rug. It’s hard making money from a site that has all it’s users do the work. The only value reddit has is automated infra, which in the days of auto scaling k8s clusters is not that unique.
While infra is much easier now, there are still a number of rough edges that drive non-technical people to managed solutions. While great for getting things going the costs demand your product make a certain amount per month and per byte transferred and per CPU cycle spent processing that request.
With as many AI companies wanting training data the Reddit API is going to get hammered. Most of those companies will likely be unable to pay the fees so they’ll go elsewhere, hopefully to the fediverse. Also, given time we won’t need petabytes of training data. I expect this API money grab to be shortsighted both from the emigration we’re seeing now and tech improving.
Sort of. Digg’s implosion was much more immediate, the changes directly impacted normal users so it was easier to mobilise people, and at the time Reddit was a bit more mature and easier to understand than Lemmy/etc is now.
My guess is we’ll see much more of a Digg-like exodus once Apollo stops working and the average user sees an impact.
