Digg raised 39 MILLION dollars in VC funding and exited with a 500 THOUSAND dollar sale to Betaworks. I get that SV operates in it's own odd ball reality of what defines success and that's what makes it annoying to outsiders knowing that you are probably correct.
A bunch of people, including me, just kept commenting "Roll back!!!" But for some reason that's beyond my understanding, they said they could not rollback the upgrade. And that was the end.
That said, I actually still use Digg in its current form today because I find it very useful. I just wish it had the on-site comments, but I understand the moderation nightmare task they'd be taking on if they enabled comments like the old Digg.
At some point those vote-driven-websites are expected to mature and turn into proper publishing businesses.
Anything that's driven by users rather than vetted and sanitised by trusted writers/editors, will scare lucrative brand based advertisers. Just look at Google Adsense's content rules to see how much advertising shapes the web's content.
I think that's what happened with Digg. I speculate that something similar is happening with Reddit but at a much slower rate - like closing undesirable sub-reddits etc.
Digg almost killed Slashdot. Digg then killed itself with v4 and we were left with a less polished alternative Reddit. Reddit has been overrun by 4chan/mainstream. For some years, HN is the new /. with the most insightful comments. Though, I miss the comfort functions of the old /. comment system like collapsing threads (and tags like funny/insightful/etc).
People forget that Digg was already on the decline when it released v4. v4 was a bold attempt at trying to reinvent the site with the trends of the time. It failed and Reddit stayed the course and became a phenomenon.
Granted, but even at 16 million it wasn't a positive exit. I know, and many others have pointed out, that Rose has a great network and knack for picking who to invest in. So going back to the original post I replied to that said "I co-founded Digg, give me money" is ironically the worst credential he could offer up.
In the show "Silicon Valley" they even made a joke about how Rose had to fail at a bunch of stuff before he could "succeed" with Digg, and then subsequently failed at a bunch of other stuff afterward as well.
