[MC27]

One of the aspects not mentioned is that Digg was a tech website at the beginning. The quality of the audience, and subsequently, the quality of the content, decreased as they opened the flood gates to other categories.

It seems like their only option was to either stagnate with an increasingly unappealing demographic, or reinvent themselves.

[zbanks]

It's the very nature of the beast (social news, that is)

You can't have a site to aggregate the "best" news without restricting your user base. With fewer users, you can't make as much money.

[rkalla]

zbanks,

Interesting point, and that might explain why sites like HN and reddit (primarily technical and occasionally quirky) are still maintaining relatively high quality content.

I suppose it's the jack of all, master of none curse.

I would agree with the assessment of the previous poster that the quality of Digg did seem to be effected to the site opening it's categories up to the world, and not just to the tech community... that did seem like a milestone in me noticing I wasn't quite as happy with what I was reading.

Also see reddit in the situation where with 6 people, it is barely scraping by... sort of a crappy rock-and-a-hard-place aspect of social news.

Then there is the Facebook or Twitter approach which is the polar opposite end of something like HN, you have ALL content from everyone's brain, and the real money is in figuring out algorithms to surface it accordingly.

I don't know that I'm holding my breath for that algorithm though.