[bityard]

A long time ago, the main three sites I visited daily were Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Reddit only had (I believe) a few thousand users at the time and /hot was mostly populated in roughly equal parts with links to content about obscure programming languages/techniques, news articles, and links to content about illicit drugs/weed. I was only semi-interested in the first and not at all in the last two, so I dropped it from my rotation thinking, "man, this is never going to take off."

[bookofjoe]

This is interesting. Three websites, at the time pretty much interchangeable, yet one flourished and other two died. Predicting which one would win would've been impossible. VCs invest in all three and hope for the best.