[vlovich123]

Step 1: convince your main competitor to piss of its entire user base.

Step 2: ? <- could be interesting to see if they did something special here

Step 3: get Obama and other major celebrities to establish you as a media company brand.

[pbhjpbhj]

Step 2 probably has a bunch of stuff, but includes:

They posted content using fake accounts to stimulate adoption.

To my recollection they allowed a lot of skeevy (illegal and/or immoral) content to proliferate.

I think they probably ran at a loss for a long time; leaning heavily on volunteer personnel.

?

[nanidin]

Step 2 for a Reddit clone/competitor would be much easier and more convincing given the current state of LLM’s.

[flomo]

One take I heard is Digg was actively combating vote manipulation, while on Reddit it was easy to get RonPaul/etc content onto the homepage. So the migration was memed to some extent.