I remember those days. Digg had a huge user base, however from what I recall there was a lot of internal politics going on. I believe the founder of Digg left, or gave up on it, or something, and someone else took over, changes were made, and people freaked out and left.

I stuck around because I had this hatred of Reddit at the time, I didn't like the layout, plus my experience with Reddit users was that every time a Digg article was posted, guaranteed, there was a post by a Reddit user that said "this was posted on Reddit two days ago".

Anyways, Digg announced that they were doing this huge makeover, and everything was going to be awesome.

When the new site launched, in order to log in, you had to connect your account to facebook. They claimed that this was in order to stop multiple accounts from the same person. I said fuck this! and never looked back.

After the first (and largest) exodus from Digg, you could clearly see the difference. Threads used to have 5,000 comments on some of them. Now threads were lucky to break 500 comments. In the hey day, there were always these ascii picts in their messages, like Pedo Bear, Face palm picard, among others. Those all seemed to disappear over night.