Yes the problem was that they changed the concept entirely, and the change was to a concept that simply didn’t work. The idea of “approved” content, was so lame everybody left.

Personally I had already left for reddit at that time, but the original idea with Digg was pretty cute though, they had a little icon of a spade, and you could digg up or down. Same as up/down vote on reddit.

Somehow reddit was just better, with it’s way more text based design, maybe because it looked a bit like a colorcoding editor for programmers. for whatever reason reddit quickly had way better content than Digg, despite Digg was more famous and had a clear head start.