It actually went very similarly to this. People didn’t want to leave Digg behind, and some tried to stick around with the “new” Digg v4.

There were different concerns at the time, however. I remember one of the big concerns was “power users” who managed to game the front page. People hated MrBabyMan, who was nearly every top post and basically spent all his time on the site, posting articles.

It will take time for a full changeover, and I’m not sure it will be quite the same. Digg had a lot of die-hard fans and they lost most of the userbase very quickly. reddit still has tons of people who are oblivious to what is going on and only have ever seen reddit through the official app or the new version of the site. They’ve nearly doubled their userbase since 2017, when they rolled out “new reddit” and there’s a significant chance they’re happy to lose the half of the userbase that is “old reddit.” The new users tend to be not be as discerning and don’t block ads.

Over time however, it will likely become a shell of its former self, much like going to MySpace years after the fact and seeing it as a weird ghost town shell of its former self. Maybe even like visiting Facebook or Twitter, now. Or even Yahoo!, which somehow is still lurching along despite being very unlike what it used to be. Technically even MySpace and Digg are still around in some form. They don’t really die as much as they just eke out an existence hanging on to a few users who somehow still put up with all the bullshit.