this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Your graphs are actually consistent with Digg traffic dropping off a cliff immediately after the redesign. My memory is hazy but according to this a week after the release they replaced the CEO and two months later they layed off 37% of staff.
That graph shows a two-year-long "cliff." Even by the end of it Reddit still hadn't reached the level Digg had been at yet. They may have immediately launched into layoffs and whatnot but the inertia of the userbase carried on much longer than that.
Reddit hasn't gone a month since cutting off the API. This is super early times by comparison.
Your graph only three data points. Lets say hypothetically the traffic was 100m requests/yr and dropped off immediately after the redesigned you'd still expect to see something like
This page has some graphs with more data points but the tl;dr is traffic was down by more than 50% within a month.
Admittedly reddit's growth was much more muted but Digg did really just destroy the site.
Indeed, that's much more of a "cliff." Sorry, I should have spent more time trying to find that more-detailed graph I saw earlier. But as you say, it took a long time for Reddit to grow. And Digg's remaining activity was surprisingly stable for a "dead" website - half the users seem to have stuck around indefinitely.