At its peak, Digg had over 30 Million monthly page views. Its homepage had the ability to bring down websites with – what appeared to be – unlimited visitors in a very short time. And then it happened, V3.0 came out and then shortly after that V4.0 came out. These two versions completely devastated the company, and to make matters worse, V4.0 was a permanent install – there was no going back. The company, that at one point was worth millions, was now being sold for a mere $500,000 to the highest bidder. People left the network, left the brand, and quickly forgot about their user ID's in what seemed to be a recurring event across dying networks from Xanga to Myspace. The only difference was that people were jumping ship long before Digg was sold off. Power users, along with other mistakes made by the company – like not listening to its users and incorporating useless tools -really began to hurt Digg's membership base, but where did everyone go?
Well, the majority of the members went to other social networks. Most of them went to Reddit, so many left for Reddit that people associate it as the killer of Digg. The rest went to other lesser known Digg style networks that were relevant to a specific niche. These people went to find networks that made them feel at "home" while still receiving news that they were highly interested in.
There are literally hundreds of communities that sprung up during the collapse of Digg, and some have been making some sort of headway within their own little niche. Nothing as large as 30 Million monthly views, but definitely large enough to have a thriving community of their own.
PI Feed – A news site that contains stories submitted by their users. The stories are related to Security, Investigations, & Crimes. Most of the stories are aimed towards security professions but if you enjoy keeping up with crime stories, you will enjoy this one as well. Like Digg, you get to vote on which stories are good or bad. The site also takes into consideration the number of votes and number of views to rate which stories make it to its homepage.
Blokube – Blokube is mostly a network for bloggers. The site allows you to submit articles from your blog to reach other bloggers. For the most part, it's aimed towards website owners and freelance writers. You'll find a good collection of general topics and categories. Unlike other sites, however, Blokube articles – for the most part – come from small blogs and not from main stream blogs that we're used to. This does give its users a good community that shares their opinion with each other, it's engaging, and users tend to care more about other members.
BizSugar – Business professionals will love this one. The site is full of links to stories related to the business world. It features articles that help small business owners grow their company & it allows business owners a way to share tips and tricks to get people started with their business. When a story is "good" you give it some sugar, the more sugar a story has, the faster it makes it to the home page.
Design Float- is a social website for designers. The site contains articles and news submitted by designers to help designers. If you're in need of ideas for a marketing campaign or need tips for web development, this is where you can find a thriving community of creative members. On this site you float stories to the top. The layout is extremely clean and easy to navigate.
Dezinews – Another website for designers, but, unlike Design Float, Dezinews is aimed towards web designers and social media marketers. They also share tutorials. Their main strength is that they offer people the ability to showcase their websites and galleries to its members.
Cuteaholic – Reserved for funny and cute pictures or videos, Cuteaholic has been growing in size thanks to the vast number of submissions. This is the humor site for Digg users. You don't have articles or pages to blogs that make you lose your interest after the third line, instead, you only have images and videos that will brighten your day.
UpNews.it – with a little over 1,000,000 stories on its database, UpNews is one of the larger sites on this list. The only downfall is that it's in Italian, so unless you have Google Translate on every page that you visit on the site, you'll be stuck with Italian translations all the way through till the end. UpNews, if it was in English, would be the equivalent of an early Digg community. This community shares just about anything and everything that is popular online.
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