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Perhaps HN isn't a significant threat, but it still poses a threat; each new service likely eats away at Digg's share of the market, assuming that people have limited time to use social media.

As an anecdote, I was using Digg substantially up until the 2008 elections. I haven't used the service since then. Instead, I'm spending time on Hacker News (+ Techmeme, Twitter, Facebook).

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You are no longer using the service because the signal/noise ratio is crumpled. It's what happens when there are lot of new members and little moderation as well as abusing/power users.

HN is a niche social website and I don't think that it eats from Digg or any other social website.

HM alone does not, but one of Digg's problems is that they are facing a pack of ravenous midgets that focus on one specific niche. If you are interested in a small selection of niches then Digg is simply a useless place to go for information -- what you care about will never surface and all you see is a bunch of articles trying to game what remains of the general interest audience Digg once commanded. You could walk down a list of all of the major Digg categories and list two or three sites that do the job better for that specific niche; this is what is going to kill Digg. Digg is like an online social newspaper, and it is suffering the same fate that the print versions have gone through with better competitors peeling off profitable niches and leaving a dull husk behind.

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