reddit has never had 'explosive' growth, always steady month-over-month. The monday before digg v4 we had about 700K uniques and the monday after we had about 900K. In the grand scheme of things, digg v4 helped, since our chief competitor self-destructed, but the site has since far, far outgrown digg's highest numbers.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that triumphed over a rival without some help from said rival's poor decision-making.

The useful bit of advice I took from the whole thing was how important it was to be aware of competitors, but not actually give a damn about what they were doing.

Thanks for redditing :) all is forgiven about that earlier digging business.

Oh! And a question for you - what kept you from redditing those years before? Were you even aware of it?

edit: One more thing, we also owe a ton to digg for educating the market on 'social news' as a concept. Sadly, they also taught them awful practices, like that it was OK to game the system, so that we're now cleaning up the mess and explaining to publishers that it's not OK to try and game reddit: http://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-ban-the-atlantic-phsyorg...