That's my recollection of it. Just one day the content was not interesting anymore and felt certainly more gamed than before, which they wanted to combat as per this blog post.
I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.
This so much. I remember visiting digg after v4 launch and it felt like a totally different site. At the time I remember looking for site that filled void and offered similar content but wasn’t so focused e.g. slashdot and I came upon reddit
I'm surprised the conclusion is not that they learn to never do a full rewrite of a social product again.