digg.com was the other service I was thinking of.
ermagherd what obscure memory did you dig this out of.
i swear i was a internet user in the days and never once opened a digg page.
and, in reply to everyone else, internet forums are subject to the Law Of Conservation Of Ninjutsu (the more ninjas in 1 scene, the less powerful they are). Each user only has X amount of attention they can give to internet forums as a whole, and if you got too many forums, they dont get much traffic.
Reddit is popular because people like the format; but, also consider: it's not just numbers of users you want, but active users. And i mean, that it' snot just a clicks or views issue (although the money is important), but are those users interacting?
I say this because i see your typical threa don reddit is like this:
Q: hey type-of-person of reddit (e.g. doctors of reddit), what is the most type-of-situation you have had?
A: 2400 answers in 30 minutes (mostly just the first 2-3 replies get threaded)
Most people just typs stuff because they feel like it, but hardly ever does a thread extend for more than 2-3 individual replies.
And, assuming you got something really, really insightful to say, do you think anyone is going to notice you reply among a thousand other ones? (with the horrible formatting reddit has, too)
Reddit does have a ton, i mean, seriously a ton of communities in them. Like, a porn fetish that's so obscure and weirdly specific would still ahve like, six or a dozen different subreddits for them. The communities are heavily fractured, and they come and go like the wind, beause realistically, there's very little persistence of users.
I am *very* old fashioned when it comes to thse things. My old forum buddies in the 2000s, we would meet IRL for beer and pizza, like, every other week. The forum was an add-on to real life. Today, it's a breach of etiquette to want to meet anyone outside of the anonymity of the forum.
Plus, people talk a lot of shit.
Forums today are just a place where people make a lot of noise but do very little communicating, and reddit is the king of white noise.