Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman believes users were never that loyal to Digg in particular, though. "What we always used to say to make ourselves feel better when we were smaller than Digg was, 'Every Reddit user knows about Digg but uses Reddit instead. But not every Digg user knows about Reddit,' " says Huffman, who left Reddit in 2009 and went on to cofound the travel site Hipmunk.
Huffman and others don't think Reddit killed Digg, but he acknowledges that Reddit didn't help. "[Former Digg users] just happened to go to Reddit, which made my day, but I think they were leaving Digg, period," he says.