V4 was definitely the tipping point and nail in the coffin for Digg. However, once the Digg community became to large it became difficult to find interesting stories about a particular topic. At the same time twitter, hacker news and many of the sub-reddits became great ways to discover unique content.

So a combination of poor product design, a selling out the Digg community and availability of alternatives killed Digg.

I would argue that the "big break" was actually a bad thing for Reddit. The massive influx of disenfranchised Digg users contributed to the decline of quality on Reddit big-time.

reddit's quality is in renascence currently, as the big and popular subreddits (e.g. pics, science) have figured out what the 'moderate' button does. until every single one of the default subreddits start moderating, the main reddit will be rubbish.

And I would credit /r/askscience for it. They have shown how wonderful banhammer is, with mods that don't hesitate to use it.

Agreed. People still would have gone elsewhere even if Reddit didn't exist.

Absolutely. Digg became so bad that if it were the only news web site on the net then newspapers would've had nothing to worry about.

Guess I will be the first one to admit that I have no idea about Digg's development versions.

So the question is: What was the big deal with v4?

They redesigned the site in a visually unappealing way and allowed news sources to auto submit content. Overnight, it became this ugly site where the only links were auto-submitted stories from popular newspapers, cable news, and other mainstream media. See this story for more: http://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill...