No maybe about it. Digg lost their market by messing with their product. It's an interesting case, because you can make a direct comparison with reddit: two nearly identical products serving the same market started at the same time. Digg tried to grow too fast and failed, reddit grew at its natural pace and succeeded.

I don't know... I was part of a big migration to reddit around 2008-2009.

I remember there being tons of threads on Reddit of ex-diggers making fun of Digg around then. There were frequent posts daily about the complete degradation of quality on Digg back then.

The running joke was all the posts on Digg's current frontpage were from Reddits frontpage yesterday.

The redesign (in 2010) was the nail in the coffin.

I was on reddit for a couple years before that. The jokes about digg's quality certainly didn't begin in 2008.