This is revisionist history. My Reddit account is 16 years old. I was there in the very early days of the site well before the Digg invasion and well before i

This is revisionist history. My Reddit account is 16 years old. I was there in the very early days of the site well before the Digg invasion and well before it gained widespread popularity. It was never because it allowed anything. It was because it was a much more accessible version of Slashdot. And it was because Digg did their redesign and it ended up with a critical mass of users. Then they started opening up the subreddits and it exploded from there. The fact that Reddit is growing without that content shows that it wasn't that important to begin with.