Both stories are pretty fascinating examples of how corporate dynamics can ruin a product. In Slashdot's case it was a clear example of "well, we hired a bunch of designers, so obviously we need to do a UI redesign!", but the designers had no idea how users actually used the site. They added a ton of whitespace and IIRC collapsible content to make the site more "modern", but in doing so it made it impossible to quickly scan the comments for high value/insightful responses. In Digg's case it had all the hallmarks of VC meddling ("we've got to monetize!") While people often comment about how buggy Digg V4 was when it released, the bigger issue was the content was just laughably bad - it was changed to like page after page of the dumbest corporate spam. Anyone using the site for 5 minutes would have known it was fucked, so I'm guessing there was just so much internal pressure to "get shit out the door" that they just wanted to release something rather than admit what they built was a turd.