Similar to my response to the OP, the comparisons don’t work because IRC as a whole, no less one network, are not empires. Reddit did a god awful redesign. Then piled on forcing their official mobile app usage by limiting the site more and more. Unlike the small geeky IRC world, none of this did anything to curb Reddit popularity. While it’s entirely possibly an equivalent move in IRC or some other niche geeky place would have an exodus or major consequences.

Reddit has banned a number of subreddits too. With hundreds of thousands of active members. None of this curbs its popularity. And not everything they ban is problematic like inappropriate non consensual sexual posts or aggressive bigotry.

Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year

Digg peaked at 30M monthly users.

A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]:

“Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion”

These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...

It's the early adopters that move, not the masses that eventually follow a few years later. It's a small community that shapes crowds.

My best argument to this that I would gladly be proven wrong so I don’t look silly being wrong. Is there any example in the past ~7 years, even ~10 years of any major cultural user content sites that had precedence like Digg, losing influence the way Digg and other contemporaries did?

The only examples that I can think of is Tumblr.

If there’s so many examples before 10 years ago. And maybe 1 example in recent times. Your point can still stand. However it also doesn’t mean much when the resilience of web giants are totally different between the Digg Web time and after that

Yeah I think also that we underestimate these massive sites by thinking they have not learned from Digg etc.

the freenode irc network disappeared overnight, but everyone just updated their links to point at libera.chat instead, which has almost all of the same projects, active users, etc.

It was essentially just an infrastructure change, which is the nice thing about open protocols and server implementations. Libera has 40k users and over 1000 foss projects that were on freenode.

the freenode userbase and community is alive and well, just under a new link

I was a Freenode user for a decade, many more IRC networks in the preceding decade, since 1999 or so. I enjoy chatting with my friends and participating in projects realtime on IRC. I left freenode when all the bitcoin/monero related projects moved to Libera. Update your links, drop your nick registrations on the old network, register on the new - keep on trucking.