That might be more to do with your social circles. There was a shit ton of teenage drinking happening when I was in high-school.

The site started to go downhill around that period because of power users and some started to move to reddit, but it was still pretty niche.

I stayed on digg until v4, then I moved with the masses over to reddit. They lost over 30% of their users that month!

The main migration was actually in 2010 after the v4 redesign. Digg wasn’t dying in 2007-2009, it was one of the hottest websites on the internet.