Sorry for the dumb question… what’s the history that’s repeating?
I assume that he’s comparing the migration of Digg users to Reddit when Digg rolled out its very unpopular v4 interface to Reddit making the current changes to their policies today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Digg_v4_revolt_and_migration_to_Reddit
In the past, Reddit has cited not wanting to be in Digg’s shoes as a reason for keeping around the old.reddit.com interface for users who did not like the new one, so not wanting to do a Digg v4 is a consideration that I believe has been on the minds of the company in past years.
The difference was Reddit had already built up a reasonably comparable audience when Digg imploded so the migration was easy. If you look at a similar graph of Reddit today and Lemmy/Kbin, you probably wouldn’t even see these tools register with the active user base of Reddit so high. I think “rhyme” of history is that another service will eventually win, and it might be ours, but it’s more akin to the fall of the British Empire than an overnight event.
Digg had bled users to reddit over the course of a few years before the big one. Many users had accounts on both for that period as well.
“This was on reddit yesterday” was a top comment on Digg often enough.
