And not great at all for Digg.
Reddit is basically an organization that froze its leadership in carbonite back in 2010 and then thawed them out in mid-2015 to suddenly turn a profit with $50m in VC funding and a dwindling advertising landscape. This is why every move Alexis and Steve make look an awful lot like a Kevin Rose play from 2011.
They literally have a "discuss on reddit" botton at the bottom of the article.
"Reddit doesn't make some arbitrary comment system for their site when they already own a website dedicated to discussing articles" attracts many fewer clicks.
http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/an-interview-with-the-heavens-gate-webmaster-meet-telah-61/
The response from the reddit community seems lukewarm.
It makes a lot of business sense - just add (con)text to content from Reddit, a more accessible site than Reddit, it's way more advertisable, VC money can have a good place and they can beat Buzzfeed et al. at their own game.
The one thing that does bug me is that this is implicitly admitting that Reddit will not be fixed in any meaningful way. "Oh, we got a bajillion dollars in funding? Let's put it into something entirely new instead of making our current thing better!" If this fails miserably for some reason, I think Reddit's days might be counted.
Thanks for informing about the new site. Interaction equals more page views for some people and I would rather leave a comment so the person know I was interested in their post.