A year or two prior to this, they were also putting linked sites into iframes, with the "digg bar" on top. So they had managed to alienate not just their users, but also the site owners that all the content linked to.
That can actually be quite useful, if implemented correctly. Even as a site owner I wouldn't mind, because it lets users upvote my content after reading it easily. But evolving browser standards killed it and most of the time it was implemented annoyingly.
Actually it would be nice if this was a browser feature. Click on a link on a site like HN or Reddit, browse to the new page as usual, but you have a little inconspicuous indicator in the toolbar that lets you vote or comment on the origin site easily.
Site owners just aren't going to be excited about stealing the most important bit of real estate and putting buttons there that navigate away from your site, that the end user presumably chose to navigate to. And other problems, like breaking bookmarking, no SEO benefits from the "link", etc.
The selfishness of it is obvious if you think through what would happen if someone posted one of these dig iframed urls to another digg-like site, which was then itself posted to a third digg-like site. 3 stacked headers, yay!
I'd think that too, but site owners were perfectly happy to go with Google's AMP for a while (maybe still). They put a big "X" to close out of the article and go back to Google in a bar at the top as well as horizontal swiping to get to other versions of the story at other publishers.
I agree that site owners shouldn't like this behavior. Still, we've seen cases where content owners have welcomed things against their interest in the name of engagement or hype.
For example, a lot of video producers started putting content on Facebook (where they received no revenue) because they were getting lots of views on Facebook compared to their own site. This eventually left them without the revenue they needed and they dwindled.
Yes, site owners shouldn't like these kinds of things, but we've seen sites chase a lot of crazy trends. The Oatmeal has a cartoon that kinda sums up some of this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people.
Even today, you'd think brands would want to move to ActivityPub where they could run their own server and actually have control; you'd think influencers would want to move to ActivityPub where they wouldn't be beholden to Facebook looking for money to boost their reach or Musk's arbitrary moods. Instead, so many are sticking around on platforms they know are looking to gain an advantage over them. I'm not even suggesting abandoning those platforms, but cross-posting to ActivityPub would mean building a future you're more in control of.
There's a lot of platform behaviors that aren't good for sites that many sites end up being enthusiastic about.
If reddit and Twitter kill their API, there's probably space for a noutofband plugin that creates arbitrary forums on content. Like, you find a website with an image, you hash the image and that creates your standard forum and voting system. Then wheverver that hash shows up, so does the forum.
Something like https://annotations.lindylearn.io/ - a collaborative social layer for annotating all webpages. Ran across it when browsing Marginalia.nu a while ago. I also miss StumbleUpon.
There was a reddit toolbar browser extension at one point that did this. If you clicked a link in reddit, you'd get a bar with title, score, comment count, and voting buttons. It was integral to my reddit experience until it stopped working and afaik never worked again.
I sort of wish they had this on Reddit - one of my big annoyances is that their "best" view (the one that the homepage defaults to) will deprioritize anything you've already clicked on, so if you click on an article, read it and then go back to Reddit it's completely gone from the view if you want to upvote it or comment on it.
