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Ask HN: How should I challenge Digg?

8 points by linkfrek ↗ HN
Do you think the time is right to startup a challenger to Digg? Im thinking of trying to recapture Digg's initial Geek tech-centric community. The time appears to be ripe, Diggs initial community appears to have left Digg, and Digg seems like its desperate to re-invent itself. My major concern is: How could I differentiate myself from Reddit. It seems as if the geek community has shifted from Digg to Reddit.

Q: What are your thoughts about starting up in the Digg/Reddit space? What would compel you to start using a Digg/Reddit competitor?

Your thoughts are appreciated. Thank you

14 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 34.6 ms ] thread
marcamillion
To be honest, I think that boat has largely sailed.

There have been so many similar sites since Digg. Not just Reddit, but I think a large portion of that initial fanbase are now loyal HN users - if not Redditors or both.

I would say look for the next trend, or innovate on a new way to experience news rather than trying to copy Digg/Reddit.

linkfrek
ok, but would you agree that the quality of the Digg clones has generally been poor? I migrated from Digg to Reddit a couple of years ago. Then from Reddit to hackerNews. Reddit appears to be succumbing to the same fate as Digg, (too many lol-cats, and cheap comments).

This site would keep the focus on tech news and try to keep the community relatively small.

imp
What kind of tech news? XBox games? OSS? VC funding announcements?

Right now, what would the top 5 headlines be on your ideal news site?

I disagree with linkfrek that the ship has sailed. Online communities will always exist and evolve. Digg, Reddit, and HN won't be the last tech communities ever built.

imp
Oops, I meant that I disagree with marcamillion about the ship sailing thing...
Travis
That's a really crowded space. If you don't already have a killer feature or user base, your time is probably best spent elsewhere. Digg clones are a dime a dozen.
[dead] TripleD42
If you have a killer concept, go for it.

Not a feature, but an actual unique concept.

The space is too crowded for wasting tons of time on another similar project.

fragmede
It is a rather crowded space, but there's room for improvement. The biggest 'pain' point in this space is how many times the same core piece of news gets posted. After something like original iPad announcement, every social media site had 30 blog posts about the thing. Lump it all under a single heading showing the primary source - Apple, and relegate blog-posts as related-discussions.

Slightly less fanciful - use tags instead of sub-reddits and 'other discussions', use RSS feeds as auto-submission source.

mindcrime 

  use RSS feeds as auto-submission source.
That's another feature I'm planning for my "reddit like" system. But, again, I'm not aiming for something that's Web facing and deployed on Internet scale. But I'm glad to see somebody else thinks that is a good idea.

Recommending feeds, or bundles of related feeds, might be interesting to do as well.

mindcrime
I think there are some interesting things you can do to innovate in that space, but I'm not sure any of the ideas floating around in my head are interesting enough to help a digg/reddit competitor overtake them. My focus is on using that kind of technology "behind the firewall" as part of an organizational "knowledge management" type system. To that end, I've been working on a very reddit-like system lately... the actual code is pretty raw still, but I've been rambling about ideas on the blog a lot lately. Feel free to look it over and see if anything I've written inspires an idea.

http://www.jroller.com/openqabal

Off the top of my head, the main things I've got right now that reddit doesn't are: sharing links via XMPP message and tagging.

I think there's also room to do a better job of recommending things. The "related items" list on reddit is - IMO - often times pretty sad. <shrug />

kacy
Recommendations are super important IMHO. Digg tried this, but they ultimately failed because they lacked community. From my understanding the algorithm was pretty dope. I just can't spend more than 10 minutes on Digg without being frustrated at the content, so I haven't really used it much. BTW, hi mindcrime. :-)
LaPingvino
Make a really really good interface. I have always felt Digg like a labyrinth, and Reddit's look doesn't really attract and also labyrinth-like.

Have a good way for people to find things they like. Hacker News is a good example in how this can work out.

And don't try to look like a clone.

imp
I think you're asking the right question, but I don't have any idea of what the answer is. It doesn't seem like answering that question is something you can crowdsource to us. You need a vision of what you think a great news site will look like. Right now, you're asking us for a vision. As users, we are mostly going to think of features you could implement on a current site like Digg, but if you want to challenge them you need to have your own innovative view of what it will look like. Reddit was "front page for the web," and "democratizing news." What ultimate goal are you trying to achieve?

So, I would say come up with your own vision and launch it ASAP because it will probably change over time. I think when reddit launched, they put a lot of emphasis on the recommendation algorithm, which no one ended up using. They didn't even have comments in the first version, yet the comments are now the most important part.

Edit: Try reading the books "Positioning", "Innovator's Dilemma", and "Innovator's Solution." Your challenges aren't technical ones, they're marketing ones. You're taking on big established websites, and you need to position your website in the correct way to even have a chance at taking them on.

linkfrek
Thank you for this comment, it connected with some of my feelings that have precolated up since my initial question.

I agree, I need to establish a vision, and launch it fast.

Thanks for those book recommondations. Thats always been my problem: marketing