HN Explorer

AHN: What can we learn from Reddit?

3 points by thomasmallen ↗ HN
In only the past couple months, the bottom seems to have fallen out, and to me (as someone who used the site for the past year) it's become virtually unusable. At this point, there's very little reason to use Reddit over sites like Digg unless you're reading comments on marginal topics that draw little interest.

So, the question is, what can we learn from Reddit? There was a bit of a false start the other day when somebody suggested making this a walled garden, which is clearly the wrong thing to do. What we need to do is determine the best ways to discourage thoughtless, asinine members and make the site distasteful for them without sacrificing the needs of the users we'd like to attract. I think we all agree that sites like this one fill a valuable niche, so we need to market to _only_ that niche.

* Mere exclusivity is not the answer, as evidenced by the poll results from the aforementioned post.

* Being abrasive would be in the wrong spirit as well, and would be tedious (we don't want to become moderators in that way).

I'll start: A simple option is to require a nominal signup fee to post. I'd be for it, although I'll admit that it's contrary to the "hacker" moniker which suggests anonymity (and doesn't much reflect the nature of the community, in any case).

8 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 25.9 ms ] thread
spydez
How's this for anonymous: send me your sign-up fee, and I won't tell PG who you are. ;)

...which brings me to my point: The general spirit around here of discouraging snowclones and other common easy/thoughtless forms of humor seems to be staving off a lot of the Digg/Reddit critical mass devolution.

noodle
HN and the codebase does a good job of preventing the downward spiral encountered by digg/reddit by requiring a karma threshold for the more important features.

to get to the useful features, you have to prove yourself worthy with good contributions to the community, and all it takes is one really out of line comment and all your privileges are gone again.

gives the community a much easier way of self-policing.

ram1024
never used reddit, but here's a "solution" system i thought up on the fly for a social posting site.

"karma" like HN for participating/socializing on the site.

with enough karma you can log into new.sitenamehere.com and vote on new submissions which are in queue for an hour. if you upvote something that gets more downvotes than upvotes, you lose karma. if you upvote something that passes the votes you gain karma, but the whole process is a blind vote, you don't see the results till the end.

what this does is puts moderation of site content into the hands of the people actively participating in the site, they're karmicly "voted" into moderator position, and then further vetted when they review content for the site.

downside: hour long submission "queue" before they show up on the site proper (or get rejected)

ObieJazz
Results 1 - 10 of about 919,000,000 for digg. (0.07 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 363,000,000 for reddit. (0.08 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 292,000 for "hacker news". (0.39 seconds)

The first rule about Hacker News is: you do not talk about Hacker News.

davidw
And especially not on reddit.
moxy
As someone who just recently migrated from reddit (almost entirely), I've noticed that one of the most defining differences on HN is the non-sensationalist headlines. Not only does this ward off the "hive-mind" mentality, but simultaneously imbues the site with a simplicity and maturity which certainly adds balance to the site's collective outlook.

Just recently, I showed this site to my younger brother and he called it "boring and pretentious." I feel like that's exactly the way it should remain, if we intend to keep the site paradigm from changing too dramatically.

josefresco
"boring and pretentious"

Awesome, I think I like your brother. And I've never been prouder to be part of a community deemed boring and pretentious.

safetytrick
A sign-up fee sounds like a way to make the problem worse. Its big business to get a link on a site aggregator like Digg or Reddit so I think spam would increase if membership came at a cost. I really love Hacker News but I'm always looking for a replacement or another source for news.