I was just thinking about this yesterday when I read the Digg article.
I used to read Digg all the time, until it got to the point where the comments in each Digg submitted article stated how that article/news story was on reddit first. This is when I found out about reddit... haha
Not how I remember it at all. At that time Digg was quite a bit larger than Reddit. Then later Digg decided to really push the revenue generation, and users fled to the obvious free alternative.
It's always tragic when the profit motive gets in the way of making good products that people want to use. Like in the case of Apple and the way it has made it impossible for them to make great products. Oh wait.
I also used to read Digg all the time, but over time it became a cesspool of pro-microsoft trolling, and I left in disgust. Imagine being attacked every time you expressed legitimate disappointment with vista. I expect we are going to witness something similar this fall on reddit (and even here) when that new polished turd gets released.
Ever been to r/politics? Someone's paying college students to patrol some threads to make sure everyone agrees with the hive-mind. It's fun if you can find a good community.
There's something about writing "in digust" in italics that makes me laugh uncontrollably.
Looking through your past comments it is clear that you have some sort of grudge against Microsoft, so perhaps I am not surprised you were downvoted after all.
V4 was definitely the tipping point and nail in the coffin for Digg. However, once the Digg community became to large it became difficult to find interesting stories about a particular topic. At the same time twitter, hacker news and many of the sub-reddits became great ways to discover unique content.
So a combination of poor product design, a selling out the Digg community and availability of alternatives killed Digg.
I would argue that the "big break" was actually a bad thing for Reddit. The massive influx of disenfranchised Digg users contributed to the decline of quality on Reddit big-time.
reddit's quality is in renascence currently, as the big and popular subreddits (e.g. pics, science) have figured out what the 'moderate' button does. until every single one of the default subreddits start moderating, the main reddit will be rubbish.
They redesigned the site in a visually unappealing way and allowed news sources to auto submit content. Overnight, it became this ugly site where the only links were auto-submitted stories from popular newspapers, cable news, and other mainstream media. See this story for more: http://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill...
Actually Digg killed Digg with the redesign. One time after the redesign I went to the site and there was NO CONTENT anywhere. It wanted me to make friends with people before I would get to see any content.
I logged in. Still no content. That was the last time I visited digg.com, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
My guess is that if the acquirers just rever to the pre-redesign version Digg will come back to life.
I left Digg for Reddit because Reddit's community at the time valued articles with content over images. As Reddit has absorbed Digg's old user base, so too did it absorb much of the culture of Digg. Reddit no longer seems to have much focus on reading and has instead become a place to find funny images, much like Digg in its heyday. It feels inevitable that the culture of a website like Reddit will change over its life span but it bothered me to see it happen first-hand.
But with Reddit, there are thousands of others who agree with you, who have created tons of subreddits that would be relevant to whatever your interests. Obviously some communities are more active and more interesting than others, but they're around if you look. Here are some great article-based reddits:
The value in Digg was the tribe it created, not the software, not the ads, not the human beings keeping the lights on. It was the tribe of people who found interesting news on the internet and shared it.
FB, Reddit, HN did not "kill" Digg. The tribe growing up and or moving on to other things ended Digg. A similar tribe is at Reddit now, but a similar tribe used to live at Slashdot. Before that they probably lived on Usenet message boards or wherever.
In college, the comp sci program I was in had a private message board that ended up having a very similar vibe to digg/reddit/slashdot. Tech heavy, at times very heated political and religious debate. Eventually the original group graduated and it's never been quite the same.
It seems that each generation has something like digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever... that is "the thing" for hanging out and sharing/complaining about the news of the day or whatever is interesting. They might look like fads because on the internet they peak and crumble pretty quick, but really it is probably a natural cycle that communities and tribes go through.
Eventually HN and Reddit will become irrelevant to certain groups and the tribes that live there will move on to the next thing, whatever that might be.
I'm guessing the next site like this already exists or is going to be built soon, so any guesses as to what it will be if it's already out there?
From my perspective, Reddit is qualitatively different from all the sites you mentioned. Reddit is the first large news site which allows its users to create their own communities.
Most of the content on Reddit these days isn't technology- or politically oriented at all. This has changed over the last year or so - there are subreddits for pretty much anything. What makes these communities special is that a lot of them have very specialized and very diverse knowledge, not necessarily related to the subjects Reddit's early adopters were interested in. There are subreddits for science, fitness, finance, sex, art and just about any other subject people would be interested in following. What gets to the default front page doesn't even begin scratching the surface of what the ecosystem has to offer.
I have the contrarian opinion that Reddit won't be displaced for a long time in the realm of primarily text-based news sharing and discussion.
The more popular a community gets the more diluted its culture becomes. The communities become overrun with users who never have a chance to acclimate to the culture of the site because they see more new users like themselves than they do seasoned users. You see this effect taking hold on HN when you go to a thread and see a bunch of short joke comments and none of them are light gray. Eventually the core users leave for greener pastures or for a place that resembles why they joined the previous site to begin with. Every community is doomed to this fate if it continues to gain unchecked popularity. All things will eventually converge on pictures of cats.
When aging HN users get tired of the changing atmosphere they will splinter off.
What I'd like to see come next: A community for hacker+entrepreneur types with an HN-like policy on commenting and etiquette that doesn't pander to Silicon Valley and doesn't need to stay on the good side of tech rags. Bootstrapping, programming, running a company -- that's it. Nothing so vague as "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity."
I was struck by the authors comment "Well, they haven’t redesigned since what appears to be 1997, which has pleased their user base who like the simple look."
How long before web designers start complaining about reddit the way they complain about craigslist's design?
I guess designers could criticize its visual aesthetic, which is pretty austere, but design is how it works in addition to how it looks. I'd say reddit's devs have shown an interest in improving their interface and making it easier to use over time, whereas craigslist has not. You still can't browse apartment listings on a map, which is the reason why the Padmapper thing blew up so big.
The complaints will happen when that simplicity impedes information flow. It's not a matter of visual aesthetics, it's a matter of usefulness. CL's design impedes its usability, independent of its aesthetics.
In Craigslist case, there are clearly better ways to browse housing spots than in a list of links with non-standardized location information in the linktext. In Reddit and HN, part of the joy is serendipity...you don't need to aggregate the content behind each link at once...because of the voting system, you don't worry that clicking on the top link will be a waste of time. That's not the case with CL's chronologically ordered list.
Reddit has made some concessions with allowing thumbnails of image-based posts to show up. Otherwise, its minimalistic approach serves a real usability purpose and is not simply the result of stagnation.
Uh... picture subreddits are 75% of reddit's frontpage traffic and my little startup thinks that there are better ways of browsing pictures than a long list of thumbnails where the title is even larger than the thumbnail preview.
I used to be a huge Digg fan, and checked it religiously. Digg v4 is what completely drove me away.
The Digg v4 idea was good, but poorly executed. They shouldn't have suddenly forced you to follow other people to get your news. They were trying too hard to become a social network like Twitter / Facebook. Instead, I think they should have integrated with Twitter / Facebook to find top news, rather than starting their own social network.
I would say diggs attempts at manipulating the front page and banning people, blocking posts, and unfairly pushing some content to the front helped kill it. When I lost faith in the democracy of Digg I just stopped going and spent time with my votes elsewhere (reddit)
Digg did not kill Digg. Nor did Reddit, nor Facebook. People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes, nerd pop culture, and rage comics. Reddit and Digg both used to be places to go for interesting discussion based off decent links. Over time, good and insightful discussion gave way to quick-to-consume, funny one-liners. You can see it happening in popular subreddits. Recently the moderators of /r/science started taking a heavy hand and deleting irrelevant comments.
This isn't a problem with the sites, it's a problem with the users of these sites. This is democracy in action. It's cable news. People voting don't want to see challenging, thought-provoking content. They want to see things that confirm their biases, or things they can repost to facebook for quick laughs from their friends.
> People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes
1) With sub-reddits, this hasn't become as big of a problem unless a lot of users still keep the sub-reddits that annoy them. There is a reddit for everyone, especially since anyone can create their own sub-reddit. While Digg only had one idea tribe, Reddit has many. Moreover users that create their own sub-reddits can police them with other like-minded users.
2) Reddit is able to fit more content per page given their design. I don't have to keep clicking the next page link to get more.
I like reddit, almost completely because I've subscribed to several small subreddits that have a good community, high quality content, et al.
But there's a tricky problem. Subreddits like /r/programming dominate, while more focused subreddits like /r/ruby (or whatever) languish. If I have a ruby link and I care at all about karma, I'm going to post it in /r/programming.
Well that's the price for avoiding garbage, you have to do a little more work. It's not impossible to successfully have a branch of an existing sub-reddit. Just take a look at the offshoots of r/gaming: r/gamingnews and r/games; or even the branches off from r/politics like r/progressive and r/libertarian.
In your case, ruby already has a good news site and it doesn't need reddit. Rubyflow is more than sufficient imo
"That's the price for..." implies that this is constant across alternatives, but it's not. One alternative is a hierarchy with subtrees feeding into nodes higher up, so that /r/programming/ruby posts would appear in /r/programming. This has its own set of problems where the price to be paid is not the same as for reddit's completely flat model. I'm not saying this hierarchical model would be better, but it would have different pros and cons.
Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.
> "That's the price for..." implies that this is constant across alternatives, but it's not
Well if there isn't, as I've already mentioned, you can make your own sub-reddit.
> Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.
hmmm you're right... Reddit's sub-reddit's is imo a half-assed implementation of an idea tribe paper that showed up years ago on HN. To this day I can't find it.
Anyways the gist of the idea, is that everyone belongs to an idea tribe / group aimed that making wikipedia better. All of these groups have differences in what they think are accurate, right, cool, etc... However many groups have things that they agree on. The paper talks about how great it would be if we could have something that would highlight those commonalities.
> Well if there isn't, as I've already mentioned, you can make your own sub-reddit.
That doesn't mean anyone's going to use it. It takes a long time to grow a community. I would love for /r/trueskyrim to take off because /r/skyrim has become 99% garbage, 1% content. Unfortunately trueskyrim hasn't had a post in 6 months.
The only reason /r/Games ever took off was because it was started by the mods of /r/gaming and got lots of attention on /r/gaming's front page. Don't get me wrong /r/Games is wonderful, but without the publicity that it got from /r/gaming I doubt anyone would use it.
The best part about Reddit, is that you can move with people of a like mind to a different subreddit. /r/games and /r/programming come to mind. If you look, it's not that hard to find places where earnest discussion continues. You're just probably not going to find it on defaults like /r/pics, /r/funny and /r/adviceanimals. They're the mass-market reddit, with a more broad userbase. You have to dig a little deeper to find the places where people submit links to news and have reasoned discussion, but it's still there.
reddit partially gets around this by allowing users to create their own subreddits. i've been much happier with reddit since i unsubscribed from all the default subreddits.
Completely agree. I feel the strength of HN is in it's walled garden: Share whatever you want, vote on whatever you want, but stay on topic.
HN will be a great place to go to, so long as it is heavily (and transparently) moderated. Otherwise the hordes will come in, and destroy it with meme's and sensationalist articles.
That's certainly true, but I'd say most seasoned users on reddit don't subscribe to much of what's on default front page. The default reddits (funny, pics, f7, atheism, politics, etc) are basically as you describe. Rehashed memes and populist statements.
Anyone who's been on reddit long enough has a front page of all the sub communities they follow, and probably only a couple of the defaults.
The pop-culture types get the pop stuff and the veterans get the small, focused culture, so everyone's mostly satisfied.
When one community starts becoming watered down, someone will usually start a new subreddit, rather than go to a new site altogether.
Altogether, I think these will give reddit better longevity than slashdot/digg.
I don't think you can credit Digg's downfall entirely to its users. v4 and sponsored links were a slap to the face of users.
If you're bothered by the community then just subscribe to subreddits. It's the same with Facebook. Any post that annoys you can be filtered with a few clicks. It's quite customizable.
> People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes, nerd pop culture, and rage comics.
Are you basing theory on anything except your personal dislike of regurgitated memes, nerd pop culture and rage comics?
As far as I can tell all evidence points to the fact that Digg was in fact killed by their version 4 release, it was widely disliked by their users and you can find articles about sharp drops of pageviews (never recovered) after that specific release and, IIRC, also articles about reddit gaining pageviews at the same time.
Nobody killed Digg. Digg committed suicide by telling it's original, loyal user base to go fuck themselves in it's quest for more money and a broader audience. Digg became too greedy.
But it was pretty obvious much earlier on that Digg had zero respect for its users. In many ways, Digg had a very old school broadcast attitude: the users were merely part of the product, only the advertisers mattered.
The problem digg faced is that their loyal customers were not sufficient to warrant the amount of money they had raised. If they had done nothing, it would have been suicide as well.
The problem they faced, then, was in deluding themselves about their valuation, and raising more capital (and incurring greater obligations) than they could meet.
Digg were apparently sustainable at their prior valuation, and with their existing userbase.
yeah, but I think they believed they could grow into something bigger. I.e, the same thing all startups believe, and typically fail to do.
Don't get me wrong, I think they'd have been far better off taking far less money and simply being a profitable property. I think nearly all startups would be better off doing this. I just don't believe that digg did anything abnormal for a typical startup.
They sold their investors the idea that they could monetize their users at a higher level than their previous advertising model permitted. That meant that they had to come up with a new model and that new model pissed off the users and ultimately killed the egg laying goose.
This is the same problem Facebook is facing having promised investors astronomical per-user revenue. They continue pissing off their users and if they aren't careful the next ad-based redesign could be the turning point.
In any such ecosystem where the inmates are running the asylum, pissing them off is not a good course of action.
The tribe knew that it was the reason why Digg was what Digg was. But arrogance on the part of the upper management at Digg was its downfall; they couldn't come to terms with the basic fact that the people were responsible for Digg's success. So they decided to tweak it, "enhance" it, modify it to "Digg 2.0", and the people revolted.
Lesson: if you are a user-driven site, listen to them. Don't piss them off.
None of these things killed Digg. Digg was simply a transitional meme.
Prior to the Internet you had mass media controlling distribution. The Internet comes along and you have things like Usenet and the proto-Web.
Then comes the first crowdsourcing sites to allow people to find content without employing people to curate that information. Slashdot was certainly early in this trend.
What Digg allowed is a certain band of people to control the information flow. People would get paid to promote submissions as it became clear that a front-page submission generated a lot of pageviews.
But what became apparent with all these community sites (and this includes forums) is they start with an early group who provide value to each other. This group ends up becoming insular. De facto standards form. But even in the Usenet days you had the "September" problem (where new college freshmen would get Internet access and not understand the "rules" and conventions that were in place and would ask questions that had already been answered, etc).
Basically all these social sites get worse over time as the masses flood in.
Digg died because the idea that there is a central source for news was a holdover idea from the old media days. Reddit understood this. Global reddit is basically useless. The subreddits are the only remotely interesting thing about reddit.
People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
I've heard the same complaints about Twitter.
Facebook for most people is not a source of news. It doesn't have the same link-sharing mindshare (IMHO) for most people that other mediums have. Ultimately I think the biggest use case for Facebook is still sharing photos. People go to Facebook to find out what their friends are doing. Very few go to find out what's going on in the world (much as Facebook would like that to be the case).
I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
I agree with most of your post, but would clarify:
>> People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
Two things:
1. "Worse" is subjective.
2. I think it's more of a trade-off between quality and size. Hacker News doesn't have to get "worse", but would have to remain niche in order to avoid it. That is why subreddits can succeed, because Reddit is essentially a platform for lots of niche communities.
If by "niche" you mean high quality, in depth content that takes effort to digest, as opposed to brain candy that makes you feel like you're in a special club when you're not, and that you're thinking when you're not, then I would very much prefer the "niche".
I think the value of a site declines over time relative to how long an individual has been viewing it. The first few weeks I started browsing Hacker News, a large portion of the articles were interesting.
The percentage of interesting articles has declined over time. Is that because I have overdosed a bit on the types of articles and discussions that appear here? Or simply because I have consumed more internet based news now than I had when I started reading HN? Who is to say.
Yes, sites in general can and have declined. However, due to the fact that I have not seen trolls dominate HN, and in my view the quality of HN is approximately as good as it has always been, I find it difficult to measure the quality of the site to a precision that would allow me to track it over time. In my own head.
The short answer is, this site is still among the best discussion news sites on the internet.
I am not a programmer, just a normal computer user with above average knowledge compared to the bog standard users. I love this site because i learn something new every single day. Same with Hackaday. I find reading articles on things you know absolutely nothing about, makes them that much interesting. For instance, i love glossing over C or ASM code, but i couldn't understand it if it depended on my life; i know nothing about programming (i can make basic applications with Visual Basic, which is looked down upon on every forum i've read).
I'm pretty much in the same boat. I hang out here so much because a) a lot of the content shared is interesting to anyone with an interest in technology, computers, or lately the world in general (seems like HN has been growing more broad), and b) With the rare exception, the discussion here is interesting and executed with respect. At times the conversations are more interesting than the articles. People here often cite sources, they highlight points they liked about a post before they disagree. I had a philosophy teacher who often would randomly just throw out into the class "Intelligent people disagree! It's ok!" I feel like that is supported here, a majority of the time.
I think that's a very good point. It's similar to how when you start learning something new, you'll make a lot of progress easily and everything will seem fresh and original. After a while, you've discovered most of the big ideas in the field and have see a lot of what is on offer, so things start to seem worse and less original.
A good way to test this hypothesis would be to check with people who are new to the scene and new to Hacker News. Do they react to the content similarly to how old members initially reacted?
>I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
Reddit is the easiest way I know of to generate a targeted community. I've set up subreddits, forgot about them, and come back to find them with thousands of members and fresh content. Are there other comparable ways to do this?
Starting a wiki? I know that wikis spring up for recently released video games pretty frequently, although I'm not sure if anything like that happens for non-video game content.
> Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
So I went over there, and the first article is about protocol-less links, and the first comment notes that they have performance issues in css for IE7 & 8. The second article is a link to dadgum and the first comment is about optimizing network communication.
Agreed. In many ways I find Reddit to be much better and more enjoyable. First, it provides a better UX, especially for posting and revising comments. Second, there is much less pedantry there than on HN ("Well technically... Well technically... Exception in this exceptional case! No it's not. Yes it is! Exotic edge case under theoretical conditions I read about in a book that one time!" etc.). Third, there are less haters. Fourth, there are lots of funny and creative writers there, again, unlike here on HN. There are definitely positives about HN, and both HN and Reddit share some of the same weaknesses (a unimind or Thought Police effect: if you post a view that strays too far from the median you will get downvotes that penalizes your karma, even if your post was thoughtful, well-written, constructive, polite, etc.)
It seems like proggit is dying. I've been subbed to it for a few years and there used to be a lot more submissions. I don't have data to back it up and hopefully I am wrong but if I am not I imagine us programmers prefer to go to sources totally dedicated for programming instead of a mixed bag. It would make sense for proggit to be dying out though because Reddit used to be primarily for tech and has of course now shifted out of tech and into everything.
I stopped following proggit months ago for the simple reason that there's too much not-about-programming posts. Too much of the content was "announcing my iphone app!", "omg industry gossip!" and stackoverflow repost variety. And I was sick of it.
I tried for about 2 months to politely explain to posters why their posts didn't fit the guidelines and then I quit and gave up. Why fight an inevitability?
"Mainstream" is often content that is polished enough, well done enough, and original enough that it can stand on its own without referring to fringe cultural appeal. "Alternative" content often relies on the fact that its fans like its particular style of "alternativeness" to compensate for the fact that its execution is lacking.
Reddit as a whole brings immense value in the sheer volume of unusual content. The AMA section varies from banal to fascinating, for example — and the strength of the interesting content far outweighs the easy-to-skip bad.
The quality of individual subreddits varies wildly, of course. This should not be a surprise. In a way, Reddit's subreddits feature brought back the spirit of Usenet.
I think businesses face significant hurdles (and are likely to die) when the founders lose interest in running them. Digg. Twitter (Dorsey left but came back and saved it). Yahoo. Flickr. MySpace. The list is endless.
Even Microsoft is not the same since Bill Gates handed the reigns to Ballmer. They're just too big (Office/Windows cash cows) to actually die from that.
Here's the blog post TechCrunch flamed me about (called me a liar and whatnot). I wrote it after I tried the alpha of diggv4, but before it was released to the public; I have no idea what happened internally, but the resulting product was indeed pretty devastating -- the final self-inflicted wound after years of encouraging power users and sacrificing the best interests of the userbase: http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadOne example of being jerks: http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/sense-of-humor-failure-at-digg.h...
After that I was unbanned, but not after an employee of Digg defamed me in a blog post by making false claims: http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/unbanned-from-digg.html
And here's an example of how reddit people weren't jerks when I inadvertently brought the site great slowness: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/tale-of-two-cultures.html
Digg wanted to make money.
If Conde hadn't bought Reddit, then it would likely have been a far closer race.
When your competition isn't interested in making money, you're always going to be at a major disadvantage.
Yes, REALLY My memory seems to function better than yours.
Let me restate that the pro-microsoft trolls were the reason I left Digg in disgust.
Looking through your past comments it is clear that you have some sort of grudge against Microsoft, so perhaps I am not surprised you were downvoted after all.
In case you didn't know, Digg was my day job from 2004-2007.
So a combination of poor product design, a selling out the Digg community and availability of alternatives killed Digg.
So the question is: What was the big deal with v4?
I logged in. Still no content. That was the last time I visited digg.com, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
My guess is that if the acquirers just rever to the pre-redesign version Digg will come back to life.
http://www.reddit.com/r/indepthstories/
http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/
http://www.reddit.com/r/longtext/
http://www.reddit.com/r/offbeat/
http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/
FB, Reddit, HN did not "kill" Digg. The tribe growing up and or moving on to other things ended Digg. A similar tribe is at Reddit now, but a similar tribe used to live at Slashdot. Before that they probably lived on Usenet message boards or wherever.
In college, the comp sci program I was in had a private message board that ended up having a very similar vibe to digg/reddit/slashdot. Tech heavy, at times very heated political and religious debate. Eventually the original group graduated and it's never been quite the same.
It seems that each generation has something like digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever... that is "the thing" for hanging out and sharing/complaining about the news of the day or whatever is interesting. They might look like fads because on the internet they peak and crumble pretty quick, but really it is probably a natural cycle that communities and tribes go through.
Eventually HN and Reddit will become irrelevant to certain groups and the tribes that live there will move on to the next thing, whatever that might be.
I'm guessing the next site like this already exists or is going to be built soon, so any guesses as to what it will be if it's already out there?
Most of the content on Reddit these days isn't technology- or politically oriented at all. This has changed over the last year or so - there are subreddits for pretty much anything. What makes these communities special is that a lot of them have very specialized and very diverse knowledge, not necessarily related to the subjects Reddit's early adopters were interested in. There are subreddits for science, fitness, finance, sex, art and just about any other subject people would be interested in following. What gets to the default front page doesn't even begin scratching the surface of what the ecosystem has to offer.
I have the contrarian opinion that Reddit won't be displaced for a long time in the realm of primarily text-based news sharing and discussion.
I think the only thing that would really kill reddit is if the people in charge try too hard to monetize it, like Digg did.
When aging HN users get tired of the changing atmosphere they will splinter off.
What I'd like to see come next: A community for hacker+entrepreneur types with an HN-like policy on commenting and etiquette that doesn't pander to Silicon Valley and doesn't need to stay on the good side of tech rags. Bootstrapping, programming, running a company -- that's it. Nothing so vague as "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity."
How long before web designers start complaining about reddit the way they complain about craigslist's design?
In Craigslist case, there are clearly better ways to browse housing spots than in a list of links with non-standardized location information in the linktext. In Reddit and HN, part of the joy is serendipity...you don't need to aggregate the content behind each link at once...because of the voting system, you don't worry that clicking on the top link will be a waste of time. That's not the case with CL's chronologically ordered list.
Reddit has made some concessions with allowing thumbnails of image-based posts to show up. Otherwise, its minimalistic approach serves a real usability purpose and is not simply the result of stagnation.
Picc.it is tuned to sharing pictures with people you don't know, but share your interests.
Think of it as the difference between glomping onto a pre-existing community (e.g. Facebook friends), and creating a new one (e.g. Reddit).
The Digg v4 idea was good, but poorly executed. They shouldn't have suddenly forced you to follow other people to get your news. They were trying too hard to become a social network like Twitter / Facebook. Instead, I think they should have integrated with Twitter / Facebook to find top news, rather than starting their own social network.
This isn't a problem with the sites, it's a problem with the users of these sites. This is democracy in action. It's cable news. People voting don't want to see challenging, thought-provoking content. They want to see things that confirm their biases, or things they can repost to facebook for quick laughs from their friends.
1) With sub-reddits, this hasn't become as big of a problem unless a lot of users still keep the sub-reddits that annoy them. There is a reddit for everyone, especially since anyone can create their own sub-reddit. While Digg only had one idea tribe, Reddit has many. Moreover users that create their own sub-reddits can police them with other like-minded users.
2) Reddit is able to fit more content per page given their design. I don't have to keep clicking the next page link to get more.
But there's a tricky problem. Subreddits like /r/programming dominate, while more focused subreddits like /r/ruby (or whatever) languish. If I have a ruby link and I care at all about karma, I'm going to post it in /r/programming.
In your case, ruby already has a good news site and it doesn't need reddit. Rubyflow is more than sufficient imo
Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.
Well if there isn't, as I've already mentioned, you can make your own sub-reddit.
> Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.
hmmm you're right... Reddit's sub-reddit's is imo a half-assed implementation of an idea tribe paper that showed up years ago on HN. To this day I can't find it.
Anyways the gist of the idea, is that everyone belongs to an idea tribe / group aimed that making wikipedia better. All of these groups have differences in what they think are accurate, right, cool, etc... However many groups have things that they agree on. The paper talks about how great it would be if we could have something that would highlight those commonalities.
That doesn't mean anyone's going to use it. It takes a long time to grow a community. I would love for /r/trueskyrim to take off because /r/skyrim has become 99% garbage, 1% content. Unfortunately trueskyrim hasn't had a post in 6 months.
The only reason /r/Games ever took off was because it was started by the mods of /r/gaming and got lots of attention on /r/gaming's front page. Don't get me wrong /r/Games is wonderful, but without the publicity that it got from /r/gaming I doubt anyone would use it.
Why not seed it yourself for a few weeks and see what happens?
> The only reason /r/Games ever took off was because it was started by the mods of /r/gaming and got lots of attention on /r/gaming's front page.
It's not like you can't work with the mods of other sub-reddits. r/libertarian is on r/politic's sub-reddit page
That is 100% your own fault.
HN will be a great place to go to, so long as it is heavily (and transparently) moderated. Otherwise the hordes will come in, and destroy it with meme's and sensationalist articles.
Anyone who's been on reddit long enough has a front page of all the sub communities they follow, and probably only a couple of the defaults.
The pop-culture types get the pop stuff and the veterans get the small, focused culture, so everyone's mostly satisfied.
When one community starts becoming watered down, someone will usually start a new subreddit, rather than go to a new site altogether.
Altogether, I think these will give reddit better longevity than slashdot/digg.
If you're bothered by the community then just subscribe to subreddits. It's the same with Facebook. Any post that annoys you can be filtered with a few clicks. It's quite customizable.
Are you basing theory on anything except your personal dislike of regurgitated memes, nerd pop culture and rage comics?
As far as I can tell all evidence points to the fact that Digg was in fact killed by their version 4 release, it was widely disliked by their users and you can find articles about sharp drops of pageviews (never recovered) after that specific release and, IIRC, also articles about reddit gaining pageviews at the same time.
Part 1: http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/04/08/war-13/
Part 2: http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/12/17/war-23/
Part 3: http://ncomment.com/blog/2012/01/06/war-33/
But it was pretty obvious much earlier on that Digg had zero respect for its users. In many ways, Digg had a very old school broadcast attitude: the users were merely part of the product, only the advertisers mattered.
Digg were apparently sustainable at their prior valuation, and with their existing userbase.
Icarus problem.
Digg was viable previously. Hence the Icarus problem. They tried to fly too high.
Most startups are stillborn. That's a different Greek myth.
Don't get me wrong, I think they'd have been far better off taking far less money and simply being a profitable property. I think nearly all startups would be better off doing this. I just don't believe that digg did anything abnormal for a typical startup.
This is the same problem Facebook is facing having promised investors astronomical per-user revenue. They continue pissing off their users and if they aren't careful the next ad-based redesign could be the turning point.
In any such ecosystem where the inmates are running the asylum, pissing them off is not a good course of action.
The tribe knew that it was the reason why Digg was what Digg was. But arrogance on the part of the upper management at Digg was its downfall; they couldn't come to terms with the basic fact that the people were responsible for Digg's success. So they decided to tweak it, "enhance" it, modify it to "Digg 2.0", and the people revolted.
Lesson: if you are a user-driven site, listen to them. Don't piss them off.
Prior to the Internet you had mass media controlling distribution. The Internet comes along and you have things like Usenet and the proto-Web.
Then comes the first crowdsourcing sites to allow people to find content without employing people to curate that information. Slashdot was certainly early in this trend.
What Digg allowed is a certain band of people to control the information flow. People would get paid to promote submissions as it became clear that a front-page submission generated a lot of pageviews.
But what became apparent with all these community sites (and this includes forums) is they start with an early group who provide value to each other. This group ends up becoming insular. De facto standards form. But even in the Usenet days you had the "September" problem (where new college freshmen would get Internet access and not understand the "rules" and conventions that were in place and would ask questions that had already been answered, etc).
Basically all these social sites get worse over time as the masses flood in.
Digg died because the idea that there is a central source for news was a holdover idea from the old media days. Reddit understood this. Global reddit is basically useless. The subreddits are the only remotely interesting thing about reddit.
People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
I've heard the same complaints about Twitter.
Facebook for most people is not a source of news. It doesn't have the same link-sharing mindshare (IMHO) for most people that other mediums have. Ultimately I think the biggest use case for Facebook is still sharing photos. People go to Facebook to find out what their friends are doing. Very few go to find out what's going on in the world (much as Facebook would like that to be the case).
I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
>> People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
Two things:
1. "Worse" is subjective.
2. I think it's more of a trade-off between quality and size. Hacker News doesn't have to get "worse", but would have to remain niche in order to avoid it. That is why subreddits can succeed, because Reddit is essentially a platform for lots of niche communities.
The percentage of interesting articles has declined over time. Is that because I have overdosed a bit on the types of articles and discussions that appear here? Or simply because I have consumed more internet based news now than I had when I started reading HN? Who is to say.
Yes, sites in general can and have declined. However, due to the fact that I have not seen trolls dominate HN, and in my view the quality of HN is approximately as good as it has always been, I find it difficult to measure the quality of the site to a precision that would allow me to track it over time. In my own head.
The short answer is, this site is still among the best discussion news sites on the internet.
A good way to test this hypothesis would be to check with people who are new to the scene and new to Hacker News. Do they react to the content similarly to how old members initially reacted?
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
Reddit is the easiest way I know of to generate a targeted community. I've set up subreddits, forgot about them, and come back to find them with thousands of members and fresh content. Are there other comparable ways to do this?
So I went over there, and the first article is about protocol-less links, and the first comment notes that they have performance issues in css for IE7 & 8. The second article is a link to dadgum and the first comment is about optimizing network communication.
It's not HN, but awful is an overstatement.
Agreed. In many ways I find Reddit to be much better and more enjoyable. First, it provides a better UX, especially for posting and revising comments. Second, there is much less pedantry there than on HN ("Well technically... Well technically... Exception in this exceptional case! No it's not. Yes it is! Exotic edge case under theoretical conditions I read about in a book that one time!" etc.). Third, there are less haters. Fourth, there are lots of funny and creative writers there, again, unlike here on HN. There are definitely positives about HN, and both HN and Reddit share some of the same weaknesses (a unimind or Thought Police effect: if you post a view that strays too far from the median you will get downvotes that penalizes your karma, even if your post was thoughtful, well-written, constructive, polite, etc.)
I tried for about 2 months to politely explain to posters why their posts didn't fit the guidelines and then I quit and gave up. Why fight an inevitability?
They only get worse for people who don't like mainstream content.
The quality of individual subreddits varies wildly, of course. This should not be a surprise. In a way, Reddit's subreddits feature brought back the spirit of Usenet.
Even Microsoft is not the same since Bill Gates handed the reigns to Ballmer. They're just too big (Office/Windows cash cows) to actually die from that.
Founder disinterest is lethal.