An open letter to Kevin Rose from Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian | Hacker News Reader

An open letter to Kevin Rose from Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian

alexisohanian.com

139 pointsdcurtis69 comments

Uhh...what? These are features that seem kindof obvious to me...I think they're awesome. In fact, this is really similar to something that I used to do on my website over a year ago (we stopped doing it because there weren't enough users to make it feasible at that time...some of the ideas still exist though).

Alexis, one of the problems with reddit, at least right now, is that there are just too many freaking people. I don't care about the majority of the users on the site. If there was a way to see reddit as it was 5 years ago when it was you and 10 other people, that would be great, and I think that is what the move digg has made here is trying to accomplish.

(Shameless plug for my site, which is embarrassing when compared to places like here, reddit, or digg, but still just as addictive to me: http://newslily.com - the part I'm talking about [show me what my friends are doing] is here: http://newslily.com/lilypad ])

My only issue with this is that it assumes my friends use Digg too, and they don't. Kevin speaks a little bit about "tastemakers" (how do I find them? Why do I trust them?) and "publishers" (which sounds a lot like RSS spam... right to you in Digg).

I hope there is a setting for Top News to be the default, and maybe some way of matching people who you are compatible with Digging to set them as your Tastemakers, allowing a transition away from Top News to something more personalized.

Your point about RSS spam made me realize that the new design could be interesting.

Right now, I use Google Reader to get content from feeds I personally selected. (so not RSS Spam, just publishers I selected myself) If I want to find links that are popular right now, I come on Hacker News (like I would on Digg, but I haven't checked it out in a long time), because the discovery/social aspect of Google Reader does not work for me. I also get links from friends on Facebook. Finally, on Twitter, I follow mostly what Kevin Rose calls "tastemakers" and sometimes get some links from them, amongst the general "what are you doing?" updates.

But if I just want to read some stuff, it's all separated.

Friends, tastemakers and publishers in the same interface could be a really good mix.

Basically, Digg can become the one-stop shop for links and articles: some from my friends, some from tastemakers, my RSS feeds, and I suppose also from the Digg users in general (friends or not). And I get the ability to share each of them in turn from that same interface.

Reddit comments are excellent, and I think that while having a buzzing community creates a lot more noise, there is also a lot more great content. Initiatives like $180,000 for Haiti, or the secret santa wouldn't have been the same 5 years ago.

Yes and no. I just made the mistake of looking at /r/pics, and it's a sty.

That said, there are a variety of good communities on Reddit.

I like /pics. Different strokes for different folks.

Not sure what tilts me more, reading reddit comments or reading that reddit comments are supposed to be excellent.

That place has been a sewer for years and I hate that it was ruined.

> That place has been a sewer for years and I hate that it was ruined.

That's a bit like saying Usenet is a waste of space or IRC is full of trolls. Reddit, like Usenet and IRC, is more of an enabling technology than a single community.

In each case, there are some really great communities where you can find a good signal to noise ratio. There are also some fairly pointless ones that are just rants or FUD or whatever. Fortunately, no-one makes you read every sub-reddit, any more than you are forced to read every Usenet group or follow every IRC channel. Just sign up to the ones that have discussions you find interesting and ignore the rest.

I'm guessing you weren't there the first few years.

Where? I've been on Usenet for well over a decade, and I was lurking on Reddit within months of its birth. The main reddit has always been overrun with a whole bunch of stuff of varying quality, and the best material and most interesting discussions have been in the specialist subreddits for several years.

I'll clarify a bit - yes, there is a lot of crap too, but reading the comments is just as big a deal for me as the submissions themselves.

Some unsolicited advice for Newslily: explain it a little better. The up/down arrows appear to be clickable, but aren't for unregistered or new users and there is no error message. New users can click on the "random" button, but it's not really clear what the randomness is. Etc.

Lower the barrier to entry a bit for new users. Not too far (that's the balance that every community must strike), but a little bit.

In another life, we'd have made usercreated reddits a better solution for the curse of popularity.

People weren't making "friends" on digg for much else than spreading their content, so I suspect most of the networks in place aren't adding much value to me as a reader. V4 makes the process all the more transparent - publishers plugging in RSS feeds that autodigg each post is a far cry from a reader powered frontpage. And to be fair, of those first 10 redditors you miss, over half of them were me ;)

There's still a void between random links my facebook friends like and random links tweeters (?) I follow like that solves the signal/noise problem. Someone will fill it - I'd love for it to be newslily. Just promise you'll gank from Steve's commenting system, it really is top notch (in my biased opinion).

>And to be fair, of those first 10 redditors you miss, over half of them were me ;)

Ahahahaha I laugh because I know exactly what you're talking about ;-).

Your guys' comment system really is, in my opinion, the most addictive feature on the site. Those damn orange envelopes man... :) Thanks for the kind words, really.

s/orange/orangered

Your problems with Reddit can be easily remedied by subscribing to only the sub-reddits that you care about.

I agree, I think I might actually go back to digg and try this out. If they gave enough intelligent filtering options + other extremely useful features, this could even draw people away from HN theoretically.

While they're at it, screw diaspora, digg should go after facebook as well, I'd trust them more (which isn't saying much.)

The other problem with Reddit is of course that it's fairly often broken or ridiculously slow lately.

Digg has already shopped itself around to all the big buyers and they passed (explicitly or not). This move is an attempt by Digg to position themselves as a potential rival to Twitter and/or Facebook. Now all they need is one big dumb company that buys into that illusion.

I wish them luck in getting bought out. Seems like Digg would be a good fit for Yahoo, considering their new content-only direction.

Digg's front page hasn't been controlled by the users in a long time. The new changes hand control over from an anonymous group of moderators to your friends and people you follow, which seems like an improvement.

Has he spent any time with Kevin? Because frankly this version reeks of Kevin - it's just endless twiddling with design and a fear of doing anything to actually change the way the site works.

You certainly know him better than me, Owen. I don't profess to know Kevin at all. In fact, I'd be interested to read your "open letter to alexis: stfu, here's the real explanation for digg4"

Perhaps. But I've really moved beyond it, and anything I say is probably not going to be constructive (and I guess my comment fits that criticiscm). At least until I get a green card and get to be something other than an employee in this country. Because I'd really like to do rather than say.

As someone who used to work at a newspaper and harangue the business editor about how corrupt the editorial process was, long before digg, I occasionally get angry. Probably for similar reasons to your post.

Cmon green card...

you always sound really bitter about Digg. I really hope you've let this go and done awesome stuff post Digg, rather than dwelling on the past. This isn't an insult, just concern.

This is such obvious linkbait that it even admits "this title is linkbait" at the bottom. He means give the power back to Kevin Rose, which is exactly what appears to have happened recently. So... non-story.

What? I don't understand what the big problem with some HN users and 'linkbait'.

Who cares? It's called journalism. In order to catch attention, the headline has to be attention grabbing.

This post was soo timely for HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1384994

If the article was garbage, then yes I would agree with you. But who cares if he manipulates the headline to get attention.

The next time you write a blog post, or anything, that doesn't have an attention grabbing headline and gets a ton of traffic...please let us know.

Indulge me a Simpsons quote:

  Baby-Proofer: Your baby is dead!
  Homer and Marge: [horrified scream]
  Baby-Proofer: That's what you'd hear if your baby
  fell victim to one of the thousands of deathtraps
  lurking in the average American home!

I would like to think that HN follows some of PG's taste for things, and none of his essays have "Your Baby Is Dead" style titles, even when the ideas inside are provocative. I think there's a line to draw, even though nobody is ever going to agree, but that's the way social norms are.

He's indeed CEO now, but the message to the VCs is that this appears to be a deliberate desparation move to find a suitor (remember we're post series C now) by bolting on the hot new things of the last year -- as opposed to the innovation that got digg to their titan status of years ago.

what does he care? if you think they are making a mistake, great, they are your competitor... why bother writing an open letter?

I also don't get what he is ranting about..I think the new Digg looks great, just when I was starting to get sick of the top news stories not being relevant to me, now I will be able to follow people with similar interests, just like twitter, but I don't have to read through what they had for breakfast to get the links I want.

They're not his competitor, he left Reddit months ago.

Exactly the reason why I felt OK publishing it. I'm still a redditor of course, but breadpig is my only ... uhh.. horse in this race.

By the way, thanks for Reddit. I still enjoy it immensely, even if it has gone downhill lately.

As a blogger, the fact of the matter is, all I ever use Digg for is skimming to see if they have any cool videos to post. I don't even use Reddit for that anymore. I feel like their communities aren't super-welcoming like HN is, and have avoided them.

I think that Kevin realizes that to reach a broader audience the site needs to have value for people who don't choose to be active members of the community (or want their own little niches). Facebook does some of this, but it's too closed-off (unless you're on a fan page). Twitter does some of this, but it's too broad in some ways. If anything, it kinda takes the best elements from each.

Digg has a lot of problems with the way its audience has grown, and as a result, it's become overly-influenced by one core group of people: Young guys. Jezebel actually called them out on this recently:

http://jezebel.com/5531991/boys-will-be-boys-the-problem-wit...

If you want to win the influence game, you have to have more than just guys and more than just Justin Bieber fans. And the fact of the matter is, you can still have a huge audience on Twitter even without ever touching the trending topics. The current Digg, you have to roll the dice the right way. Reddit, you have to also keep your fingers crossed.

And to win the publishers over, you have to a) not treat them as if they're jerks for wanting to build traffic b) not waste their time. This design does both.

I'm going to use this once it goes up, because it doesn't feel like the deck is stacked against my little blog ( http://shortformblog.com/ for the curious).

Digg still crushes reddit in traffic. I'm not saying traffic is an indicator of profitablity, but it's apparent they are either marketing it better, or more people prefer it. Either way, it's tough to argue "with the people" based on the author's indication of importance.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com/

This may have to do with the fact that Kevin Rose was a mini-celebrity in the tech world when Digg was launched.

But what about PG ?

(for the record, reddit is my #1 site)

Maybe in traffic, but the same number of people google for the two sites, and the trend line is not in diggs favor:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=digg%2Creddit%2Cslashdot%2Cha...

I wonder how much of their lead in traffic has to do with better SEO on Digg submissions. I see Digg submissions come up all the time in Google searches. I hardly ever see Reddit submissions.

"back when "social media gurus" were simply called "tools.""

Did we stop calling them tools?

..back when we were able to game Digg (algorithms were very predictable) for fun and profit.

I don't have a dog in this race and I actually agree with Alexis (I don't like the new product direction - it does seem very derivative as opposed to innovative)

But if you look at where Pownce was going it looks like Kevin has liked some of these ideas for some time now.

I do agree that these features are 'inspired' by other apps. Had they launched these in 2006 it'd be a copycat move. At this point, these are features that I think many users expect in something like digg. Facebook features have also been 'inspired' by other apps (i.e. twitter) and you can't argue with their growth. Digg has looked more like a forum and less like a startup for a long time, and this may be a catching up on lost ground, and a prelude to hopefully more innovative days.

Reddit's quality has gone down in flames; it's 6 months away from being Digg with a shitty (if lovable) interface. I still visit Reddit, but less than ever. So to talk down to Digg, which Reddit shamelessly copied, and while Digg is at least trying to innovate is odd. What has reddit done lately? Subreddits? Narwhals? I still have love for Reddit, but this post seems obnoxious.

Two minutes tweaking your subreddits will give you a much better experience. I found that just removing main Reddit made my first page an order of magnitude better.

I concur 100% with this. The 'main' reddit isn't all that great and more of a distraction than anything. The strong use of subreddits has increased my interest in Reddit strongly over the past few months. Otherwise yes, what is on the front page is just a precursor to what will be on Digg the next day.

That being said, these things just funnel around in a hierarchy. HN, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc all suffer a bit from this.

can it be confirmed that KR isn't making the calls anymore at digg?

Let me only confirm that I'm entirely speculating.

You don't like the direction Digg is going. If you were the one making the decisions what would you do?

Hmm... User-created diggs (like we have on reddit, but better articulated & designed - I say this as the closest thing reddit had to a designer, I'm no designer). I have no idea about headcount, so I won't speculate there, only to say that reddit's ratio of 1 non tech for every 5 technical worked well for us.

And i'd make that digg mascot more prominent, maybe change it around for holidays, too.

User-created sections like the subreddits on reddit would be cool. In fact I think the subreddits are what I prefer about reddit over digg. I mainly go to the programming subreddit and sometimes I am deceived into thinking that all of reddit is about programming because it in itself is a large community.

But apart from the programming subreddit I go to the AMA section from time to time and that has allowed me to really grasp the beauty of the subreddit system. It allows each subreddit to develop it's own personality in that it's not just the topics that change as is the case with a category system but the feel and concept of the community changes as well and it offers a unique experience to learn and interact.

You guys really did a great job with Reddit!

Basically reddit with a different skin?

Is digg a site you frequent? Why so interested in its fate? Wouldn't you rather see reddit leave it in the dust?

My understanding is that KR is now back in charge, with more control then he's had in some time.

This is also my understanding from people in the know. Jay Adelson was removed from the company and most of the codebase for Digg v4, that was supposed to be launching sometime soon, was scrapped and Kevin took over the direction of the company again.

Hi think Alexis is biased by the fact that in some way Reddit was lucky in not having the social dynamics leading to a monopolization of the whole site.

This is instead what happened to Digg, and to many other social news sites, and the only fix is probably to switch to a hierarchical model. This also happened to OKNOtizie, that is the "Italian Digg", that I happen to run currently.

So I'm looking forward to the Digg changes, and in general to the idea of binding users to real identities of other social network sites, like twitter or facebook. We implemented a great deal of filters, but this does not work when a great percentage of your users are not playing the game correctly.

Subreddits (by design) somewhat prevent this monopolization of the front.

My response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388142

I'm a Reddit fan but come on Alexis. Let Kevin be. Digg v4 hasn't even been released to the public yet. You left Reddit a long time ago. If you were still at Reddit then I'd chalk this down as a little trash talk from a competitor. You're no longer in the game. Give him time to prove himself.

My intention was quite the opposite from trash talking. As a commenter articulated, this feels more like something forced on him by acquisition hungry VCs than of his own design.

Digg was in a way one of the best external things that could've happened to reddit: it did all the work of educating people to the concept of "social news" and provided a Goliath to our community's David.

The VC is a huge assumption for one thing, and it sort of comes off as concern trolling.

I assume the April 1st 2011 reddit site redesign has been decided then.

This link crashes the browser on iPad.

an open letter to Alexis Ohanian

fix search, it's been broken for a couple of weeks now.

Reddit search? Was there ever one?

sort of, before you'd get "crap" results, now you get no results. All you get is:

Our search machines are under too much load to handle your request right now. :( Sorry for the inconvenience. Try again in a little bit -- but please don't mash reload; that only makes the problem worse.

http://www.searchreddit.com/

Except I never use it, googling site:reddit.com along with my search terms and possibly inurl:subreddit-keyword gets the job done

I retired from reddit 7months ago, but let me direct you to code.reddit.com where I encourage you to contribute :)

A couple of weeks?

open letter to you:

it's open source, submit a patch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com