Are we still talking about this? | Hacker News Reader

Are we still talking about this?

alexisohanian.com

48 pointsjaybol26 comments

This was my favorite part.

"Michael, just because you put a question mark after things, doesn't make them evidence to support your headline of 'Guy Who Copied Digg Slams Digg For Copying Twitter.'"

That might be because I find the rhetorical question incredibly annoying outside of a Socratic setting.

On a different note, I'm disappointed that Arrington would fuel this little drama production, but of course, that is his MO.

Drama creates pageviews.

They all copied slashdot and the idea of a purely voting/community driven site was discussed frequently on slashdot for years before digg or reddit. So there :)

One day I want Sir Tim Berners-Lee to hop into one of those threads and tell everyone to GTFO.

But really, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. It's cliche for a good reason (though the English teacher in my brain is yelling at me for using one).

I think of del.icio.us as the direct ancestor. Digg came out when joshu's baby was the new hotness and everybody and their dog were trying to clone it.

That reminds me, on Demo Day (Aug '05) del.icio.us was the site we kept hearing over and over. Explaining how we were different from them was pretty straightforward [Del.icio.us is king of social bookmarking, a way to keep make your bookmarks always accessible, the by-product is you can see what people are saving for later. Ppl use reddit to find & share new & interesting links about anything popular at the moment, not reference material to save for later.].

But our spartan designs did look similar, which I suspect is what made the connection.

Does anyone else remember kuro5hin? If my memory is correct it pre-dated Digg by several years but of course didn't have the same level of success. Digg deserves a lot of credit for making the idea work on a big scale.

kuro5hin definitely shared the voting element, but other than that it was pretty different than the reddit or digg. It was more like a social blog, you didn't post links, you actually posted full essays and people voted and commented on them.

If by essays you mean right-wing conspiracy theories, then yes, that's what Kuro5hin was.

I really didn't pay a ton of attention to kuro5hin... but what I did read there wasn't what I would call right-wing. Essays like one that was abused to create the recent Wikipedia pedophile scandal were much closer to what I remember.

Yeah, OK, that sounds about right.

The idea of a purely voting/community driven site as a Slashdot spinoff was also implemented, at Kuro5hin. It turned out a bit differently, though, as it mostly ended up becoming something of a site for freelance tech writers to publish long-form pieces in the era before everyone had blogs they could do it on. So, ended up diverging from the blurbs that Slashdot does, or the pure links that digg/reddit type sites do. They did keep a section for just a link and a blurb, but it was pejoratively entitled "mindless link propagation" (MLP) and not really a main focus of the site.

(These days it's something of a dive bar, with only old regulars left and a lot of miscellaneous discussion.)

Alexis, you sound like an awesome guy. If this were someone else, this would probably turn into a shouting match, but you were above that, and instead offered him a t-shirt. That's just the right thing to do.

I respect that a ton.

Thanks! The way I see it, it's all sticks & stones. I got to learn that early as an overweight kid with a girly name and fondness for videogames.

I just wish I could get the TC Comments to work for me (why aren't they using disqus?) so I could chime in there...

I will take you up on the Reddit t-shirt offer

Well, since we're throwing mud, remember that Arrington is the one who just held a startup contest that gave a $50k prize to a company with $8 million in previous funding. Attacking the establishment is not something he's known for.

Yes, yes you are still talking about this. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just pointing out the irony that you're trying to put an end to the conversation by continuing it. Michael does these kinds of things because they get attention. Perhaps the best thing to do is just ignore him rather than giving him more attention?

(For what it's worth, I agree with you and my blog post would have been a lot meaner. :-) )

Oh, it's indeed ironic. If it weren't for the misrepresentation, I'd have ignored it, but that kind of thing is particularly irksome - especially as I'm looking at the evidence in my inbox. In that instance, it was worth it to get the facts straight. Call me whatever you want, but don't make stuff up.

Can you share the email with us? I know its private communication, but it would be educational for many of us to know how was the thoughtprocess of 2 successful entreprenuers, in the early days.

The naming of Reddit: reDDit like diGG seemed the most obvious reason to suspect it was inspired by Digg.

Since they say they didn't consciously copy Digg I take them at their word. I doubt they'd lie about it. I wouldn't be surprised if they're misremembering though. People are always teaching me things I taught them a week earlier. Memory is faulty and that was probably an especially stressful time for them.

Fun fact: it was between "reddit" and "reditt" while I was a senior at UVA sitting in Alderman library. I asked my friend (and library buddy) Melissa for which one made more sense for the way "read it" oughta be misspelled. She picked reddit.

We ended up considering a number of other names once we got to YC (PG wasn't a fan of reddit) but I persisted and I think Steve just realized he had better things to do.

I've got the email I sent to Steve about digg (subject line: READ THIS on 7/11/05 at 11:48pm (we launched reddit on 6/23/05).

I'm not lying or misremembering, which is what motivated me to respond.

http://alexisohanian.com/are-we-still-talking-about-this-res...

fwiw, arrington first heard about digg only 5 days before reddit's launch.

http://techcrunch.com/2005/06/18/profile-digg/

Wow, who cares?!?

Dude, I couldn't agree more.

I was going to respond with some remark like, "this thread has become very reddit-like". Then I read the username :)

My thoughts exactly. People copy and improve each other's ideas all the time. Reddit was a better Digg. Digg is taking ideas from Twitter. Who cares? It's good for the users, it's good for the company, it's good for the investors, it's good for technology in general.

With so much good involved, I don't see why there's any reason to get so bent out of shape.

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