This was a triumph.
blog.reddit.com
blog.reddit.com
Out of curiosity I just checked compete.com and was disappointed to learn that Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.
Could somebody please explain this sentiment to me? I feel like all the "cool kids" are constantly falling over one another to talk about who hates digg the most.
Is there some trove of horrible things that Kevin Rose has done floating around somewhere or something? I used to watch diggnation every week, and he genuinely seemed like an incredibly nice guy. Why so much hate for him? He's living what I think a lot of us dream about. He's got an incredibly popular website, he's got tons of funding, he's got lots of very brilliant engineers working for him, and he's really really young...
He's living the freaking life, guys, and as far as I can tell he hasn't ever done anything to deserve all the hatred.
As far as digg itself goes...why is it always being comparied to reddit? To me, this is about as apt as comparing reddit to msnbc.com; they're not even in the same category of websites.
Digg is very link-centric. It's all about links, lots an lots of links.
Reddit, on the other hand, is all about comments.
I guess a good comparison would be youtube vs some very popular web forums. On reddit, it's all about the discussion. the comment system they put together is freaking outstanding (when it's working), and that is why people go to the site. Digg is more like youtube; nobody really cares about youtube comments (they're mostly crap anyway), they're there for the video.
Digg and reddit are fundamentally different. Please stop comparing them, and please let me know what it is that everybody hates so much about the former.
Not so much hate for him as hate for how his website has de-evolved. Early on, it was much like Slashdot or HN. When he started introducing features that benefited power-users, your chances of getting your own stories dropped to 0 while the front page was filled with Cracked-like "top-10" lists.
They also have a whitelist of domains that can show up on the front page which turns digg into an rss feed of those sites and the occasional Reddit story that a poweruser feels like copying.
This is true for funny 30-second videos with millions of views and the like, but there are plenty of youtube videos on niche subjects that will never accumulate more than a few thousand views, all from like-minded people. The comment threads on these videos are a completely different matter.
I know in the times I visited in the early days, those commenting were mostly pretty hapless and predictable.
Other than that, any success attracts haters.
He didn't. Which is exactly why I didn't say or imply that he did. What he did say, and what I did address is expressing sadness that digg is successful. The question about the Kevin Rose hatred was a question about the general dislike for him that a lot of geeks show and was not directed at OP specifically.
>The National Enquirer and the New York Times aren't similar in function / category but I can still compare them.
And I can compare a bottle rocket to a pile of bananas, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a completely and totally worthless comparison.
But nonetheless, I have never 'hated' on digg. The site has changed and I realize it's not for me anymore. I'm sure there are many users that love it the way it is, just not me.
Digg is about comments as much as reddit is. It just so happens that the comments on reddit are slightly more intelligent and Digg is more commercialized.
My opinion about Digg has nothing to do with Kevin Rose nor is it because "all the cool kids" think so too. The communities surrounding Digg and reddit are ideologically identical to icanhazcheeseburger's. The core of the communities are founded on populism and memes.
http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...
http://www.reddit.com/user/raldi/ is more open than others.
http://www.reddit.com/user/jedberg &
http://www.reddit.com/user/KeyserSosa are the other two admins
Edit: Raldi mentioned that they are getting offers from other CN properties (ie, Wired) to help them with sales/marketing.
They are not too sure about monetisation strategy so for them the best thing to do right now is not promise anything.
The top rated comment starts, "As someone who donated..."
And from the second highest comment, 'I will not be "donating" money to a corporation which has shown no real initiative in growing the site.'
That said, I think any drama would just be background noise for the vast majority of users. People go to reddit for entertaining links and funny or interesting comments. Drama doesn't threaten that.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/cotz3/this_wa...
Tiny [icons] of narwhal tusks, lolcats or rashers of bacon that could appear next to your name could prove quite popular with the community. Similarly, being able to not only upvote, downvote, but also put a 'hex' on a comment I could see as being an amusing pastime. Not to mention, they already have the beginnings of an achievement system in place with the awards panel. I could see them greatly expanding that with quest style achievements; "posted 5 links", say, to earn /reddit/credits.
I'm not sure how it would affect the community, but the revenue possibilities are endless.
Or maybe I am wrong, Slashdot has been starring their paid subscribes for ages, but I am not sure reddit wants to stoop to slashdot levels.
I love reddit dearly, but there are some days when you could run it through.
sed -e 's/narwal/Natalie Portman/'
To me it's mostly proggit, hastily scanned once every 1-2 days.
HN and /. are on opposite ends of a spectrum--HN is what happens before the trolls arrive, given you seed the community well, and /. is what happens after the trolls leave.
What's strange is that slashdot moderation isn't that different from any other site, but for whatever reason, I think it hurt slashdot far more than any other site. Maybe, it's just that by default not that many comments are displayed as opposed to reddit or hn, so it's all the more noticeable when the top 20 or so comments all are basically the same.
The announcement section, which is included by default, and low traffic enough that I doubt anybody unsubscribes, has 300,000 users. Even if they're retaining 30% of their users (and keeping them as active), that still isn't even close to 8 million.
http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...
To put things in to context, reddit ran a haiti donation campaign which was heavily promoted through their ad spaces and blog postings and individual "donation drive threads" and they raised $185k from 3783 users over a period of ~30 days. They broke their first 100k within 12 hours. So if they got 6000 people to donate within 48 hours or so, that pretty damn good, over next few weeks as they add subscription only features its bound to get much much higher number as it gets promoted more.
http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...
They didn't release the money amount yet because they are waiting for "confirmation" from higher up to reveal the numbers.
The average seemed to be around $10; however, there were donations as low as $0.01 and as high as $1000.
It's worth noting that this won't ever happen again, though. This was basically a one-time gain of $X. So hopefully they don't wind up back in this situation.