How Reddit Kicked Digg’s Ass | Hacker News Reader

How Reddit Kicked Digg’s Ass

vospe.com

66 pointscartab42 comments

Reddit kicked Digg's ass because Reddit is designed as a feedback loop that benefits all users. Digg only rewards elite users.

Look at a random Reddit submission. If it survives the first minute, it makes some user's frontpage. If it is "good," it gets votes and is seen by more people. If the username is popular, it gets upvoted faster. But it turns out this is not necessary for success - I have submitted successful articles without any possible benefit of name recognition, or help from friends.

Reddit's comment section is a great feedback loop: Reddit is designed for discussion, and discussion is great at generating more discussion. Large comment threads form on popular articles, even if they're only lightly inspired by the article or vapid. You must check your recent comments to defend yourself, since the risk is high that someone will strongly and persuasively disagree with you. After all, it's Reddit. Good comments get trophies. Really good comments make /r/bestof.

In contrast, Digg is a feedback loop that benefits the best users. Within a few years of Digg's launch (especially after they dropped the technology-only focus), it was almost impossible to get an article on the frontpage without a friend network, or the blessing of a poweruser. The various sections of Digg were littered with hundreds of high-quality articles with two Diggs. To successfully submit articles to Digg, you needed to focus energy on gaining a network and voting on articles that they submit, and using this network to gain a larger network. The last time I was there, the comments section was also a nightmare. It is designed for single-use comments, and not for discussion. At one point they introduced nested comments, but it seems like they've either done away with it, or don't have enough comments to nest.

The best website designs act as feedback loops. Reddit has polished theirs.

I think that the community itself matters significantly. IMO, the articles that I get from Hacker News are much more valuable than the articles that I consume from Reddit or Digg. In fact, I have seen a steady decline in the quality of content that I get from Reddit because of the surge of mainstream users.

It's not a surge of mainstream users. It's a surge of young users. People often forget that the entire internet is younger than you, and will be for the rest of your life. The average age on reddit is 21.

It is funny, because I agree with your statement. But I never thought of Reddit as made for discussion. Maybe I miss out, but I always have a terrible time following the comments on Reddit (granted I don't even try on Digg and comparing Reddit to HN might be apples to oranges). The comments are usually confusing and non-beneficial to me.

I get great mileage out of this "hide replies to comments" bookmarklet - it allows me to quickly read the best-rated comments that reply directly to the article. If a comment is thought-provoking I'll click through to see what discussion it's spawned.

http://gist.github.com/582630

i know from reading reddit often that there are frequently highly-rated comments as replies that are several levels deep, and possibly have nothing to do with the original top-level reply.

i recommend sorting comments by "best", and then just cranking up your minimum score rating in your preferences so that comments under, say, 10 will not get shown.

Funnier still, I see it the opposite way: reddit discussions are, more often than not, more valuable than the articles themselves (although the s/n ratio is diminishing).

Same is true for HN, but the s/n ratio remains quite high.

I used to read digg way back when, but someone alerted me to the whole situation and I watched it crumble, and it was... spectacular. It was like a cyberpunk novel. People didn't just move to reddit, they moved to reddit, and then salted the earth behind them.

Title should probably be 'How Digg's fuckup benefited Reddit'

I agree, It has nothing to do with Reddit. It's all about how Digg managed, as if by miracle, to scuttle its own boat in a few hours.

Digg didn't feel like Digg anymore after the change so I looked for something that felt like digg and found Reddit. It's obviously not the same and there are things that almost make it unbearable (I love the analogy that Reddit is 4chan lite) but I'll stick around there until something better comes around.

It has a lot to do with Reddit in that Reddit was available, better, and already fairly well known. It's not like the article could possibly go "How Digg's Whatever Benefited Mixx.com". Reddit was basically standing there ready to soak up Digg users once masses of them stuck their heads up for long enough to notice that Digg isn't really that entertaining or informative, and other sites may suit them better.

I agree with you there. Digg's traffic was higher before the change to v4.

I think what may have happened was that they looked at Reddit's plea for money as an excuse to commercialize, and took it too far.

Will the wave of users coming from Digg be useful participants?

Will there be any paid gaming of Reddit?

Will Reddit turn into a sewer as it grows, as did Digg?

I've visited reddit a fair number of times and haven't found much use for it over other sites. The comments on reddit are typically about as valuable as those on 4chan with the modification that they are on average less entertaining and also contain fewer pictures of genitalia (on average).

Visit /r/DepthHub and its subreddits or even /r/TrueReddit. It's not bad if you don't visit the most popular parts of the site.

People who generally comment on reddit's childish comments based on their time on the main reddits and rarely visits the meat of reddit, which are the specific and targeted sub-reddit, are fly-by users. They never truly experienced reddit.

In other words, just like Digg.

Try /r/gonewild

Warning: NSFW (amateur nudity).

It already did, alas. A couple of years ago it was really nice, but even when selecting only a few potentially interesting reddits (programming, science, etc), some posts are OK but comments are more and more both useless and stupid.

So finally I spend much more time on HN now. Though the problem is that probably most older reddit users will come there, then pushing the HN old-timers to start some alternate HN-clone :)

As I always do when someone starts off on this flight of mythology, allow me to suggest that you read Clay Shirky's "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy":

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

You may learn some things about these cycles of "I was on Site X and it was great, then went to crap, then I went to Site Y, then it went to crap..." which will surprise you, and which -- at least in my reading and based on my experience of spending the last decade building community-oriented sites -- hint that reddit's doing way, way better than HN.

Thanks for that link. This really, really hit home with me.

Except with reddit, people don't go to site Y, they go to /r/Y.

Am I the only one seeing a huge chunk of Viagra spam ("A proposito viagra 50 mg di pazienti affetti da malattie coronariche 10,8-11,8 arteria laureato rilevando ...") in the middle of that article?

Mmmh... Yes, probably. Your PC must be infected.

Nope. I figured it out, and it turned out to be something even more devious.

Please tell me more :)

I don't know if the person responsible for this vospe.com site is someone here, but it's really bad design.

1. It crashed my browser the first time I tried to look at it (Firefox 3.5.12 on mac)

2. It broke the normal functionality of my up and down scroll keys... apparently I press down to scroll down a little and it goes all the way down to the comments section.

3. That grey box hovering at the top and blocking out some of the text is just plain obnoxious.

2) Yes. 3) Yes.

Really annoying.

Glad to see that dried meat sales went up.

edit: I'm also quite impressed with reddit's professionalism. It also appears that reddit is back to being reddit. The digg users have been assimilated.

I just looked at Digg for the first time in a few weeks and the snapshot of front page articles is actually pretty good. They may take a hit in the short term with the raging power users who hate change but most of Digg's traffic is comprised of people who don't even login to the site much less spend hours a day on it voting things up/down. For most users all that matters is good content and the old system was failing them.

tl;dr: Reddit didn't have to do anything. Just wait for digg to kick its own.

More like how a bowler gets a wicket in cricket. Bowl consistent line and length and wait for the batsman to err.

Maybe my article from a couple of years ago about the relative merits of Reddit and Digg may be relevant: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January...

It doesn't really explain why Digg has been more popular for the following two years. Or does it?

To be fair though, you could get a similar reddit experience by subscribing only to subreddits you find interesting.

For example, I never go to reddit.com. I go to programming.reddit.com, the subreddit for programming related articles.

I lost interest in Digg a few years ago, most of the posts seem to be lists or funny images or just totally banal.

Also there's some bizarre political movements that seem to move throughout Digg, that largely seems to sit on the right wing side of the spectrum

The site scrolled to the end of page when i clicked the down arrow. Bad design!

What do you think will happen to Digg? Will the "core / elite" users all jump ship? But does Diggs new offering have a chance with the "mainstream crowd" (who may or may not yet know about the site)?

It is kind of sad to see what has happened to Digg. It uses to be a simple site with a simple purpose and an elegant design. They have now morph it into a hybrid of some sort.

Anyone have another link to the video? It's loading really slow for me.

I assume it's working for other people? I only get a few seconds of video after few minutes waiting, and then "Connection lost"...

Digg kicked its own arse. Reddit was just around at the right time.

http://digg.com/news/technology/how_reddit_kicked_digg_s_ass

Let's get this on diggs front page.

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