A tale of two cultures | Hacker News Reader

A tale of two cultures

blog.jgc.org

242 pointsjgrahamc45 comments

A tale of three cultures.

I had been to reddit and digg many times, but have never registered and never posted.

I came to hacker news years ago, jumped right in, and never looked back.

Why? We can talk about all kinds of complex criteria regarding social networking, community building, people behavior, systems behavior, etc., etc., etc., but let's not overlook the most basic thing of all: it's simple.

Simple font, simple layout, threaded conversations, limited options. Easy to read, easy to explore. No "sub-reddits", no fancy filters, no complex algorithms begging to be gamed (well maybe). None of the stuff that people keep asking for to make us "more like digg or reddit".

It's so simple that we actually focus more on the content than anything else. There's a lesson for all of us developers in there.

It's so simple that we actually focus more on the content than anything else

Let's also not forget the fact that the content is aimed at a fairly narrow niche. If HN were aiming for mainstream popularity, I don't think it would work so well.

Now, presumably this focus may also be the case in some sub-reddits-- but then you fall into the opposite problem; the permitted topics can be too narrow.

Put another way: there's a complex set of mutually reinforcing relationships between the community, the content, and the system. I don't think you can reduce the cultural differences between Digg, Reddit and HN to any of the three.

However, there is a price to all this: Hacker News will never be commercially viable. I know it's never supposed to be; its purpose is high quality conversation and links. Still, it's a good idea to note something like that if you're pointing to HN as an example for developers. HN is very successful at what it's supposed to be, but profitable is one thing it is not.

P.S. If you consider HN to be pg's personal playground, conceptually speaking it may already be monetized due to pg feeling that the knowledge/value/exposure he gains from HN leads to him being more profitable. It's sort of a secondary form of profitability but it's totally a legit profit in my mind. It should encourage other millionaires to start and curate online communities around their interests.

Indeed. HN is simple enough to be comparatively inexpensive to run. HN helps generate interest in y-combinator amongst the most important target demographic. Almost certainly the benefits for y-combinator (increased submissions, greater visibility for YC funded companies, a larger and more engaged talent pool for people looking for YC help or looking to work at YC companies, etc.) exceed the cost of HN.

Yes, my intention was not to imply HN isn't successful. It's incredibly successful imo; it's the best example that a good, quality community can be built and not lose focus. However, it is currently not economically successful. It could be monetized, maybe. However, subscriptions would drastically lower the number of commenters (better? Worse? Not sure.). Ads might be a good solution, because they could be very targetted, since this is a niche community.

> However, it is currently not economically successful. It could be monetized, maybe.

Au contraire. It may be a "cost center", but I have no doubt that it has been enormously beneficial for YCombinator's bottom line, as a marketing effort.

Marketing plus creating better entrepreneurs and thus in the end making better ideas/companies for YC to invest in.

I agree with this. Also, I have seen many of the yc companies post job ads here. Have they been successful in recruiting? If so, that is another way HN has helped yc.

A freemium model might work. Free will be as it is like now. Premium might offer some neat and personalized features---like mixing your own HN from the votes of people you select.

Comments and submissions by free and premium users will be treated the same. So premium buys you a more interesting presentation, but not a bigger say in any debate.

Yes, HN can have a different value model, because building a community of knowledgeable, start-up-oriented hackers builds Y Combinator's core business.

I don't really believe that. I think HN could easily be monetized by charging subscription fees. The quality of the content is so much higher than your typical magazine and people pay tons of money for those.

Another way to monetize it would be limited ads. The site has a captive, highly-targeted, highly-influencial and wealthy audience. I bet companies would kill to put ads on HN.

HN is a proof of concept for a small, targeted, curated social community thing.

Totally. I'd pay at least $100/year without thinking and I'm a poor bootstrapper.

The subreddits are the most interesting part of reddit. Literally anyone can create a place to discuss any topic. No matter how big, small, or esoteric the community is. That's why I really don't think reddit has a single culture. Though this article appears to be more about the founder/business culture than site cultures.

In fact, HackerNews isn't much different than having a "HackerNews" subreddit.

The open source aspect of reddit is also interesting. LessWrong.com is probably the most successful outgrowth of that.

Also, HN is fast.

Well, this might be a sole implication of its simpleness: I need fewer steps to accomplish things, and the pages load faster because there's less stuff to transfer and less stuff for the browser to render.

However, it might also be the case that the HN folks performed better optimizations than Reddit, or that HN needs less optimization because it has fewer visitors.

The tic-tac-toe hack is absolutely fantastic, and reddits response is really great.

I think most of the people here have 'tasted' digg for a while and then left, it never felt like a site I wanted to be a part of to me, I think that cultural difference is visible on many levels, not just the interaction with the management.

I have never used digg. I found about reddit back in the day through a link from Paul Graham. I was active there for a while and even sent in some bug report that was answered quite fast.

FYI, the reason digg didn't check for 404 errors, was because it stopped people from submitting interesting 404 pages.

you mean reddit, right?

(edit: Oh, I see now that you mean Digg, but Digg not checking for 404 errors is not mentioned in the story, just FYI)

Indeed I misread the original post. I wonder if reddit did it for the same reason.

I still remember the recursion hack, I had no idea it was you. Funny, harmless and very clever. Kudos.

Yeah, that was nice: "Oh, this is the guy!" Reddit lets their userbase drive much of the time, and it creates warm feelings all around.

If you haven't read the article yet, read it! It talks about 2 clever "hacks" of the Reddit/Digg systems, which are really imaginative and wonderful.

There is one thing about the article I'm not sure about. He says the difference between Digg and Reddit is in their "hacker culture"; Reddit is made up more of hackers, and therefore likes hacks more.

On the other hand, I think Hacker News is even more slanted towards the hacker mentality than either Reddit and Digg. But I'm not at all sure what HN's reactions to such "hacks" of the system would be; I think we tend to frown on such things.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Read niyazpk's comment for an example of a hack of HN (although that is literally a hack of the code that runs HN, not a hack of the "system". Either way, interesting reading).

>> I'm not at all sure what HN's reactions to such "hacks" of the system would be; I think we tend to frown on such things.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976

Yeah, I'm still mad about that. But only because I had thought of precisely the same thing in parallel with dfranke (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640213) and he had the time to actually do it. Aargh. People who have time to do clever stuff! :-)

Perhaps I need to get a job where I get to break things.

Matsano!

True Hacker News is slanted towards hackers, but it takes itself far more seriously than Reddit.

And it doesn't give its hackers white fedoras.

I wonder how much of the difference in culture is actually fueled by the aggressive fund raising of digg early on.

It probably fueled it quite a bit. When you take $40 million in funding, you're committing yourself to exit for hundreds of millions of dollars within a few years, which in turn puts you on a monetization clock.

Which should give you more incentive not to annoy users unnecessarily.

Very insightful article. I think Digg vs Reddit might be suffering from the typical "grew large too quickly" issue where due to their sheer size, they implemented more corporate/mnc type policies for handling hacks etc. By default most larger companies are anti-hackers which ( to their detriment) is what powers true innovation. A dire need to expose and solve an itch. Lets hope Reddit keeps the culture rocking

At the time of this hack, digg had only about 20 employees, had raised not $40 million, but around $6 million, and the culture was quite open and relaxed. But there were some very smart people there, and most of them including me agreed with Tim Ellis's opinion on this "hack." It was stupid.

Now perhaps some on the management side overreacted, but we were inundated with stupid shit on a regular basis.

It hurts to hear that lots of people thought it was stupid. Fine. But that doesn't excuse the public bad mouthing I received.

The really sad thing is that I was a very active Digg user; I was on the site every day reading stories and submitting. Here's a screenshot of the Digg front page for July 21, 2006 (five days before my prank and the closest I can find to that day): http://i.imgur.com/UE09Z.png (actual page from archive.org is http://web.archive.org/web/20060721035713/www.digg.com/).

The second link down on the front page was submitted by me. I was looking for cool stories and submitting them to Digg every day during that period and then whammo I'm banned and bad mouthed.

Well, for what its worth, I wasn't big on the banning of users, and, if I had been asked in your case, would not have supported it.

I always wondered why Kevin and Alex felt the need to hide behind their laptops on Diggnation.

Unfortunately reddit is not what it used to be. The days when Lisp tutorials I submitted skyrocketed to the top of the front page (before subreddits) are only a distant memory now.

Reddit isn't what it used to be, but it has stopped getting worse and is actually improving. The admins are doing a great job of community management. Triggering the Colbert/Stewart rally in DC is quite an achievement for reddit.

What I love about reddit with subreddits is that if you want lisp tutorials you only have to unsubscribe from the high-traffic reddits (e.g. pics, technology) and subscribe to the lower-traffic but more topical reddits.

The subreddits are fantastic! It's like they have created a community inside of a community.

> I always wondered why Kevin and Alex felt the need to hide behind their laptops on Diggnation.

What do you mean by that? The stories are online and I'm sure the show wouldn't be any better if they memorized them.

Sorry--"dark-tipper"?

He used to run a "Dark Tips" segment on The Screen Savers.

Sorry to say this, but "A tale of two cultures" is a very glorious title for something like reddit and digg. Humanistic and scientific cultures, the profound debate about how we marry them and how to control complexity and compartmentalization of science and research is not comparable to the other two "cultures". What term should you use for describing those "cultures" in a precise and respectful form?

Is either of the two cultures successful in monetizing?

What I like about HN:

1.- Intelligent people 2.- Nice content 3.- I don't have to provide an email or any other personal information.

What I don't like:

1.- I am always submitting very fast. 2.- I have two faces: one with positive and other with negative karma. But my negative karma is not well here, so my negative karma face should say that this is not a balanced place.

I prefer HN culture (that is my positive karma speaking)

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