Why Digg Lost #1 Spot to Reddit
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zurb.us
So the community left. And felt so betrayed, they salted the earth behind them.
Requested elaboration: "Digg was never able to diversify content (read: expand, scale, grow) because it was never worth it for minority voices--and here I'm referring to non-liberal, non-young, non-male, non-athiest users--to attempt to carve out space and participate."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1831431.
Looks like we've had this debate already, Michael! I think the particular niche that Digg has chosen (rather, has chosen Digg) is common knowledge. It's hard to escape the conclusion that minority voices were actively suppressed there and that Digg had two routes: niche sub-diggs or a personalized Twitter-like experience that didn't function like old-Digg. The revolt was predicted, but the technical problems that would make it easy for new users to play with it were not.
1. That's an ignorant conjoining
2. Libertarians are well aware they're members of a vanishingly small minority
Of course, not all 300M US citizens are online, so adjust as necessary. Digg probably got something like 1%-5% of the US online population, which was enough to get it to where it was.
What would a community driven site that wasn't repellant to the majority of the population look like? Humans are so non-homogenous and diverse, that the greatness of the internet is found in it's ability to be a collection of niche communities, not a place where catering to the lowest common denominator is the only route to success.
Digg tried to monetize and drove away their users. I'm not sure Reddit has really tried to monetize as much yet apart from their 'donate' thing.
The great thing about reddit, also, is that it's structure lends itself to accommodating niche communities. If you don't like the Pics subreddit, you read the Funny subreddit instead. If you just want to read about Harry Potter and Ruby on Rails, you can, and you can pretend the rest of the site doesn't even exist. This minimizes the possibility that a shiny new site will attract users away.
If Reddit can keep the lights on, the employees paid, and the community diverse and satisfied, then I'd say they've "won", and I don't think large profits are necessary.
As an aside, I also wonder if web 2.0 has really proven itself, outside of a few exceptions, to be generally profitable the way valuations show that investors expect it to be.
I'm not political in any way either left or right (I'm Canadian we like out political parties numerous and weird) but I found digg had become very polarized politically and to the point it was no longer a social news site it was a soapbox for for extremists.
Personally, I think the subreddit system did its job. It was put in place so the site could scale without losing its community feel, and I think it's done that admirably. I've long since removed most of the major subreddits from my frontpage, added a bunch that interest me, and now it feels like a fairly small site that's perfectly tailored to my interests and sensibilities.
Everyone talks about having a personalized experience on the internet, from Netflix & Amazon's recommendations to customized dashboards but nobody has got it right except for Reddit. When I go to reddit.com homepage, I only see what I want and if I don't like a subreddit, I remove it from my list. I don't ever feel like reddit is going down the hill or that the olden days were better. It really is a community of communities.
It's interesting to see Stack Overflow take the same approach with the Stack Exchange network. I'm betting that will pay off over time.
To me it seemed to be a big story. Kevin Rose was on TWiT a couple episodes ago and they hardly mentioned Digg's problems. Journalism indeed.
I remember listening to the TWIT episodes around the Digg V4 fracas, and I thought Leo made it very clear that he would be unable to cover the story without bias.
Also, TWIT is an opinion show by its very nature. It's the tech equivalent to an OpEd page in a newspaper.
I loved my time at Digg. I worked on some great things, learned a ton, and yes, came out with some cautionary tales that will serve me well through my career.
Digg isn't losing to Reddit, the market for that kind of site is shattering into millions of tiny little peices. Hacker News is one of those tiny little pieces. Stack Overflow is another.
Reddit won when they diversified their front page into groups. I rarely visit the front page now, only programming, coding, webdev, python and javascript groups.
Noise levels were reduced almost to zero.
Why users went their was some games, some content and personal communities and power-play (that's my view of it, it could be different) and then they tried to make it user centered like twitter - which solves entirely different problem.
Now if I can't do what I used your site for, why would I use it anymore?
I honestly think whoever was in charge got pressured and acted with money and greed in mind instead of the actual users. Karma is a bitch.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2009244
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