Reddit Grew 230% in 2010 at Digg’s Expense
mashable.com
mashable.com
Reddit had 250 million pageviews in January, Digg had 200 million in July (before the redesign - this likely means Reddit was already ahead in January), and Reddit ended the year with 830 million.
Most of Reddit's growth couldn't have come from Digg.
Reddit has taken over 1st place but they have a few problems: First, Conde Nast doesn't supply them with enough resources compared to their popularity. This makes the user experience painfully slow, and the site is down even more times than Twitter was in the early days.
They also don't have a designer which makes the usability bad.
Third, they lack the creativity to make money off their huge userbase.
I'm sure these three reasons are related. If a start-up would be launched now it could even exploit the recent delicious-catastrophe by importing those links. This could bootstrap the community and content, and it'd make for some good marketing.
* I still count 4chan as an underground site, but maybe they are the third player. They're niche though, so let's say there's still room even then.
I've heard this repeated a number of times, and I completely disagree with it. Reddit may not be the prettiest site on the block, but it's damn functional. There is very little unnecessary stuff on the screen, and I quite like it that way. I tend to turn off custom subreddit styles because they takae away from the minimal, functional interface. I've heard people talk about "improving reddit and HN's design", but I've never seen any clear examples of where they think it's bad.
I still count 4chan as an underground site, but maybe they are the third player. They're niche though, so let's say there's still room even then.
4chan's an entirely different category. They're less about linksharing, and more about...well, whatever the hell they are. I don't think I'd put them anywhere near Digg or Reddit except for the fact that they both have memes. That's pretty much the only comparison.
(Yes, I know you can decide which subreddits appear on the front page when you are logged in).
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/f12id/its_time_to_choo...
They've done well considering the massive amount of traffic and the complex way they are constantly adding comments, but the site is slow as sin and, honestly, quite unpleasant to browse sometimes.
I don't want to be reminded of refreshing a page on dial-up.
Unfortunately, by selling to Conde Nast, they've ceded control on things like hiring. Every time they want to hire somebody, they have to beg to CN for permission. If it was VC funded, they'd have 40+ employees by now, and the site would look/work good. Unfortunately, CN just doesn't know what they have.
Also, never mind the headline; Mashable pretty much lives off of Digg referals, so this is just linkbait.
I'd settle for it loading, however. That'd be nice.
The reddit admins are quite adamant that their growth was independent of digg.v4 and if you look at their numbers, they seem to be right. There are some increases associated with v4, but reddit was enjoying growth prior to that as well.