Ask HN: Do you consider it a failure Reddit failed its initial mission? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you consider it a failure Reddit failed its initial mission?

6 pointsalanh13 comments

Reddit, as I understood it, set out to be a Digg or Newsvine competitor — a social-powered news service where the best news stories, categories by subreddit, are voted to the top.

But it’s, I believe, universally acknowledged that Reddit is instead a community or hivemind of in-jokes, 4chan memes, and chain puns. Story titles are almost never actual titles but rather click-bait or vague reactions. And yet, they hit 1 billion pageviews a month.

Given that the reality seems so divergent from the goal, would you consider Reddit a success?

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I haven't looked at reddit for about 4 years. Your question made me go check it out. Scanning through the headlines on the front page made me LOL and spray some coffee out of my nose. It's so random, it's like an Onion parody of news aggregation sites. "Email from Egypt" mixed in with "please stop posting photos of your dead pets." Oh my.

http://cl.ly/311b2u3b0b231Y243f1d

you must not frequent reddit. Sometimes reddit is the news. Last example I can think of was Ted Williams the man with the radio voice. He was brought to popularity on reddit, and was initially asking the community to help a guy out. During the wikileaks black out, reddit actively supported getting the cables out and accessible. So although the community likes to joke around and have fun.. or as you call it memes and in-jokes, there is plenty of news and plenty of differentiating opinions.

http://i.imgur.com/tgo9W.jpg - what news site would tell it like this. ( posted to reddit )

I would never argue that news never appears on Reddit, but going to Reddit with the intention of seeing and actually discussing the news is an incredibly frustrating experience.

It was already "debunked" on reddit that reddit helped Ted Williams. [citation needed, but I'm too tired atm]

Your title seems a bit click-baitish to me, but that could easily be my bias.

I think it's great that Reddit has evolved over time rather than trying to force their community into what they think Reddit should be. I am appreciative that if I want to dip into few funny things to come out of things like 4chan I can, without having to deal with a lot of what makes places like /b/ so repulsive (gore, excessive porn, etc). For the most part when you remove the default subreddits from your frontpage and stick to the smaller ones (netsec, web_design, gamedev are some good ones) you can avoid a lot of what you are describing.

The great thing about reddit is that you can unsubscribe from all the crap and only follow the niche sub-reddits that you are interested in.

It's an entirely different experience when you remove /r/reddit, pics, videos, wtf, athiesm, politics etc

Here's a useful doc that lists all the active sub-reddits https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?key=ttpCnxB3rDcEbGTxSi9...

I'm not sure if you were just using "digg" and "newsvine" as examples, or if you think they actually were aiming to be competitors.

Reddit launched in 2005. Newsvine launched in 2006. The Reddit founders also didn't know Digg existed when they launched.

Given the state of Digg and I don't believe Newsvine has been doing particularly well, maybe Reddit has it right.

HN is like a subreddit of Reddit. In fact, I think HN needs 'subHNs' to allow for scale. eg Corporate stories, Technical stories, etc.

Being a convert to HN from Reddit, I really like having a single channel of high quality posts. Yes, it's true that I'm not interested in every single story on HN but that's okay as it keeps me procrastinating less. Plus, it's always good to do some reading in areas you are unfamiliar or not interested in, expand your mind as it were.

But it’s, I believe, universally acknowledged that Reddit is instead a community or hivemind of in-jokes, 4chan memes, and chain puns.

Maybe on some sub-reddits, but hardly all of them. I see fairly little of that stuff on the ones I frequent, FWIW.

That is the secret to successful Redditing; use subreddits.

When I Reddit from work (on my lunch break boss, I swear!) I rarely log in. As a result, I don't stay long as I get tired of cat memes and in-jokes. However when I log into my account and just use the sub-reddits I subscribe to, it's like going back in time to when Reddit was much smaller and less about memes and such, and more about real discussions of news/events/new tech and such.

> a community or hivemind of in-jokes, 4chan memes, and chain puns

Yes, this is true but if you actually spent time there you would also see that it is a community doing some incredible things.

* donating over $500k to donorschoose.org

* helping prevent suicide at reddit.com/r/suicidewatch

The list goes on and on.

>a community or hivemind of in-jokes, 4chan memes, and chain puns

You know, you don't have to see any of that - just subscribe to the niche subreddits that interest you, and drop the rest. It's a completely different experience.

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