Digg Makes a Play for Relevance, Increases Front Page Speed 75% | Hacker News Reader

Digg Makes a Play for Relevance, Increases Front Page Speed 75%

jboitnott.com

29 pointsjdrucker28 comments

It doesn't matter how fast it loads or updates if it reads like a bizzaro-world version of the headlines of the magazines at the supermarket checkout.

BTW he is talking about the frequency new articles appear - not page load speed.

So he's twitterizing Digg? I guess it could work.

I'm probably bias as I really dislike the whole "social media" thing going on with the internet right now (the sort of crap mashable covers) but I see this as proof that "social media" is a fad and that real communities which have been around since the dawn of the internet are where the real growth and stability is.

Reddit is a community, always has been, it took time to grow but it has grown and is now flourishing, Digg is a social media site, where the focus is not on discussion or sharing cool things, it's about driving page views to other sites, the discussion and sharing links became a side part of it.

Digg is like that once-cool friend who goes all weird overnight leaving his buddies wondering 'WTF happened?'.

The front page was pretty fast, but I keep getting a weird error that won't let me proceed to the next page.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/317805/digg.png

is it just me, or after they changed the layout, 90% of the users left for reddit, so it would make much more sense if the speed boost would've been 1000%?

At that point they didn't have any users worth keeping anyway. The community had degraded to the point of irrelevance a year or two before the redesign. If anything the shift to reddit just harmed reddit.

Happily, subreddits help alleviate this 'content inflation'.

They aren't talking about latency, they're talking about how quickly stories reach the front page and how long they stay there.

Did I just miss it or is there no actual link to digg in the article? I expect that crud out of the newspaper sites, but it seems odd there.

Wow, they finally took my advice and changed their layout back! :P

Yours and the world's as well.

I don't care how fast they claim to be now-- whether if it's true or not. reddit is down at the moment and I've been reloading like crazy for about 2 hours. I think there's a lesson to learn there.

Reddit has always had way more downtime than digg for as long as I can remember. People left digg for reddit because of power users and the last straw of serving as an RSS feed for big name websites.

If they have the brains to go back on these 2 changes and maintain the same uptime, there's absolutely no reason why they would not be able to surpass reddit again. Reddit is not without its share of problems:

  - frequent downtime
  - censorship and squatting of subreddits
  - censorship of random subreddits like atheism
  - shadow banning of random articles

What makes you think there's any real censorship? Mods are free to censor whatever they feel like. When people get sick of it, they form a new community. See the /r/marijuana to /r/trees migration that occurred a while back for the most famous example.

Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod shadowbans you, post elsewhere.

As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion pageviews. Give them a break.

- What makes you think there's any real censorship?

See the atheism debacle. They tweaked the "algorithm" until it stopped showing up in the top 10 (requirement for frontpage). Try submitting an anti-haskell article in proggit. It will never show up.

- Shadowbanning from the site is really only done by hueypriest. If a mod shadowbans you, post elsewhere.

Post elsewhere? The difference between the front page and a random unknown subreddit is 20k or 10 viewers. Articles can be "shadowbanned" because of their faulty anti-spam system. The main problem with shadowbanning is that people don't even know it is shadow banned until they start digging, so good stories get stuck in limbo.

- As far as downtime, they have three engineers. One programmer, and two sysadmins. Raldi just left for Google. Three engineers for 1.1 billion pageviews. Give them a break.

They had uptime problems far before 1.1 billion pageviews. Read the The Mythical Man-Month. 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month. 3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website. If it isn't, then they should've stopped adding features.

>3 engineers is more than enough for this type of website.

Sorry, but you lost all credibility right there.

I love the example Reddit has made with the Digg/Reddit war. Mostly in that it was never a war. I remember hearing their response when they found out about digg was something to the affect of "oh interesting" then continued on.

Digg was popular well before Reddit, and I was always given the impression that Reddit was established as an ultimately successful Digg competitor.

However, your statement prompted me to do a little research. Here is Alexis' (reddit) story:

"This is a good chance for me to dispel any rumors. We were living in a veil of ignorance for the first month or so at Reddit. We were working our asses off, my co-founder Steve Huffman and I, building a site that we got online, and then two weeks into the site being online we found out that there was this other site called Digg, that had venture funding and it had been out for quite some time."

Source: http://mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-wa...

From the perspective of a programmer-slash-reader back in '05, I think the progression was that you discovered Digg and used it until you heard about Reddit, which had much fewer stupid stories that were much more tech focused than Digg's, so you ditched Digg and started reading Reddit until three out of four stories were about either peak oil, Ron Paul, why America sucked, or Obama. You suffered through that for a while until Hacker News came along, and then you stopped going to Reddit.

I've actually started reading Slashdot again in the last year of so, which is funny, because it's growing irrelevance is what drove me to Digg in the first place.

With all due respect, I really don't buy that story. I'm a fan of Digg and Alexis.

Paul Carr said it best: "So at best they did zero research before they launched Reddit into a space that kinda relies on the founders knowing where to find cool new stuff online."

Does it really matter in the end? It's not the idea, it's how it's executed right?

Well claiming complete non-awareness of the popular competitor just seems a little odd. It would be kind of like Mozilla saying they weren't aware of IE - sure execution is all that matters, but it's curious why you'd say that.

Digg wasn't a "popular competitor" at the time. It was an unknown competitor. TechCrunch did a first profile on Digg 5 days before Reddit launched. I'm going to assume reddit took more than 5 days to build.

http://techcrunch.com/2005/06/18/profile-digg/

So is it that absurd that they started on Reddit without knowing about Digg? For that matter, TechCrunch wasn't that popular either in 2005.

I'd say Digg became popular due to promoting it on television, Kevin mentioned Digg on TechTV and invited people to try it.

He had a captive audience on TechTV (or what was left of it after G4 gutted it) which helped a lot to get the word out and to give it some geek credit.

Then there was a shift from Slashdot (my post never gets shown!) to Digg (my post never gets shown) to Reddit (too many people posting!) now ...Hacker News?

I don't think there's going to be a shift from Reddit to Hacker news in the same way. I feel like there's a theoretical balance between social networks. Additionally I think reddits subreddit system helps a lot too.

p.s sorry for the drunk post.

I expect drunk posts today of all days.

Certainly Reddit is quite different but I can see a shift maybe among older users or maybe more of a dual membership.

who cares ?

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