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Comment by nopassrecover | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

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