How has Reddit not had its Digg 2.0 moment yet? They are blatantly user-hostile in so many ways nowadays.
For those who don't know, a UI change at Digg triggered a mass exodus to reddit years ago.
For those who don't know, a UI change at Digg triggered a mass exodus to reddit years ago.
It's happened more than once already.
I've long thought about a social network where each user is required to verify their identity. That comes with its own problems of course, especially in the current times of data protection, misuse of data and a lack of trust for these kinds of things. I'm sure it can be done properly, but who's to say what "properly" means.
I'm working on bringing e-IDs to more people which would make ideas like your much easier to implement. If you want to make your idea reality I'd love to collaborate!
One day, maybe... I am focused on my business at the moment (check my profile here on HN).
A social network is certainly not a small undertaking but I can see it starting off as a side project and building a small community. I can forsee lots of costs involved however. I will keep your offer in mind!
But they do have a platform.
It's genuinely quite hard to find a post on TD or TD-replacements that doesn't boil down to bigotry. Mocking and attacking their strawmen-of-the-day is basically the entire site.
So yes, I am intolerant - I am intolerant of intolerance. Civil society doesn't only permit this, it requires it. Being anti-bigot doesn't make me a bigot. Thinking so is perverse.
There is no third option, because people can't be trusted to simply be civil. Nazis or Fascists, pick your poison.
Reddit has been slowly rolling out changes for a couple years, and at least so far are leaving the old interface available at old.reddit.com. The redesign is as bad or worse in every way; but it's so slow there hasn't been the organized revolt.
Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse.
It's funny though, I actually really like the new Digg. It's nothing like what it used to be, but it's a nice curated list of interesting articles, major headlines, and tech news.
On the contrary, Digg’s UI changes were happening when “Web 2.0”-hype was peaking, including bold new web-design trends - many sites were actively redesigning themselves with a brighter theme and better visual-effects: this was around 2007-2010 when IE6-support was starting to be discounted by tech-oriented websites so they could start using new CSS features and alpha-channel PNG images that IE7, Firefox, and Opera supported.
I argue that the changes to their recommendation algorithm - and the introduction - and eventual promotion - of mainstream news (especially sports news) meant that their early users: technology news readers, lost interest in the site. The redesign of the site was a contributing factor, but a bad redesign is nowhere near as damaging to a site’s popularity than it losing relevance to its core user base.
Reddit has the bury brigades too in some of the more popular subreddits (the ones which you used to be subscribed to by default), but you can avoid them by only participating in the subreddits that interest you. This is where Reddit is a huge improvement over what digg was, but I wouldn't say it's immune to failure. The more they try to be the arbiters of what people ought to find interesting, the less people are going to put the effort into interacting with the platform as a whole.
On average, 80-100% of the content of the frontpage is removed by mods every day.
I guess the plan is that enough people will have started with the new UI and have never known the old one that even with the old people leaving, the site may still remain alive?
+1. They learned how to boil the frog much better. Note how the top comments are recommending old.reddit as a valid option. While old is specifically there as an A/B test of sorts to prevent the most vocal people from leaving.
It's all quite amazing in a way...
That was a decade ago, and tech has become a lot more normalized since. Today's Reddit gets visibility on MM possibly more often than any site other than Google. Its users span the political spectrum, treat it as a utility, and for the most part never chose to come to Reddit, never critiqued it, and wouldn't notice if anything about it changed much. It's easy to imagine many modern users never make it off the front page.
I don't think Reddit will die like Digg did. It's the megaphone of the Internet, and could probably commit much worse transgressions than some random DRM technobabble before the common user would take notice.
At present there isn’t an obvious choice for where to migrate. Maybe more specialized boards like Hacker News will be the thriving suburbs outside of a dystopian reddit metropolis.
But it's a pretty shit site now anyway compared to how it used to be. It's the law of forums it seems to be.
But I agree with the user hostile notion. They are terrible nowadays
To be honest, as a whole the content has slowly decreased in quality. Now I finally understand that a lot of content on reddit is just farming karma for bots, so those bots can be sold for astroturfers. So I have a lot of distrust for reddit in general.
I'm feeling more and more frustrated, and I tell myself more and more that I have little interest going to reddit.
I've been using Reddit - reading a lot, commenting quite a bit, posting a little - since I read about it in the Joel on Software blog in 2006. It has been fascinating and fun but I've made no lasting friendships or connections. I'd move to something better with no regrets, but the site owners are probably never going to annoy me enough to move to something worse out of principle.
IMHO Digg was a success despite itself. Run more like a sophomoric Animal House [i] than a facebook or twitter. It was only a matter of time until it imploded.
There's nothing more user hostile than going bankrupt due to advertising fraud.