On Community Migration from Digg to Reddit

kqed.org

5 points·vlad··5 comments

Reddit needs to figure out how to create more subreddits without having to overcome critical mass every single time. I'm sure I'm kicking in an open door here, and I believe I read that they were working on it already, but I haven't seen a real solution so far. The recommendations system theoretically makes it feasible for all articles to go on one big reddit even with a large and diverse user base, but in practice, they're still suffering from a situation where new subreddits are hard to get off the ground while the main page has to be shared by different subcommunities with different interests.

According to Compete, at least, reddit is growing and Digg isn't:

http://snapshot.compete.com/reddit.com+digg.com?metric=vel

According to compete's visitors graph, Digg's month-to-month growth is actually 44.7%, much higher than Reddit's 30.1%.

I looked up the metric you used, and compete.com describes it this way:

"Use Velocity to understand how much more or less time people spent on the site, or their level of engagement. If a site can garner and sustain more of an individual's time it should generally be considered a good thing."

So, it seems that reddit visitors spend more time there than digg users do on digg.com.

Oops. I assumed by "velocity" they meant velocity.

The Digg influx seems to have hurt Reddit quality. Yahoo! started out as a human-edited collection of links; looks like there's a good reason to return to that model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com