"None of these have the potential to be a self-sustaining business" | Hacker News Reader

"None of these have the potential to be a self-sustaining business"

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You know, even if a business of mine completely failed, I would never, ever let godaddy park its spam there:

Oh, well. He should have used an anonymous account like the rest of us jerks.

Funny that Reddit catches most of the flack. If "rufy" is around, I'd love to hear his take on the now undeniable success of Reddit (apparently not the biggest success story from that program, but the one we all know about).

Are you referring to Loopt?

The lesson here is complexity != commercial viability.

It's times like these when I want to build a website that tracks predictions and promises. Everything from some engineer ranting to a politicians campaign promises. Rank the top promises made in one place, then rank the top promises proved right / wrong due to events or some time limit imposed. Not a business idea so much as a fun website to run.

That idea is highly thievable. Done right, I could see it being a good go-to site for news in general.

You may want to consider implementing [Idea Futures](http://hanson.gmu.edu/ifextropy.pdf).

I wonder if a site like this would encourage people to structure their predictions with qualifiers and clauses in such a way as to give them the maximum chance of being proven "correct". Also, I wonder if this site would encourage people to make their 'prediction' be more about explaining their beliefs about the present rather than guessing at data/outcomes that will occur in the future.

Well, his basecamp clone was rejected... sour grapes?

The article gets a lot funnier after you finish reading it and realize it's from 2005. :-)

(And yes, I know it says so at the top)

I can't really disagree with him though, Reddit really is a Digg clone minus the UI.

I can, because the founders didn't know about Reddit when they started it. There's different fundamental design concepts.

They're actually quite different. Different layout (reddit's is denser); different initial focus (Digg was initially about technology, reddit general news); very different frontpage ranking algorithm (why Digg has problems with censorship and reddit doesn't); and different comment threads (until Digg copied reddit yesterday).

The reason they're so different is that they have different origins. Digg started as Slashdot with voting instead of editors, and reddit started as Del.icio.us with voting instead of saving.

What I think is funny is that digg recently redesigned their comments (the most distinguished feature of reddit) to try to immitate reddit's, but missed the most critical aspect -- the ordering.

Digg still orders comments chronologically and that sucks. I'd equate this with google not paying attention to ordering of results! Creating a threaded comment system without the ordering is so mind numbingly easy and digg decided to take the easy path without paying attention to the details that count.

I was tempted to post this where the creators of digg can see it, but I don't really want them to realize their error:)

So why does Reddit have a very different feel than Digg?

It sure used to, but since the HD-DVD fiasco, Reddit seems to have picked up a large number of ex-Digg users.

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