Ask HN: What comes after Reddit/Digg? HN a model? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What comes after Reddit/Digg? HN a model?

8 pointsjkaljundi2 comments

I would like to brainstorm some ideas with people regarding what might come after Reddit/Digg as far as topic-based content discovery and discussions go.

Is there something where you see Reddit/Digg a lacking that could be implemented better or revolutionized in a completely different way?

Could HN - niche site for one area - be a good example of where curation-based content discovery goes? Or could it be more about automated content discovery and analysis based on Twitter/FB/Google+ datasets with curation, voting and community aspects built on top of it?

While Reddit/Digg for sure have their own audiences, my feeling is as the quantity of content out there grows, there are still many opportunities for innovation in the content discovery and topic-based communities area. The question is what might come next?

Thanks in advance!

I'm betting the next "big thing" with these social sharing sites is personality driven niche sites. Reddit, Digg and HN all formed around the personalities of their founders but as the communities grow large the community's personality itself takes over (giving the community a personality out of control of the founders). What I haven't seen is the loss of that democracy in favor of a benevolent dictator.

Imagine a community where someone like Arrington is publicly voting on the stories giving him a Caesar like "thumbs up, thumbs down" influence over the content. You see this to some extent with "power users" but I think it won't be long before someone intentionally starts a community to promote their own ego and successfully develops a following.

Think of it like grabbing a bunch of Twitter feeds in front of a crowd and saying "I like this one, who's with me?" -- and the crowd cheers. "This one sucks, right?" -- and the crowd boos. People like to follow, not lead and this concept plays off that dynamic.

reddit and digg don't really have content suggestions built in. They should be able to compare your interests with other people's interests on the site and actually curate the submissions automatically for ones that you'll most likely like.

Right now everything is determined via actions, such as following subreddits and looking at the what's hot pages. It could be much more personalized with some machine learning.

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