Google Insights: HN vs. Reddit vs. Digg

Is your browser sending the wrong language? http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities

I agree. Google doesn't respect the Accept-Language header, just the location. It's really mind-boggling, and that has been the case for ages.

Perhaps most/many google users do not own their computers?

How annoying would it be for hundreds of internet cafe customers in China or India to search google only to realize it is in English because some foreigner changed the value?

In Chrome on Mac, I open Preferences, Under the Hood, Languages and Spell-checker Settings..., drag another language to the top of the list, and Google starts giving me whatever language I put on top.

I'm a native English speaker, so I only do this for testing app i18n support, but it seems straightforward (if cumbersome) to me.

I'm confused as to what's being measured in OP's link vs. your links. Is the OP's link measuring number of searches and your trends link measuring the number of daily visitors?

Also, I know the reddit admins have mentioned a number of times that third-party statistics about their visitor count are wildly wrong.

Those numbers are guesses and estimates. Here's the graph of uniques that actually comes from reddit's Google Analytics data:

https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...

IIRC, they did try to backpedal but by then they'd lost a fair chunk of their userbase, so they rolled out the new features again.

I'm not convinced that they want to backpedal at this point. They get the sponsored content and users that they wanted (or whatever it was the changes were that upset everyone). And frankly, the content is a lot better now than I ever remember it being.

That would mean admitting you were wrong. Better to blame it on others, blame it on bad technology, blame it on your programmers and blame it on your VP of Engineering. That is the way Kevin Rose chose to play it.

I think it is reasonable to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Kevin Rose badly misplayed the situation.

Please read:

As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...

This manages to be defensive and offensive and stupidly self-centered:

Kevin Rose Responds To Digg Criticism On Diggnation, Mostly Tells Users To Chill http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/kevin-rose-responds-to-digg...

Kevin tried to place a lot of the blame on Cassandra, saying the technology was not read for prime time, but the community pushed back in a big way and insisted that Cassandra was not the problem with Digg. If Cassandra had been the real problem, then Digg would have given up on it, but they did not:

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/08/digg-not-likely-to-give-up-on-c...

http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-Digg-v4s-tech...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669645

They had cleared most of the comments database, which is massive incompetence. I don't think they had any fallback plan.

they backpeddled much much later by 'reintroducing' some of the aspects of the site that were there before. Thing was, it was really quite a long time after all of the users had left. Initially, imo, the real problem was the shock of change and some serious downtime/bugs in the first 2-4 weeks is what killed it. As an active, dedicated user, not being able to use the site for so long left me no choice but to drop it from my daily habits.

Either I've grown up a whole lot in the last two years (possible), or the influx of new Redditors from ... well, everywhere ... pretty much killed the appeal the place had for me. It lost its exclusive feel, and now a 'Redditor' is just any random American college kid.

It's HN that I check when I wake up or when I'm bored now - comments here are likely to be things I want to read.

Yes, jailbait was one of the top search terms before that story.

Note that the jailbait reddit has been closed: http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbait (SFW). Of course, there is still a lot of material: http://www.reddit.com/r/truejailbait (SFW, but don't click the links).

It's because 4chan ran a campaign to get it there, not because of the content.

Every site exhibits some kind of bias which appeals to a certain class of people making the site better in the eyes of that particular group.

Every reddit and 4chan user would tell you that their site is superior to every other similar site.

Generally, this is good for everyone.

There are many comparisons that could be made between different sites that share some traits, but which one is the best is not something you can quantify.

Digg hit its peak and began to decline in May 2007. This is exactly when the HDDVD fiasco happened. I believe this was Digg's first major user revolt and it was responsible for many users (myself included) moving over to Reddit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

This seems forgotten in most discussions.

We all know that Reddit is far more large than HN. To me, the chart serves to illustrate how far Digg has fallen, and that reddit's profile has risen far above Digg's greatest height. Meanwhile, HN is steadily gaining ground, albeit in a much more narrowly focused area of topics, as you note.

>Or is there anything i am missing here?

You should probably consider why you felt defensive about HN.

It's sad isn't it?

It's like a tabloid rag now, the owners of digg should just get it over with and let TMZ buy it.

wow, did reddit actually outnumber 4chan? impossible, no?