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Comment by watmough | Hacker News Reader

Reddit did two brilliant things:

  1. They didn't screw up their site. 
  2. They scaled. Not without struggles tho.

Pretty good demo of letting competitors destroy themselves.

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Your first point is nearly impossible to do in conjunction with second point but reddit did it splendidly. The admins do a fantastic job of being unbiased and pro-users (instead of pro-owners). They have learned that taking a short-term loss for long-term gain is the right thing to do. They haven't tried to change the site design or rules after people have gotten used to it. They are still acting like reddit is a small community of the first 5000 users and not 20 million visitors.

You may disagree with the content that adorns the front-page but you can trust that it was driven by users and not sponsors.

The bigger "miracle" to me is how they fostered a 4chan-like creative atmosphere without going overboard. This is a very tricky balance but they managed to do it really well.

Yeah, they really did community management well, and continue to do it well. Digg pulled all sorts of sketchy admin stuff, but Reddit maintained an integrity that won it loyalty from users.

I alway believed that reddit needs a redesign, but now that I'm thinking it, Digg had 4 redesigns and maybe that is a part for why it failed. People don't like change.

It was arguably only the dreaded "version 4" redesign that caused the failure of Digg. And it wasn't necessarily the look that everyone hated, it was the fact that every single aspect of functionality was completely changed in a way that made it a different type of website. It took the voting-power out of the users' hands and gave it to the "publishers" of the content.

"redesign" isn't really an appropriate term for what Digg did- they changed a lot of core functionality at the same time as changing design.

When when the dreaded "V4" came, it wasn't the design that was the problem, it was the change to prioritising major media companies.

It would be possible for Reddit to change their design without changing functionality. But I suspect that no-one would be happy with the result.

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