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Comment by jgroome | Hacker News Reader

> The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.

With my cynicism hat on nice and tight, it seems a bit late for that. Digg WAS, in its heyday, the best place to find and share online content. But as the management undertook on iffy decision after another, and as imitators sprung up left right and centre, it lost its place in the online world. Sad.

We have plenty of content aggregators now. The kind of people Digg 5.0 (?!) will target are probably more than happy finding their entertainment through Twitter, Facebook, and dare I say it, Reddit.

Having said that, I for one wish the new team all the luck in the world in trying to get the site back to its former glory, and I look forward to trying it out.

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There is always room for a better content aggregator, reddit etc. all have their own set of flaws and problems. If the Betaworks team have the ideas to make a great content aggregator then purchasing the Digg brand is absolutely brilliant. The hard part of launching a new site is traction, if they can launch with "the new Digg" (and the site is impressive) that $500k will be the best $500k they could possibly spend on marketing. Techcrunch, Mashable, Reddit... it would be the front page of everywhere, "Digg crashed and burned and after being bought for $500k it's back and it's amazing!", hell maybe even CNN and the BBC would cover it. Not only that they have the entire userbase of Digg to market their new site to. A social news site biggest problem is getting users; this solves that problem (and them some)

If we assume that instead of the thought process being "We can have Digg for $500k... should we do it?" the thought process was actually: "We have this brilliant idea for content aggregation, how can we most effectively implement and market this?" then it sounds like a much safer and sensible thing to do.

I liked Reddit back when it was less well known. Now, it just appears that the content appeals to the lowest common denominator. Some of the content is still great (i.e. r/dwarffortress), but a lot of the site has degraded into junk. If anyone has some good subreddits that are still decent, I'd love to know what they are.

foodforthought truereddit, economics

and if you unsubscribe from pics, funny, adviceanimals, aww, and atheism (regardless of whether you are or not, it's just not high quality content), you'll find that things suddenly get a whoooole lot better

http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3pv4lu/

This might be the first permissible use of quickmeme on HN ;)

there are a lot of excellent small subreddit, but their appeal will obviously depend on whether you share that subinterest. some good larger ones are /r/askscience, /r/printsf and /r/coding.

/r/learnprogramming is a great place to learn and contribute

It's all about the subreddits

http://subreddits.org/

http://www.reddit.com/reddits/

Reddit is what you make it. Nothing more, nothing less.

/r/securityanalysis is excellent for those interested in analyzing financial securities. It's pretty narrow, but just shows that pockets of deep content do exist on a mostly frivolous site.

/r/askscience and /r/depthhub are pretty consistently good.

I don't use reddit so have a fairly basic understanding of how it works but looking at all these replies about subreddits, it struck me that basically reddit is a web2.0 version of usenet. So I guess that means good content is there, you just need to know where to look :)

P.S. for the redditors: I have nothing against reddit, it's just that I'm already drowning in information and never found the time to get in to it.

That's actually a pretty decent analogy. Obviously the focus on posting links and ranking and such is different, but the user experience of someone totally new is similar. As is the searching for tiny pockets of awesome in a sea of idiocy.

Heh heh I love your phrase "searching for tiny pockets of awesome in a sea of idiocy" - that pretty much sums up my entire relationship with the internet :D

Well, it's kind of specific, but r/TheoryofReddit is a very interstitial sub that often deals with the questions we're talking about here. I find it to be quality. Here is an interesting comment regarding the submission problem: http://www.reddit.com/r/ideasfortheadmins/comments/rbwn4/ran...

You could also check out Hubski. It's a much smaller new community with completely different social feed mechanisms. I like it quite a bit, though the volume of users is small (but growing). The owner coded it from the open source HN code. There have always been differences in the features and mechanics, but mk just completed a redesign that completely removed even stylistic similarities.

Time to hit 'reply' and see how badly I mangled this post typing on my phone...

I've got my reddit page nice and customized so I see exactly what I'm interested in appear on the front page every morning through specific subreddits

I come to HN for a bit more focused conversation on industry related stuff

I don't think Digg really has a place anywhere between those two

Yea, this reminds me of the MS/IBM DOS 4.0 fiasco, though in this case it is much worse.

the cost of switching with content aggregators is so low, and there is a network effect in the switch, so I would never write digg off. just thinking about it, I would probably give whatever they build next a chance

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