Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

As much as everyone loves to blame Digg v4 for Digg's failure I don't think that's entirely accurate. I definitely think that v4 sped up the demise, but Digg as a product was not what the majority of people wanted.

If you compare Digg and reddit the differences are pretty big, beyond the basic premise ("links that people vote on") Digg had a very big focus on news and "social" whereas reddit focuses on content, whether that's farmed from elsewhere or created by reddit users. If you compare the top 100 links from r/all vs. digg.com/all you can see a clear difference in content.

A Digg type site definitely has a place on the internet, as it's been shown Digg still has traffic now, I just think reddit was the natural successor to Digg, regardless of the mistakes Digg made.

I think reddit vs. Digg can be compared to Twitter. Twitter would never have worked in 2001, the internet just wasn't ready for it, but in 2012 it's doing incredibly well. The internet wasn't ready for what reddit is now in 2004. Digg catered to what people in 2004 wanted, but it doesn't cater to what people want in 2012. reddit succeeded because reddit is more of a platform than it is a website, it offers the basic framework for a community link sharing website but their focus was loose enough (with stuff like subreddits) that it was able to evolve with the internet. If that makes any sense...

I have always maintained that reddit let the content shine, where digg tried to wrap too much UI around the content, in the same way that Quora is doing today.

The digg interface, while clean for the first few weeks of viewing it, became a hindrance from providing information density.

Reddit allowed much more information and content density thus allowing a faster and more free flowing consumption of content.

Look at Quora today: you see that they have a weird UI wrapped around their content that makes the wrong bits of information stand out, the worst method of finding topics and an annoying auto-refresh that makes content jump when trying to read it, zero comment threading and depth, and finally and most importantly far too active heavy moderation/censorship.

Quora is only successful because of the early adopters, but in time it will fall to the side as digg did, when the first generations of its users move on and the UI becomes far too obvious how bad it is for consuming lots of information quickly.

I was just thinking the same thing a couple days ago. Reddit feels like you're hanging out a bar with friends but also meeting new people. Quora feels like a salon where librarians shush you if you speak too loudly.

I think the difference is that reddit can be exactly what you want it to be, to an extent. Or, rather, of the 100s of communities on reddit, you only have to belong to a select few of them if you so desire, and the kinds of communities you can find on reddit are vast, varied, and uniquely interesting.

This is exactly what makes reddit so great. I don't have to look at pictures of cats and rage comics if I only want to se stuff about programming/technology/etc.

This also allows it to evolve. Some sub-reddits with reddit enhancement suite installed are more like pinterest.

“don't take too much financing” is a recognition that Digg v4's failure (and you should look at Alexa graphs to see how significant that was) was due to ignoring the community to give investors the site they thought they wanted.

An incredibly astute observation - it also serves to show that the investors didn't know beans about how to make the product successful, but were pushing for the changes anyway. They are still out there telling startups what they 'should do', even as we read this.

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