Can Digg make a run on Reddit?
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I associate reddit more with close discussion communities, as broader-versions of forums.
I don't think they will be successful, but its a really interesting concept.
One of the hardest parts of any kind of community driven website is to generate the community in the first place. Of course, as the idea of eternal september demonstrates communities deteriorates in quality over time as the community grows to a broader variety of people.
Its interesting then, to try to take an existing community that has settled at the lowest common denominator of content and to try to revitalize it.
If you take the metaphor further, if you think of artists as the cultivators of culture in a city. And the first step of gentrification is an increase in artists (typically seeking lower rent) who is the cultivators of culture in an internet community. Money doesn't really exist on the internet... well at least the classism associated with it (and rent) so what attracts these culture cultivators back?
blauwbilgorgel gave some good reasons why this prospect seems ridiculous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322197.
Like outlook.com, the best thing Digg has going for it is that people really want an alternative to the incumbent who sits on most of the market, which in this case is reddit.
Digg at its highest peak was a grossly imperfect product. If project success depended upon trivia like type="text/javascript", the internet world would be a very different place.
In its current state definitely not. If they can build even better algorithms and communities than Reddit, maybe. But that's a huge if. And they've got nothing right now.
I do like its design though, which is very different from Reddit, and that means it might serve a different market.
* dysfunctional, but community nonetheless.
Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time. While this leads to a filtered world, that is exactly what users expect from sites like these.
Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users (while catering to a new audience) -- in /r/all as well as individual subreddits that see a constant cycle of abandonment as people try to ontologically solve the problem -- as it is increasingly dominated by teenagers.
If I could strongly express a disinterest in every fictitious Facebook picture / iPhone message conversation, and that served as a quality indicator of people whose opinions I don't respect, that would be beautiful.
It shouldn't matter what subreddits I subscribe to (and the encroachment of certain trends keeps herding people to yet new subreddits. /r/gaming -> rage comics and DAE remember. Okay, everyone to /r/games...rinse repeat. /r/atheism -> ridiculous and obviously fake caricatures for people to knock down. /r/programming -> beginner material, so what, /r/notbeginnerprogramming?)
That is a hack, manual solution for machine learning of the things I am interested in.
Netflix uses strong algorithms and a lot of data crunching to suggest movies I might be interested in, rather than simply forcing me to subscribe to wholesale genres (you like Action movies so here's every movie that dropped in the Action bin). The eventually winner of the social news game will be those who effectively transfer that sort of learning to this genre.
Note that you can take it beyond simply finding correlation indexes between users -- analyze the linked site to determine factors like is it image heavy, what is the grade level / complexity level of the writing, discern the subject matter, etc.
Look at it this way: when you upvote a fitness-related submission, you say "hey, I'm somewhat interested in fitness", when you subscribe to /r/fitness, you say "hey, I'm really interested in fitness."
So, both upvoting and subscribing are actually manual actions.
With which you also say -- or so Reddit believes in its current level of imperfection -- "and I have complete affinity with everyone else who happens to vote in /r/fitness".
Is that true? Is there any subreddit where that is true?
It perplexes me that this is being treated like an either/or. It is not. In reality subreddits see a constantly exploding entropy as users try to fix a broken mechanism of correlation -- the fact that I like gaming doesn't mean that I like the same thing as every other reader of /r/gaming, for instance. Just fix that by splitting off into /r/truegaming, or maybe /r/games, or maybe...
So, the site should be unique for each user, right? But if you take the tactic you mentioned in a previous post: "Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as provided to that user for some period of time." You'll pretty quickly run out of any other users to interact with.
Heavy math/statistical analysis that can be tuned to create a productive enjoyable experience, with the side benefit that it reduces gaming and exploitation.
No. With that I tell Reddit to show me different opinions on fitness coming from people who aren't morons (since the submission was not downvoted). You seem to think that if a person subscribes to /r/fitness, he surely has the same opinions as the hivemind. That's not true at all.
Good subreddits allow all kinds of opinions. And by allow I mean they aren't being downvoted automatically. Of course, there is the hivemind and a dominating opinion, but other opinions are not repressed, that's my point.
Trying to make everything automatic seems like a job for a different site entirely.
Categorization does still matter (in the Netflix example they can competently recommend and rank for me, but they still allow me to filter into specific categories). Subreddits are useful.
However subreddits are a very coarse, manual solution to what I described.
To the comment about what reddit is designed for, it started sans subreddits. Indeed, an original focus was recommendations, but either the algorithms or the hardware wasn't there to support it, the result being a bit of a disaster. So they went down the manual binning approach.
Manual binning does something magical: each bin is a separate community run by moderators. Each one has different rules, different posters, different content and different discussion.
If you automatically sort into bins, then you will automatically lose the distinction between bins.
You cannot get your users to respect the difference between communities if you are unwilling to show them that each community is different, and deserves individual attention.
Sure, find a better algorithm for the front page and logged out users.
But to destroy the autonomy of the subreddit would be to destroy the very thing that makes reddit successful.
So, what's the point of automatic recommendations on Reddit? If there is any fitness-related material on Reddit, I'll see it in /r/fitness anyway.
Besides, how are you going to train the recommendation engine? By analyzing what submissions people upvoted?
"I like action movies" "Here's Megashark vs 747. You like action movies, so you like this"
How is any given subreddit any different? Being into fitness does not mean you share an identical interest/taste/discernment with everyone else who is into fitness. Further social news sites are subject to the tyranny of the minority -- aka the lowest common denominator. When people are more likely to express approval than disapproval, a small percentage of users with a common interest will tend to dominate.
I think you are missing the point of subreddits. They are not for finding people that agree with you, they are for creating communities with all kinds of opinions. I go to /r/fitness exactly because I don't share most of the ideas there. I go there to learn something new.
If I want to know everything that happens in the world of fitness, I subscribe to /r/fitness. With automatic recommendations (and without subscribing to /r/fitness) I'd never see stuff that I didn't know I was interested in.
That's the problem with automatic recommendations - paradoxically, you can't discover new interests with their help. You can discover what's happening inside your sphere of interests, but you can't discover new interests.
I have never said that subreddits should go away. Ever. Each post that again argues one versus the other is tossing up a distraction.
They are not for finding people that agree with you
Correlation isn't about agreement: An upvote does not mean "I agree with this". It means "I found this interesting/useful/enjoyable/educational", whereas a downvote should mean "I find this uninteresting/not useful/unenjoyable/not educational".
In no universe does that preclude learning new things. Quite the contrary, in fact.
There is no Reddit, there are communities united by the same platform.
In fact, I see this complaint all the time and it is usually coming from people who didn't discover the beauty of subreddits.
Again, there is no Reddit. There is nothing to fall apart.
That's unless you refer to the default front page as Reddit. The front page is falling apart because the default subreddits are being swarmed with teenagers. But the front page is not Reddit, subreddits are Reddit.
/r/atheism is the pinnacle example (this is a trend that becomes exaggerated the larger the sub).
The subreddit approach alone does not scale. Or rather it does scale by endless manual fracturing, which is a half-assed, luddite solution.
Yes you are.
-former reddit employee
Sure, there are users who adjust their subreddits, but (if I'm remembering this correctly) jedberg has stated the vast majority— some 90%— of users never make an account. I'm betting subreddits aren't the main reason reddit attracts so many people.
All content on Reddit -- all of it, comes from these individualized communities.
Also the 90% number -- that's true of almost any site, it's the "1% Rule"[1] (or a rule by a number of other names). Instead of focusing on the 90% lurkers, realize that it's the 1% of creators and 9% of contributors that create/submit and curate the content that brings the 90% to the front page.
So how do you attract the best 10%, the best curators, the best original creators?
In my opinion: individual communities dedicated to any topic they choose. Decentralized power that makes the 90%'s front page nothing more than the best-of-the-biggest subreddits. Sure, many subreddits will not be worthy of the 90%'s front page -- but then again, many communities don't want on the front page (and the massive influx of 'eternal september' users that it brings!)
Some subreddits, like /r/askscience, have over half a million users and maintain a rigid, empirical comment section that actively prevents layman speculation. Think about that, 600,000 users and they run a community with very little to no layman speculation.
Other subreddits, like /r/f7u13 (or /r/circlejerk) run very anarchistic comment sections where ridiculousness is supported and mods abusing power is par the course.
The beauty of Reddit is the freedom the subreddits have and the wonderful communities that create and curate the content that makes the 90%'s front page as good as it is.
I do not understand how you can emulate the result of a strong, engaged community by preventing communities from forming at all.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
If doubling your traffic every 8-12 months for seven years is a disaster...
Reddit has the inertia effect right now. The potential upside shrinks while the potential downside explodes.
I will also claim that subreddits are by no means a hack. They are THE key feature of Reddit that allows users to join together on the basis of common interests. There's no replacing subreddits because they are a killer feature in their own right.
Also, it shouldn't matter what Usenet newsgroups I read and what TV channels I watch.
Enjoy your stay.
If you want to see a bad job of filtering, by all means rely on an algorithm that is designed to give minimal acceptable performance because anything else would soak up too much CPU. I'll stick to moderation and subfora.
Second, and more interestingly: people have different facets that they show in different subreddits. As an example here on HN people prefer tech-oriented stuff. But not everyone here is that into tech. They just sort or organize the content, so they come to HN for in-depth stuff, and (say) Engadget for rumors, and sbnation for sports etc. So someone who upvotes a stupid FB pic in /r/funny might vote the same photo down in /r/politics. If the person is "sorting" content that's appropriate in different situations, it's not useful to discount their opinion entirely.
1. I don't want to have to spend time researching subreddits just to figure out what I'd like. Content aggregators are meant to remove steps from the process, not add them. 2. While the content of smaller subreddits are usually improved, the level of discourse in comments are not. Even if you say 'okay, no meme posts, no meme comments', the fact is that you're going to have a glut of commentors whose first impulse are to crack a joke or make a surface-level comment. The difference in comments between a post on here and a post on /TrueReddit/ are astounding.
(The one pretty ready example to the above are < 100 member subreddits, but those usually have the issue of insufficient content.)
Between being generically named, being linked in similar subreddit sidebars and showing up in the search, I think it's pretty easy to find what you're looking for or create it yourself and know that it will get more bites than a random website people would have to Google to get to. I would even say that in Reddit's case, there are just so many users from so many different walks of life that it is an easy bet to find a subreddit that suits your fancy in both content and personality.
There's an exploratory phase that anyone who wants to delve into a community has to go through, and if that takes too much time, perhaps that's the user's problem, not the site's.
I don't want to spend time upvoting 50 submissions to tell the recommendation engine what my interests are (and with the current state of technology it will get my interests wrong anyway). I just want to click one button (subscribe to a subreddit) and that's it.
And when I become less interested in a certain topic (fitness, starcraft) I can just press the unsubscribe button once and never see submissions for that topic again.
Overall, I'd like to see aggregators move to the Pandora model, rather than the Hype Machine one. With Pandora, I can specify a jumping off point (genre, artist, song) but it still refines my tastes from there.
Hype Machine, I've 'liked' hundreds of songs but I still need to manually peruse through specific blogs to find new songs I like. It's unideal.
Besides, I'm not a fan of automatic recommendations as they have a lot of drawbacks. Their major problem is: they won't help you find something you didn't know you liked.
This is patently untrue. It is more likely to find you stuff that you didn't know you like than the lowest common denominator strategy.
Just how exactly will they do it? I'm really interested, maybe I'm missing something?
Simply speaking, if a system knows all I listen to is classical music, it can recommend me a new classical composition, but it cannot all of a sudden recommend me dubstep (which I might actually like).
Regarding music taste, if the system knows that you have a strong correlation with a number of users who like classical but periodically explore new music, what they like will likely be something you might be interested in. This, in practice, is exactly how music discovery happens in the real world (that the discoveries of the people you share musical tastes with are more likely to interest you).
The system you are describing will find people who have a strong correlation with me and who also like:
1) Classical music and Justin Bieber.
2) Classical music and Metallica.
3) Classical music and Dubstep.
And it will recommend me Bieber, Metallica and Dubstep. I might like Dubstep, but I won't like Bieber and Metallica. How is it better than listening to random songs?
I want to be encouraged to upvote/downvote things because I know it will impact my experience, not because it will modify some arbitrary score to an unknown individual.
The experience would be more pleasant (for me at least) if it could cut out comments & stories I'm uninterested in, possibly with a summary of the article / conversation.
No matter how hard I try, rate comics and Facebook anything still hit my screen.
I'm not sure that FB and Twitter shares are the same as "diggs".