What was reddit like before it got "Dugg"? | Hacker News Reader

What was reddit like before it got "Dugg"?

5 pointsaswanson11 comments

I never visited the site back when, so what made it so appealing? A lot of hackers here seem to have a nostalgia for the olden days.

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It had an intelligent and interesting community that was almost exclusively made up of programmers. The submissions were made up of programming, science and general interest links. What made it great was the quality of comments; the discussion was the most interesting and insightful of any on-line community I've ever found. The links these days aren't the problem - its the comments. Sadly I've found the quality of my comments has dropped along with general trend - people tend to ignore long comments these days in favour of quick opinions.

[edit] also the size of the community helped. You got to know regular posters and this lack of anonymity encouraged a quality of discussion.

IMHO, reddit can do the following to clean up:

1. make my.reddit.com the default and make it harder to get to the current default front page.

2. This was a while back so they may have fixed this already: Don't screw up on the cookie/log in process - I've had to log in several times to reddit despite not logging out. I finally stopped logging in. Their ip logs probably tell the story better and can validate my experience. Its a small bug and takes a while to realize the full impact on user experience. The auto-login is sacred for a site like reddit.

3. Work really hard on the recommendation engine for comments as well.

s/my.reddit.com/http://reddit.com/recommended/ in above post.

"Execution aborted due to compilation errors." You didn't escape your slashes.

Conjecture: I don't think Hacker News will ever have the same feel as reddit, or at least the type of banter than went on in those posts.

Why? Because I think too many people reading these posts want to get YC funding and are therefore stepping on eggshells with what they say.

On the converse side the conversation is probably more polite than other forums.

I've personally seen Paul Graham kill a kitten with a blender.

edit: It was horrible.

A smaller community submitting higher quality links without dumb comments by 13 year olds. The initial community was seeded by Y Combinator and Paul Graham. Check out PG's links here: http://reddit.com/user/bugbear/submitted?offset=300

It's all still there.

http://reddit.com/info/bwbu/comments

And if you have a look at the first 5 comments, 4 of those commenters have all posted in the last day (2 in the last hour). So it has not completely lost its potential. It just needs a channel through which it can bloom again.

richardkulisz

http://reddit.com/user/richardkulisz/

Now known as http://reddit.com/user/redditcensoredme/

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