The unbundling of Craigslist and Reddit
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(There are forum areas, but I haven't gotten involved with those. I assume they're not as popular as Reddit, but feel free to correct this assumption. Regardless, they're a contained area of the site, rather than embedded in the underlying structure.)
Reddit, on the other hand, is a huge community of users openly engaged with each other. This is a fundamentally different dynamic, one which I believe cannot easily be separated into individually-operated platforms.
The mental overhead of looking on twenty random for the twenty things one would commonly do on craigslist would still be huge.
The thing about craigslist is it's about doing stuff that most people aren't sophisticates, afficionados or specialists in. Most people who look for rooms for rent don't have a complex or even a well-defined set of criteria for what a good search would involve. Even landlords tend to be pretty adhoc. Similarly with people selling cars or household items.
Craigslist is where people exchange good-enough information about some incidental commodity between each other. Neither person is going to make the investment of providing more information because it's not the specialty of either person. Add to that the way people have currently learned to prefer good-enough and Craigslist looks unbeatable.
There's no way HN is still the center of this world for long. Its where you invited all your friends and co-workers to, and now its a mess. Now you have to move upmarket to find better information, and getting into those other communities is harder. They don't just let anyone in. They watched what happened to HN and they're scared of killing quality.
If you want into those communities, you better have created something, and you better be willing to contribute in a positive way. They won't tolerate many Jeremiahs.
Accounts cost $10, and you get banned (meaning you have to spend another $10) if you do dumb things.
If it feels a bit like networking... thats because it is.
Another alternative is Amy Hoy's (ahoyhere) 30x500: http://30x500.com/
Those are a couple of the public-access gates. Enter therein, and bring with you optimism, a willingness to share knowledge, and determination.
At $50 per month, it certainly seems like a good way to keep the owners employed, at least.
If the community isn't worthwhile, then even $5 would be too much.
If the community helps your business to grow, then $50 is a trivial price.
I'm not a member, but I read Rob's book and it's was worth FAR more than the cover price.
I have revenue. Not as much as I want, but enough so that even a tiny increase in conversions is worth quite a bit, if the increase is permanent.
Pass.
What did happen to HN, exactly? Maybe the bloom just hasn't worn off for me yet, but discussion here is about a million times more high-quality and productive than, say, Slashdot.
The core problem with HN seems to be the tendency for people to lambast ideas before we've given them a chance to germinate. PG gets fiery mad at this behavior. Scoffing at ideas adds nothing, in fact it reduces the value of the conversation to the point that it has less-than-zero value.
To use a (poorly constructed) analogy: if I want to laugh at nerds and their nerdy ideas, I should go join the ranks of nerd-scoffers at any local high-school, where I'd be a better fit. If you want to be part of the conversion here, you should bring a positive or constructive voice and try to improve on ideas, rather than tear them down.
Comments similarly started lacking in quality, or maybe the really vocal minority are just louder than everyone else. You're right that slashdot comments are way worse (jokes aren't frowned-upon as they on HN, so a lot of discussions degrade to cheap jokes), but the articles are moderated by a handful of people and are typically more interesting.
It's simply a function of a user-run moderation system that reaches a critical point, after which is it logistically impossible for the "good few" to moderate out all the bad ones because their votes count the same. We saw it in Slashdot comments, Digg and Reddit, and now we are seeing it here.
It'd be interesting to see some statistics on who comments on what articles. (And who doesn't.)
As it stands I sort of feel like I'm crashing a party, and would serve you all best by leaving.
Aside from political posts, I think there is still a broad range of content on here that spans far more than myopic coding/entrepreneurial blogs etc.
Great comments happen here too, but I feel (possibly incorrectly, haven't done a survey or anything) that they come on a smaller range of subjects. You can count on tptacek for very good crypto comments, grellas for law, there are some old-school Lisp hackers around, and on a lot of web-related stuff you have the people who wrote the system in question around to comment. But we don't seem to have as many non-computer technologists around: pilots, nuclear engineers, chemists, etc. I think Slashdot has a userbase that averages somewhat older, somewhat less Silicon Valley, and somewhat less startuppy, which has its pros and cons.
Or maybe it's just rose-colored glasses to some extent; certainly there was the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" type stuff.
Additionally I've heard this complaint so many times, but I don't find Reddit ugly at all. What do people want? Tag clouds, gradients and flash everywhere, or what? What's a less ugly forum/comment layout than Reddit?
Not to mention commonly being saddled with a 10yr old model of PHPbb style boards.
1. Change the #0000FF links. Something, anything, slightly desaturated from pure blue would look better IMO. <Insert contrast comments here>
2. Whitespace. I can feel the function over form guys typing away furiously from here! BUT YOU CAN FIT MORE CATZ WITH LESS WHITESPACE! I like a little bit of extra whitespace, so sue me. I think an extra 20 pixels between submissions would go a long way. Maybe even a light HR too?
3. The "tabs" at the top are just flat ugly and dated. In fact, everything within the blue header just looks dated.
http://www.reddit.com/r/googleplus for example does a nice job of making Reddit look better without drastic changes. Although I think their titles could be slightly larger and I hate text-decoration: underline;
As for the ugly, I think it looks fine. At least, I'd rather have it be a bit on the plain side than have megabytes of garish colors everywhere like a 2003 Myspace page that takes 30 seconds for each page to load.
For instance, Quora is not /r/AskReddit. AskReddit is much more casual, full of opinion and silly questions, whereas Quora is a lot more serious and formal and values quality and factuality much more than AskReddit does.
As for why CL and Reddit don't move with the times
"Why is this the case? I don’t know. But, my guess is that this leaves both Craigslist and reddit more vulnerable to unbundling effect, and this is a good sign for startups building within their verticals."
Simply, they haven't needed to yet. The threats haven't been obviously very strong, and they continue to have a lot of users and make strides (especially Reddit) in popularity, despite the apparent drawbacks.
Reddit's UX isn't actually that terrible, it's just a bit ugly-looking. It works quite well, in general, and isn't completely unintuitive.
Some of my favorites of the last year or two are http://reddit.com/r/ExplainLikeIAmA, http://reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting, http://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful, http://reddit.com/r/futurology, http://reddit.com/r/outside, and http://reddit.com/r/hwstartups. To name just a few. There is basically no way the reddit founders could have envisioned any of those categories, but thankfully, they had the foresight to create a generic, make-your-own-category platform.
The community of reddit certainly has shifted quite a bit, but this ability to evolve organically will keep it from unraveling in the same way as Craigslist has. I think it's a bad comparison anyway.
CL provides the easiest, most frictionless way to engage in a local transaction with another individual or entity. The other verticals may be slicker, more targeted, and backed my big corporate $$, but they haven't attracted the mindshare or provided the utility to the average person that CL does.
As for ugly sites, you can use your own CSS to theme sites to your liking, so ugliness is pretty much a non-issue for me.
There may be validity in the "unbundling" notion, but I still seem to use my preferred sites after giving the new sites a spin for a short time.
Whereas its harder to see how reddit can monetise on any scale, let alone how there can be money in individual verticals.
Reddit's monetization issue is ironic, because it's incredibly valuable to marketers: organic/viral growth via Reddit is easy and lucrative. The problem is that Reddit's platform is designed in such a way that there's really no need to go through advertising channels: why pay money to get off on the wrong foot with your audience when you could go through the normal means of the site? (I'm not sure what the admin's stance is on subreddit takeovers, but I'd imagine those would be an avenue worth going down.)
What the author is trying to say is as subreddits become more popular, exclusive website will be created in their image. He gives success stories like 9gag & hacker news. So it comes as no surprise that the author has his own website which he claims is a result of a subreddit (which one I have no clue). Basically this guy is drinking his own koolaid. The problem with this argument is it is not clear if reddit came before 9gag or hacker news. Surely hacker news & 9gag are successful despite what is on reddit, not because the idea may have spawned from a subreddit.
Most internet use is during business hours. Craigslist & Reddit look, from ~10 feet away (by passing coworkers) to look closer to "work", as it's text-based, with very few graphics. It doesn't look like the Huffington Post, ESPN, Netflix, or Facebook.
So, coworkers or bosses passing by either don't register it as "goofing off", or, if they do recognize it, they are "in the club" & not going to call you on it.
And, by having a minimalist UI (compact, informational), they know they MUST focus on content to succeed. This makes content king, like it should be, for user-generated content sites like this.
Craigslist on the other hand has no karma. A good seller or good buyer is completely anonymous. People will post to Craigslist if they can sell just as easily they'll post to another site if they can sell there. Reddit is not the same. A redditor will more readily post to reddit because of the sweet, sweet karma.
Digg, which was the first post-Slashdot favorite, positively churned compared to reddit. People like reddit and CL because they don't change. These forums have been popular since the 1980s BBSs. They don't change it because it works.