Congrats to reddit team, despite some frequent "this is not reddit" remarks here on HN I still love that community.
Out of curiosity I just checked compete.com and was disappointed to learn that Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.
>Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.
Could somebody please explain this sentiment to me? I feel like all the "cool kids" are constantly falling over one another to talk about who hates digg the most.
Is there some trove of horrible things that Kevin Rose has done floating around somewhere or something? I used to watch diggnation every week, and he genuinely seemed like an incredibly nice guy. Why so much hate for him? He's living what I think a lot of us dream about. He's got an incredibly popular website, he's got tons of funding, he's got lots of very brilliant engineers working for him, and he's really really young...
He's living the freaking life, guys, and as far as I can tell he hasn't ever done anything to deserve all the hatred.
As far as digg itself goes...why is it always being comparied to reddit? To me, this is about as apt as comparing reddit to msnbc.com; they're not even in the same category of websites.
Digg is very link-centric. It's all about links, lots an lots of links.
Reddit, on the other hand, is all about comments.
I guess a good comparison would be youtube vs some very popular web forums. On reddit, it's all about the discussion. the comment system they put together is freaking outstanding (when it's working), and that is why people go to the site. Digg is more like youtube; nobody really cares about youtube comments (they're mostly crap anyway), they're there for the video.
Digg and reddit are fundamentally different. Please stop comparing them, and please let me know what it is that everybody hates so much about the former.
Not so much hate for him as hate for how his website has de-evolved. Early on, it was much like Slashdot or HN. When he started introducing features that benefited power-users, your chances of getting your own stories dropped to 0 while the front page was filled with Cracked-like "top-10" lists.
They also have a whitelist of domains that can show up on the front page which turns digg into an rss feed of those sites and the occasional Reddit story that a poweruser feels like copying.
Once a site gets huge like Digg then the trolls and monkeys of the Internet come in and ruin everything. At least that is why I stop reading digg in late 2007.
>nobody really cares about youtube comments (they're mostly crap anyway)
This is true for funny 30-second videos with millions of views and the like, but there are plenty of youtube videos on niche subjects that will never accumulate more than a few thousand views, all from like-minded people. The comment threads on these videos are a completely different matter.
Only ever looked at Digg a few times and only at Reddit because HN has linked there a bit, but I'm wondering if the Digg hate is more a dislike of the broader community than the owner himself?
I know in the times I visited in the early days, those commenting were mostly pretty hapless and predictable.
Where does he say he hates Kevin Rose? Also, The National Enquirer and the New York Times aren't similar in function / category but I can still compare them. (Not to say that that'd be a completely fair analogy to Digg vs Reddit, but you get the idea.)
He didn't. Which is exactly why I didn't say or imply that he did. What he did say, and what I did address is expressing sadness that digg is successful. The question about the Kevin Rose hatred was a question about the general dislike for him that a lot of geeks show and was not directed at OP specifically.
>The National Enquirer and the New York Times aren't similar in function / category but I can still compare them.
And I can compare a bottle rocket to a pile of bananas, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a completely and totally worthless comparison.
I'm sure Kevin's a great guy, but his site is not him. I was regular there for a few months and there was a marked decline in link and comment quality. Eventually, I gave up and left. Many people on reddit share the same experience.
But nonetheless, I have never 'hated' on digg. The site has changed and I realize it's not for me anymore. I'm sure there are many users that love it the way it is, just not me.
Digg is compared to reddit because they are nearly identical in their function.
Digg is about comments as much as reddit is. It just so happens that the comments on reddit are slightly more intelligent and Digg is more commercialized.
My opinion about Digg has nothing to do with Kevin Rose nor is it because "all the cool kids" think so too. The communities surrounding Digg and reddit are ideologically identical to icanhazcheeseburger's. The core of the communities are founded on populism and memes.
Reddit's community might be a liability for pure traffic numbers. I don't think an outsider is going to be as interested in the content as a community member is. Add more people and the content will change drastically and probably no longer appeal to the core community. Then you've just got another Digg. They'd be better off trying to stay small.
I see no evidence in the post that they are thinking about implementing broader ways of monetising their traffic. There were wonderful suggestions --in HN and reddit proper-- in response to their first plea for help. Are they going to ignore other recommended approaches (e.g maintaining a proper ad inventory, sponsored sub reddits, employing a dedicated biz dev team, and so on) and assume that pledge drives will scale into the future?
They didn't explicitly say anything on the blog post because they don't have power to higher anyone without getting permission from above, they can't even get new servers without getting permission first. The best way to know what going on is to follow the developers/admins comments who are very much involved within the discussion:
Don't you think they should be showing comments from "gold" users differently? Kind of like what PG did a while ago using different colors highlight distinguished users...
That would segment Reddit immediately into at least four communities among the gold/ungold and supports-highlighting/opposes-highlighting axes, and I suspect many members of those communities are going to be violently passionate that only their position is acceptable for True Reddit Supporters and that the heretics must burn.
Judging from the comment thread[1], it looks like that's already happening.
The top rated comment starts, "As someone who donated..."
And from the second highest comment, 'I will not be "donating" money to a corporation which has shown no real initiative in growing the site.'
That said, I think any drama would just be background noise for the vast majority of users. People go to reddit for entertaining links and funny or interesting comments. Drama doesn't threaten that.
Maybe being able to buy virtual swag might be a better way to go for Reddit, in a similar fashion to Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Tiny [icons] of narwhal tusks, lolcats or rashers of bacon that could appear next to your name could prove quite popular with the community. Similarly, being able to not only upvote, downvote, but also put a 'hex' on a comment I could see as being an amusing pastime. Not to mention, they already have the beginnings of an achievement system in place with the awards panel. I could see them greatly expanding that with quest style achievements; "posted 5 links", say, to earn /reddit/credits.
I'm not sure how it would affect the community, but the revenue possibilities are endless.
Depends on which section you read. I introduced my fiancee to /r/IAmA and she thinks reddit is mostly about child molesting drug-dealers who fly fighter-jets and rescue endangered species, because they were raised in a polygamist cult family living in the Everest base camp.
To me it's mostly proggit, hastily scanned once every 1-2 days.
/. has had editing problems, but the comment quality has not, to my experience, dipped that low. It's not as high as HN, but it hasn't dipped that low, either.
HN and /. are on opposite ends of a spectrum--HN is what happens before the trolls arrive, given you seed the community well, and /. is what happens after the trolls leave.
I always though the biggest problem with slashdot was that the moderation somehow lead to an extremely insular community. There was a prevailing "slashdot" opinion and that was pretty much the only opinion expressed in highly moderated comments. I was a reader for years and that's pretty much why I left.
What's strange is that slashdot moderation isn't that different from any other site, but for whatever reason, I think it hurt slashdot far more than any other site. Maybe, it's just that by default not that many comments are displayed as opposed to reddit or hn, so it's all the more noticeable when the top 20 or so comments all are basically the same.
I usually found a lot of highly moderated comments opposing the "Slashdot groupthink", particularly ones that criticized the "Slashdot groupthink" by name. But there were a lot of shared cultural assumptions there as well.
There is a 'lounge' subreddit that only donators can get into. I don't think they should treat people differently on the main part of reddit, it'll cause too many issues/arguments.
I wish they published some numbers though. The conversion rates for freeminum models (that I've seen) haven't been spectacular. Lets hope reddit breaks all rules here.
Whoa whoa whoa, I don't think reddit has even close to 8 million active users. I'd say much closer to about 100,000.
The announcement section, which is included by default, and low traffic enough that I doubt anybody unsubscribes, has 300,000 users. Even if they're retaining 30% of their users (and keeping them as active), that still isn't even close to 8 million.
To put things in to context, reddit ran a haiti donation campaign which was heavily promoted through their ad spaces and blog postings and individual "donation drive threads" and they raised $185k from 3783 users over a period of ~30 days. They broke their first 100k within 12 hours. So if they got 6000 people to donate within 48 hours or so, that pretty damn good, over next few weeks as they add subscription only features its bound to get much much higher number as it gets promoted more.
Hmm, good point. The 8 million number comes from the blog post. Maybe the vast majority of people who visit the site don't bother to create an account?
Contributors can view the list of contributors who have specified their username on the paypal checkout form (it's probably not public) at http://www.reddit.com/r/lounge/about/contributors - it's currently at 5715 donators. No word on amounts yet though, a few people are doing surveys in the subreddit.
There is sentiment that Reddit's developers are too quick to adopt the latest me-too web technology which overall doesn't benefit them. So I think what he's implying is that it's money wasted on EC2 when a traditional server would be more cost effective. I tend to agree.
In the last thread they said that they are spending over 250.000$ a year just in servers. They could save huge amounts of money if they would just switch to rented servers.
Amazon EC2 is very cheap if you want to use a server for a few hours. However if you want a server for 1 year, then it's cheaper to buy a 1 year lease (i.e. your own server) than it is to rent it by the hour./
It's worth noting that this won't ever happen again, though. This was basically a one-time gain of $X. So hopefully they don't wind up back in this situation.
Sounds like they are already. Were going to use the money to hire a new guy, right? Instead, putting up a couple more servers. Or is that just the start?
Out of curiosity I just checked compete.com and was disappointed to learn that Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.