Digg did not kill Digg. Nor did Reddit, nor Facebook. People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes, nerd pop culture, and rage comics. Reddit and Digg both used to be places to go for interesting discussion based off decent links. Over time, good and insightful discussion gave way to quick-to-consume, funny one-liners. You can see it happening in popular subreddits. Recently the moderators of /r/science started taking a heavy hand and deleting irrelevant comments.
This isn't a problem with the sites, it's a problem with the users of these sites. This is democracy in action. It's cable news. People voting don't want to see challenging, thought-provoking content. They want to see things that confirm their biases, or things they can repost to facebook for quick laughs from their friends.
> People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes
1) With sub-reddits, this hasn't become as big of a problem unless a lot of users still keep the sub-reddits that annoy them. There is a reddit for everyone, especially since anyone can create their own sub-reddit. While Digg only had one idea tribe, Reddit has many. Moreover users that create their own sub-reddits can police them with other like-minded users.
2) Reddit is able to fit more content per page given their design. I don't have to keep clicking the next page link to get more.
I like reddit, almost completely because I've subscribed to several small subreddits that have a good community, high quality content, et al.
But there's a tricky problem. Subreddits like /r/programming dominate, while more focused subreddits like /r/ruby (or whatever) languish. If I have a ruby link and I care at all about karma, I'm going to post it in /r/programming.
Well that's the price for avoiding garbage, you have to do a little more work. It's not impossible to successfully have a branch of an existing sub-reddit. Just take a look at the offshoots of r/gaming: r/gamingnews and r/games; or even the branches off from r/politics like r/progressive and r/libertarian.
In your case, ruby already has a good news site and it doesn't need reddit. Rubyflow is more than sufficient imo
"That's the price for..." implies that this is constant across alternatives, but it's not. One alternative is a hierarchy with subtrees feeding into nodes higher up, so that /r/programming/ruby posts would appear in /r/programming. This has its own set of problems where the price to be paid is not the same as for reddit's completely flat model. I'm not saying this hierarchical model would be better, but it would have different pros and cons.
Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.
> "That's the price for..." implies that this is constant across alternatives, but it's not
Well if there isn't, as I've already mentioned, you can make your own sub-reddit.
> Call me an optimist, but I can't help but think that there's something better than what's out there now.
hmmm you're right... Reddit's sub-reddit's is imo a half-assed implementation of an idea tribe paper that showed up years ago on HN. To this day I can't find it.
Anyways the gist of the idea, is that everyone belongs to an idea tribe / group aimed that making wikipedia better. All of these groups have differences in what they think are accurate, right, cool, etc... However many groups have things that they agree on. The paper talks about how great it would be if we could have something that would highlight those commonalities.
> Well if there isn't, as I've already mentioned, you can make your own sub-reddit.
That doesn't mean anyone's going to use it. It takes a long time to grow a community. I would love for /r/trueskyrim to take off because /r/skyrim has become 99% garbage, 1% content. Unfortunately trueskyrim hasn't had a post in 6 months.
The only reason /r/Games ever took off was because it was started by the mods of /r/gaming and got lots of attention on /r/gaming's front page. Don't get me wrong /r/Games is wonderful, but without the publicity that it got from /r/gaming I doubt anyone would use it.
That's certainly true, but I'd say most seasoned users on reddit don't subscribe to much of what's on default front page. The default reddits (funny, pics, f7, atheism, politics, etc) are basically as you describe. Rehashed memes and populist statements.
Anyone who's been on reddit long enough has a front page of all the sub communities they follow, and probably only a couple of the defaults.
The pop-culture types get the pop stuff and the veterans get the small, focused culture, so everyone's mostly satisfied.
When one community starts becoming watered down, someone will usually start a new subreddit, rather than go to a new site altogether.
Altogether, I think these will give reddit better longevity than slashdot/digg.
Completely agree. I feel the strength of HN is in it's walled garden: Share whatever you want, vote on whatever you want, but stay on topic.
HN will be a great place to go to, so long as it is heavily (and transparently) moderated. Otherwise the hordes will come in, and destroy it with meme's and sensationalist articles.
The best part about Reddit, is that you can move with people of a like mind to a different subreddit. /r/games and /r/programming come to mind. If you look, it's not that hard to find places where earnest discussion continues. You're just probably not going to find it on defaults like /r/pics, /r/funny and /r/adviceanimals. They're the mass-market reddit, with a more broad userbase. You have to dig a little deeper to find the places where people submit links to news and have reasoned discussion, but it's still there.
I don't think you can credit Digg's downfall entirely to its users. v4 and sponsored links were a slap to the face of users.
If you're bothered by the community then just subscribe to subreddits. It's the same with Facebook. Any post that annoys you can be filtered with a few clicks. It's quite customizable.
> People using Digg killed it. The same people are now killing Reddit, making it little more than a place to regurgitate memes, nerd pop culture, and rage comics.
Are you basing theory on anything except your personal dislike of regurgitated memes, nerd pop culture and rage comics?
As far as I can tell all evidence points to the fact that Digg was in fact killed by their version 4 release, it was widely disliked by their users and you can find articles about sharp drops of pageviews (never recovered) after that specific release and, IIRC, also articles about reddit gaining pageviews at the same time.
reddit partially gets around this by allowing users to create their own subreddits. i've been much happier with reddit since i unsubscribed from all the default subreddits.
This isn't a problem with the sites, it's a problem with the users of these sites. This is democracy in action. It's cable news. People voting don't want to see challenging, thought-provoking content. They want to see things that confirm their biases, or things they can repost to facebook for quick laughs from their friends.