
Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter - willvarfar
http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18839832580/reddit-vs-hacker-news-vs-twitter
======
kijin
> _The per-page time is actually quite high; often over 5 minutes on average
> for a lot of my stories even when its a big crowd. I suspect some subtle
> misreading of Google Analytics on my part, or else people might actually be
> reading the whole thing carefully!?_

That might be because a lot of people do what I do: keep the article open
while browsing comments on HN or Reddit, and switch back and forth between the
two tabs while writing my own comment. In fact, I'm doing it right now. I
don't know how Google Analytics would measure time spent on a page when the
page sits idle in a background tab for the most part but brought to the
foreground from time to time.

[Edit] Things get even more complicated if you open 5 articles and 5 comment
pages at the same time, and take 30+ minutes to go through all of them.

~~~
nikcub
This is why I wrote my own datapoint gathering script (I started it while at
Techcrunch, curious about who scrolls down to comments, etc.).

It measures body focus, number of times unfocused, total focus time, scroll
position, scroll rate and a bunch of other things.

It isn't completely working cross-browser yet, but it is close and useful
enough where for Safari and Chrome visitors I can see how far down the page
they are scrolling and how long the page is in focus for.

~~~
18pfsmt
No doubt, this is part of the reason _this_ noscript_using_reader stopped
visiting TC. Call me a tinfoilhat-guy, but I simply would not consent to the
collection of such data. It's ironic that I've learned so much from your
analysis of data collection techniques elsewhere.

~~~
path411
If the site still functions without these scripts (As it should), then there
isn't much of a reason to stop visiting a site because of it.

------
diminoten
There is something systemically flawed with Reddit's moderator system which
precludes it from ever being an unqualified success as a social news
aggregator.

The primary issue revolves around the selection process for moderation. To
become a moderator for a subreddit, you need to have thought of the name of
the subreddit. That's it. This nomenclature designation act grants any user
absolute power within that domain space, and the ability to grant _any_ other
user the exact same powers.

The person who created the "programming" subreddit has no qualifications, no
resume by which to judge their aptitude for the moderation job, and no process
exists by which to vet newly added moderators.

A moderator can, for any or no reason, decide to activate the "spam filter" on
any submitted article, removing it from public voting and view. This is the
_only_ tool by which Reddit moderators are given to modify their respective
domains, and when used for reasons other than spam, it "teaches" the filter to
remove non-spam results. This is the cause of the "broken" spam filter on
Reddit - moderator abuse.

~~~
eogas
I think you hit the nail on the head with your last point, though I wouldn't
necessarily call it moderator abuse. The actions that moderators can take on
reddit were built on a laissez faire model of moderation, where anything goes
except blatant spam. This obviously doesn't work very well for moderators who
choose to run their subreddits in a different manner, and this happens to be
most of the big subreddits, because laissez faire moderation just doesn't work
on a large scale.

For example, the sole /r/truereddit moderator believes in a laissez faire
moderation style, and the subreddit is slowly getting worse and worse as the
userbase increases. Every time a /r/truereddit post makes it to the front
page, a virtual swarm of idiocy surrounds the entire subreddit for a few days.

But that's the only way the moderation system is designed to work. There's no
way to remove/approve content without training the filter. If someone submits
a codinghorror post to /r/programming that is completely off-topic, the
moderators either have to remove it, effectively warning the filter that
codinghorror might be spam, or hope that the userbase does the right thing and
votes it down. Usually, they won't, especially the people who are voting from
their customized front page, not paying attention to what subreddit something
is in.

It's broken, and the admins have never really expressed any concerns about
this fact.

~~~
diminoten
One of the core problems with even talking about the issue is the general
disdain Reddit users have for one another, or to be more accurate, the disdain
individuals have for the collective. The idea that content can be "better" or
"worse", and this can be judged by an individual to the exclusion of the
group, completely circumvents the entire concept of Reddit - crowdsourcing
news.

~~~
guga31bb
> _The idea that content can be "better" or "worse", and this can be judged by
> an individual to the exclusion of the group_ [...]

This happens in every growing online community. As the community grows, the
new members don't necessarily have the same interests as the original ones.
This happened at digg, reddit, and now even HN has posts about declining
quality, which is another way of saying content can be "better".

------
radicalbyte
> A comment on HN is going to be mature and reasoned; often expanding or
> exploring technical issues raised

That's what I love about HN : the content of comments here are of a very high
quality.

It's something that I've noticed with my own posts - well reasoned comments
attract a lot of positive karma. _Even_ if you're taking a controversial
stance on an issue.

~~~
stanmancan
At least 50% of the time I don't even read the article, I just read the
comments. I tend to be more interested in the conversation the posts generate
than the posts themselves.

~~~
erickhill
I would venture to guess I read the comments 90% more than the actual posts.
The discussion (or the subject) will occasionally lead me to read the article
in depth, but more often than not the discourse here is more enlightening
overall. I can easily say HN is the only community where my behavior follows
this model.

~~~
stanmancan
90% is actually a more realistic metric for myself as well. I was being
generous leaving it at "over 50%"....

------
joshuahedlund
> _Nobody actually follows the links in tweets though; click-through is often
> in the low digits per tweet_

Tweet click-through data is obscured in Google Analytics because anyone who
clicks from a mobile app shows up as a "direct" hit because there is no
referring URL. There's some speculation and evidence[1] that this, at least in
some cases, shows up as "Mozilla Compatible Agent".

[1] [http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/02/15/why-simply-believing-
se...](http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/02/15/why-simply-believing-seo-bloggers-
is-dangerous/)

~~~
willvarfar
I've assigned the t.co domain trickle to Twitter.

The 'reactions' thing on Disqus doesn't seem 100% sadly.

Mouse-hovering over those reactions can be a nice pat on the back, when the
reaction system works.

------
chrisacky
Yesterday, I posted an article on HackerNews. Its received 62k views in total
so far. HackerNews was the site that kicked off all of the view counts and it
quickly jumped to the top spot #1.

After it reached the top spot, I thought I would also post it on Reddit. It
didn't get a single upvote. It's the third time that a story of mine has made
it to the front page of HackerNews and then not received a single visitor on
Reddit. In the future I don't think it is worth bothering.

Ultimately, 100% of the traffic that I received, would not of happened if it
weren't for the upvotes on HackerNews, because from these upvotes everyone
started tweeting about it. It received 900 tweets in total.

Here was some of the highlights.

[https://s3-eu-
west-1.amazonaws.com/files.chrisacky.com/githu...](https://s3-eu-
west-1.amazonaws.com/files.chrisacky.com/github/trending.png)

(The highest it went to was 800 concurrent users).

I'm guessing 60k for an article within 24 hours is a lot!

~~~
nikcub
> It didn't get a single upvote.

that is because it is in the spam filter. you need to message the moderators.

~~~
ExpiredLink
The decline of r/programming in recent months is due to the moderators
selection. r/programming has a moderator problem more than a fan-boy problem.

~~~
eogas
Would you care to elaborate on this? Are you referring more to the removal of
posts that have made it through the filter, or the lack of approval of posts
that are stuck in the filter?

I think we do a pretty good job. No choice is as clear cut as people would
like it to be (especially when it is their own content on the line). I've
heard feedback from people who think we do an amazing job at moderating,
keeping the ever-growing cesspool from leaking into the sacred realm of
/r/programming, and I've heard feedback from people who think we're the devil,
and that we're censoring the will of the people, and somebody call the ACLU
right now!!!

But any community is going to get feedback from those two extremes. That's
just how people react to moderation. The fact that there seems to be pretty
equal feedback from both extremes tells me that we must either be doing
something right, or everything completely wrong.

~~~
willvarfar
Lots of my posts never get through the spam filter, yet I think they are
programming related.

[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/16399069781/googl...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/16399069781/google-
moresql-is-real) for example

[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13264962223/sum-o...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13264962223/sum-
of-absolute-differences) and
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13265364121/popen...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13265364121/popen3)
are two others that I would like to share wider

I don't think they ever got through :(

(I've lost track of what I've tried to send through now; I tend to delete to
tidy up when it fails)

Generally, the memory of proggit I have is warm and fuzzy and old. Naturally
my memory is selective; but I remember it being far more like HN is now.

The comments were less brogrammer frat'ish. Now, they swin further and further
daily towards the immature brat'ish frat'ish sadly.

Insightful comments are fewer and further between.

Maybe proggit needs a restart? The /r/republicofatheism -type reboot is all
you can do on reddit because its not self-organising ;)

I lament the passing of the good old days.

~~~
eogas
That first one was submitted to /r/programming by a user who has a really bad
history of incessantly spamming his/her own blog and nothing else. The user
has 2 comments in 4 years, and only 2 submissions which are not self promotion
(one of which is yours).

I couldn't find a trace of the other two, though looking at your account (or
what I think is your account) I am seeing a slew of filtered posts, some of
which are on topic, some of which are not. I just approved a couple of your
most recent on-topic posts, however I can tell you that you will need to keep
a good ratio between your own site(s) and other good content for the spam
filter to go easy on you. It filters really heavily against people who submit
the same domain a large part of the time, and we (moderators) tend to stick to
that as well.

I will comment on your other points in a little while.

EDIT: Okay, now for the rest.

I think the warm fuzzy memories you have of proggit are akin to the warm fuzzy
memories a lot of people have of reddit as a whole 3 or 4 years ago. But with
a larger userbase comes a lot of noise and idiocy. In my opinion,
/r/programming was one of the first subreddits to take real action against
quality decay. There was a period of time, after the heyday, but while
/r/programming was still a default, when rage comics and advice animals were
rampant. Maybe not quite as rampant as the rest of the site, but it was pretty
bad. There were lots of people who were not programmers submitting and
commenting, so lots of stuff ended up being off topic.

I think the quality has improved immensely since then, and I think this is in
part due to strict moderation and the disabling of self posts. I will allow
that it certainly isn't as great as reddit as a whole was in its heyday, but
it's getting better.

There's not much we can do about the comments. We can't moderate comments for
stupidity (because that would be pretty messed up). The only thing I've ever
moderated comments for is spam and personal info.

A reboot, unless it's in the form of a different sub, is probably not going to
happen, but I'd certainly be interested in hearing any ideas for improving the
subreddit in its current form.

~~~
willvarfar
Thanks

I've tried to put moreSQL through again - is it on topic for proggit?

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qklxn/google_mo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qklxn/google_moresql_is_real/)

I don't like the idea of having to scrape HN to find other people's content so
I can hide my own content submissions in the noise.

~~~
eogas
I just approved that post. It should be fine.

And on your second note, the idea is not that you go seeking out content to
mix in with your own. If you happen to come across a cool article, and it
hasn't been submitted to proggit yet, just contribute it. This is probably
part of the community vs content aspect you mentioned in a different comment,
but sheer size of the site means that you cannot really ignore the community
aspect.

I could probably get in trouble for saying this, but the reddit userbase, as a
whole, is not smart enough to filter out what is good and bad. If a bunch of
bloggers just auto submit every blog article they write, we will have tons of
crappy, ad-ridden, off-topic posts being voted to the top. It still happens
from time to time. HN might be smart enough to distinguish the good from the
bad, but reddit surely is not. So we have to be at least a little restrictive.

I'm not saying your content falls into those categories, but we can't really
give special treatment to people we like or are familiar with. There is one
guy in the /r/programming approved submitters list, and he is a very
noteworthy programmer who, for whatever reason, could not get any of his posts
through the spam filter. He is the one exception. For the most part, everyone
is lumped into the same bucket.

So when your posts get caught in the spam filter, just send us modmail.
Sometimes we'll get them, sometimes we won't. That's just how it is. I saw
earlier that you said you sometimes delete them if they've been filtered. This
may be a bad idea. I cannot say for sure, because the admins don't really
disclose this stuff, but deleting and resubmitting the same link has been
known to hurt a user's standing with the spam filter, so just deleting it may
do the same thing, I'm not sure. And there's really no reason to delete it.
The only think it will clutter up is the spam filter, which is going to be
cluttered no matter what.

Anyway, I hope this has been somewhat useful to you. Sorry about the massive
walls of text. Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

~~~
willvarfar
So I can infer the rules better, which of my posts are appropriate for proggit
and which are not?

lets try and train the bayesian filter in my brain ;)

~~~
eogas
Haha. Well, to be completely honest, I was recruited as a moderator for
/r/programming because of a novelty account I ran that essentially bitched
about any submission that could remotely be construed as not being related to
programming, so I, and the mod who added me, are pretty strict about what
belongs in the sub and what doesn't.

Looking over your blog though, it seems like most of the stuff you write about
is fine. We'll only have a huge problem with it if you start indiscriminately
submitting every post on your blog, relevant to programming or not. If you're
not sure, just submit anyway. One of the admins just added a feature yesterday
that allows us to remove posts that are off topic without training the spam
filter (long overdue), so if we do decide that something isn't right for the
subreddit, it won't harm your standing with the filter.

------
eogas
FWIW, it's currently in /r/programming's spam filter, and it won't be coming
out because it's not about programming. Sorry to be all stackoverflow about
it, but that's how we operate.

~~~
ExpiredLink
Is 'spam filter' nowadays an euphemism for 'moderators'?

~~~
blhack
Yes.

Reddit's spam filter is completely broken with no apparent activity from the
current group of admins towards fixing it.

It seems that generally if you submit something to reddit, it will get caught
in the spam filter, then you have to message a moderator to request that it
get approved.

[Again, it seems] that you're not so much voting on an assortment of links,
you're voting on an assortment of links that moderators have deemed worthy.

~~~
socialist_coder
Yeah, I have always been puzzled about that. I will post extremely relevant
content to various sub-reddits and they _never_ show up in new/hot/whatever.
It's like insta-spammed somehow. I don't even bother messaging the admin.

------
willvarfar
According to my own mining, I should have waited a few hours before posting
this :)

Anyway, some time next week I'll be in a position to add a line describing the
success of "deeply meta" posts like this one ;)

We just have to get someone to post it to proggit too, I guess. And perhaps
dzone...

~~~
18pfsmt
As an amateur, beginner programmer, I'm curious why you don't use something
like Jekyll+S3 rather than tumblr. The dude that pulls my espresso shots uses
tumblr...

~~~
willvarfar
Its a good question.

Despite wishing they'd hire people to add features
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18002362007/tumbl...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18002362007/tumblr-
fumblr) (note the comment there from someone using Google Pages + Jekyll), I'm
generally happy enough not to invest time nor money in self-hosting or paid
hosting.

------
nikcub
No mention of Techmeme? I'll add that the best way of getting picked up by
other bloggers is first Techmeme (not the largest audience but definitely the
most influential in tech) and second HN.

I've had blog posts pick up their traffic peaks 2-3 days after they were
posted as the route was techmeme -> other tech blogs -> mainstream media

~~~
chrisacky
What's the proceedure for getting included on Techmeme?

~~~
nikcub
Good question. A combination of a few things:

\+ Attach yourself to a story cluster if a relevant one is already there by
linking to a source post

\+ `tip @techmeme <url>` on twitter

\+ Message the editors on twitter

\+ Make sure your feed validates, can be autodiscovered etc.

\+ Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet counts, so make sure the
same canonical URL is being retweeted and favorited from the post, from
twitter, disqus etc.

\+ Post interesting things frequently enough that you become a source that is
crawled by Techmeme

~~~
chrisacky
Good advice. I wondered why/how I got included on Techmeme before. I would
assume it is based on "Techmeme can discover stories based on retweet
counts,".

~~~
nikcub
TM takes hints from a lot of sources - including HN. It has 30k+ sources that
it directly crawls itself as well, and uses a lot of different hints to work
out what is popular. The biggest hint to a big story is inbound links from
other blogs that are also sources, and from there things like popularity on
social media

------
18pfsmt
I must admit I'm nauseated by the number of references to reddit on HN. I
think reddit is powerful and fills a void, but the few times I've visited >
cmnd+w. Twitter is also useful on occasion, but simply not my "cup of tea."
These sites feel like eternal September, and make me consider suicide (not to
over-dramatize...).

~~~
leoedin
I think to a certain extent 3 or 4 years ago Reddit was very much like HN is
now. When I first joined Reddit (2007) there was generally a lot of reasoned
discussion, and the submissions were very much programmer orientated in a way
that's long since passed.

I'd imagine (although I suppose I have no real evidence for this) that the
people who talk about Reddit and HN in the same context were active on Reddit
a few years ago.

~~~
willvarfar
(blog author)

yes

I was rather hoping this blog post would turn up on proggit and, instead of
hate-clicking, there'd be a discussion about rediscovering proggit's past.

I've tried to think of solutions before too:
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-
organizing-reddit)

Being pro-content anti-community is not so popular over on proggit ;)

~~~
leoedin
It's nice to get confirmation! I did once get a lot of comment upvotes
lambasting the poor quality of comments on the science reddit, but frankly I
think the sheer size of the reddit community will make it very, very hard to
return to how it was. The culture that seems to be pushed by a subset of
(mostly non-technical) reddit users is largely incompatible with the culture
that I (and I assume others) are looking for in a social news site.

There are of course some areas of reddit which maintain a largely engaged user
base willing to make in depth and interesting comments, but they tend to be
rare, hard to find and often suffer from the mainstream reddit culture being
dragged in by more casual visitors.

Perhaps we have to simply resign ourselves to a migration between social news
platforms every few years.

------
rtisticrahul
My experience with HN has been much better than with Reddit. In reddit, even
good posts get down ratings a lot of time.

The one thing i like about hacker news is your posts still have 1 point
minimum even if others dont like it, whereas in reddit you fall down to 0
points which makes you feel discouraging sometimes.

~~~
kijin
A lot of downvotes on reddit are actually inserted by the system, accompanied
by the same number of upvotes to balance them out. This is supposed to be some
sort of anti-spam anti-troll measure, though I'm not sure how that even works.

Anyway, the upshot is that you never know the true number of downvotes you
got. This can be discouraging for people who don't know about computer-
generated phantom votes.

~~~
willvarfar
What bugs me more is that the numbers jump all over the place if you refresh
the page. Even the number of comments seems out of sync.

That CAP gets so much in the way is irritating. Its like stackoverflow used to
be a while ago.

You can make big sites that don't have such laggy BASE. I guess not with the
reddit infrastructure perhaps.

------
fool
What I'd really like to see is some sort of "diffusion" system to let me know
which link aggregation site found a URL first.

------
toadi
On what data are these assumptions based? Don't see any reference.

So for me he uses numbers to support his conclusions but I can't check them.

~~~
willvarfar
They are based on my Google analytics account.

I am not going to share it with you ;)

Feel free to disbelieve my data or my conclusions.

