
Top Stories On HN vs Reddit - thecombjelly
http://thintz.com/essays/hn-vs-reddit
======
swombat
"I took two numbers that depend on the size of a certain population, let's
call it X. Those numbers were X1 and X2, and were, predictably, of the same
order of magnitude, since they're just different measurements of the same
thing (the upvote activity of the entrepreneurial community on social news
sites).

Then, I took the first number and multiplied it by 10. To my surprise, after
this operation, the first number was about 10 times bigger than the second
number!"

~~~
PDoF
Not to mention the essayist seems to assume that all Reddit traffic is
allocated to the programming section.

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ringm
A reddit/HN-like voting system is inherently unstable, as some users just skim
over top stories and upvote them, creating a positive feedback loop. If you
have few submissions, this effect is weak. As the number of submissions, users
and votes all grow linearly with respect to each other, the number of top
stories and the number of stories an average user can read stay the same. This
means the stream of new stories gets less and less readable, while top stories
stay readable, which makes larger and larger percentage of users just skim
over the top stories, and quality suffers. It would be interesting to create
an accurate mathematical model of this behavior, maybe this would let us
significantly improve stability.

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pg
A better way to compare might be to look at the top n stories over the past m
days on the two sites, and see how much overlap there is. You can see the top
recent stories on HN at <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>.

Or you could just take snapshots of the two frontpages every 12 hours or so
for a couple days.

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po
I applaud your effort in looking into this. However, I believe that when
people say HN is turning into Reddit they don't mean that the same stories are
being submitted, they just mean the same quality of stories.

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pook
<http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

PG says that the comment quality is the most worrying part of the site ("Bad
comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. ")

Perhaps a better way of measuring the difference, would be to parse the
comment threads and compare length (PG: length of a comment is directly
proportional to the intelligence/civility of the poster) or frequency of
memes.

I suspect this would show HN to consistently score higher, but not as
dramatically as your analysis of posts.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I think the comment quality is quite high here given that it's such a dynamic
site. I'm hard pressed to think of another site with such story traffic that
matches the comment quality.

It seems the solution to that isn't really technological, it's the community
peer pressure the site creates. It's cultural, in terms of the culture of the
site.

~~~
robryan
One thing that could be done would be to go back to a -8 points limit for down
votes which may reinforce better what are really bad comments. At the moment a
comment with an unpopular stance that is decently written can go -4 along with
plain stupid comments that would normally get down voted a lot more.

~~~
eoin_murphy
Alternatively; a two value system measuring popularity of the sentiment
expressed and separately the quality of the post. So for example, a poorly
written post with good ideas would be: legibility: -4, popularity: +4. This
could be expressed as an rounded average or different users could filter by
their own preference of legibility/popularity.

Of course this would all be a fairly major change to a system that isn't
really broken so it's just speculative thinking on my part.

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ilitirit
Reddit-like submissions don't bother me as much as Reddit-like comments. I
used to love reading the comments on HN. In the past I was also much more
likely to take part in the discussion. These days though I just skim them, and
I hardly comment. In the past, there weren't nearly as many "me too"-type
comments (etc), and those that were posted got instantly down-voted. The
turning point came when people started upvoting complaints that noone was
interested in superficial anecdotal opinions that added little value. That was
the signal to me that HN's "mindset" was beginning to shift to a Reddit-like
state. Not that there's anything wrong with Reddit, but the Web doesn't need
two of them.

The dip in quality doesn't surprise me though. A year or two ago I said the
same thing about Reddit in comparison to Digg.

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jwegan
What your data shows is that Reddit and HN do share some of the same popular
stories which would lend credence to peoples complaints that it is turning
into reddit.

Also your upvote statistic doesn't seem particularly meaningful.

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Kilimanjaro
reddit's frontpage sucks

reddit/r/programming half-sucks

reddit/r/coding is like HN, but nobody goes there

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xinuc
so, what's the conclusion? really?

