

What was reddit like before it got "Dugg"? - aswanson

I never visited the site back when, so what made it so appealing?  A lot of hackers here seem to have a nostalgia for the olden days.
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lebski88
It had an intelligent and interesting community that was almost exclusively
made up of programmers. The submissions were made up of programming, science
and general interest links. What made it great was the quality of comments;
the discussion was the most interesting and insightful of any on-line
community I've ever found. The links these days aren't the problem - its the
comments. Sadly I've found the quality of my comments has dropped along with
general trend - people tend to ignore long comments these days in favour of
quick opinions.

[edit] also the size of the community helped. You got to know regular posters
and this lack of anonymity encouraged a quality of discussion.

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mwerty
IMHO, reddit can do the following to clean up:

1\. make my.reddit.com the default and make it harder to get to the current
default front page.

2\. This was a while back so they may have fixed this already: Don't screw up
on the cookie/log in process - I've had to log in several times to reddit
despite not logging out. I finally stopped logging in. Their ip logs probably
tell the story better and can validate my experience. Its a small bug and
takes a while to realize the full impact on user experience. The auto-login is
sacred for a site like reddit.

3\. Work really hard on the recommendation engine for comments as well.

~~~
mwerty
s/my.reddit.com/<http://reddit.com/recommended/> in above post.

~~~
BrandonM
"Execution aborted due to compilation errors." You didn't escape your slashes.

------
blored
Conjecture: I don't think Hacker News will ever have the same feel as reddit,
or at least the type of banter than went on in those posts.

Why? Because I think too many people reading these posts want to get YC
funding and are therefore stepping on eggshells with what they say.

On the converse side the conversation is probably more polite than other
forums.

~~~
falsestprophet
I've personally seen Paul Graham kill a kitten with a blender.

edit: It was horrible.

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rms
A smaller community submitting higher quality links without dumb comments by
13 year olds. The initial community was seeded by Y Combinator and Paul
Graham. Check out PG's links here:
<http://reddit.com/user/bugbear/submitted?offset=300>

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pg
It's all still there.

<http://reddit.com/info/bwbu/comments>

~~~
pretzel
And if you have a look at the first 5 comments, 4 of those commenters have all
posted in the last day (2 in the last hour). So it has not completely lost its
potential. It just needs a channel through which it can bloom again.

------
minus1
richardkulisz

<http://reddit.com/user/richardkulisz/>

~~~
staunch
Now known as <http://reddit.com/user/redditcensoredme/>

