

Can Digg make a run on Reddit? - jessicaSFNY
http://betabeat.com/2012/08/the-digg-bang-theory-can-betaworks-make-a-run-on-reddit/

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seltzered_
Is digg trying to make a run on reddit? I finally saw the new digg, it felt
more like prismatic/other news sites to me.

I associate reddit more with close discussion communities, as broader-versions
of forums.

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swalsh
The really interesting thing about the redesign of Digg, is in a way it's kind
of the first example, of the possibility of seeing gentrification ported to
the internet.

I don't think they will be successful, but its a really interesting concept.

One of the hardest parts of any kind of community driven website is to
generate the community in the first place. Of course, as the idea of eternal
september demonstrates communities deteriorates in quality over time as the
community grows to a broader variety of people.

Its interesting then, to try to take an existing community that has settled at
the lowest common denominator of content and to try to revitalize it.

If you take the metaphor further, if you think of artists as the cultivators
of culture in a city. And the first step of gentrification is an increase in
artists (typically seeking lower rent) who is the cultivators of culture in an
internet community. Money doesn't really exist on the internet... well at
least the classism associated with it (and rent) so what attracts these
culture cultivators back?

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lbcadden3
Not if you have to have a FB account to login. They need other options fast.

~~~
k-mcgrady
It says on the site FB login is a temporary spam prevention measure while they
work on a good account system of their own.

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klein
They are serving completely different purposes. Why would they be competing?

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captainarab
They are both link aggregators. Although, the new Digg looks more like
Pinterest or even canv.as than Reddit.

~~~
klein
But their algorithms for aggregating are very different. Reddit is primarily
based on submitted links. Digg is primarily based on links shared on social
networks.

~~~
captainarab
True. However, at the end of the day, both of these sites revolve around the
content "submitted" by users (either directly on the site or across social
networks), and they need this content to thrive/survive. So while their
purpose/methods may be very different, both sites co-exist in the same
ecosystem?

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freyr
I've enjoyed Reddit for years, but I'm about at my limit. Incessant memes,
novelty accounts, meta-commentary about novelty accounts, reposts, complaints
about reposts, kitten pics, and a million other annoyances that trace back to
karma whoring make the site difficult to tolerate. If the new Digg could
successfully counteract this trend, I'd be on board.

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BaconJuice
No.

~~~
kmfrk
Indeed.

blauwbilgorgel gave some good reasons why this prospect seems ridiculous:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322197>.

Like outlook.com, the best thing Digg has going for it is that people really
want an alternative to the incumbent who sits on most of the market, which in
this case is reddit.

~~~
huggyface
Because a rushed product is imperfect?

Digg at its highest peak was a grossly imperfect product. If project success
depended upon trivia like type="text/javascript", the internet world would be
a very different place.

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mtgx
It's not even out properly yet and these articles are already starting to pop
out?

In its current state definitely not. If they can build even better algorithms
and communities than Reddit, maybe. But that's a huge if. And they've got
nothing right now.

I do like its design though, which is very different from Reddit, and that
means it might serve a different market.

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Kilimanjaro
Digg is a tabloid, reddit is a community*

* dysfunctional, but community nonetheless.

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schneby
No.

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huggyface
They can through algorithms, which is something that is painfully lacking on
most social media sites (including HN).

Give users the ability to dislike something strongly enough that anyone who
voted it up is excluded from all vote counts/rankings/recommendations as
provided to that user for some period of time. While this leads to a filtered
world, that is exactly what users expect from sites like these.

Reddit is essentially falling apart for many users (while catering to a new
audience) -- in /r/all as well as individual subreddits that see a constant
cycle of abandonment as people try to ontologically solve the problem -- as it
is increasingly dominated by teenagers.

If I could strongly express a disinterest in every fictitious Facebook picture
/ iPhone message conversation, and that served as a quality indicator of
people whose opinions I don't respect, that would be beautiful.

~~~
sp332
Two things: trivially, you can change the subreddits you are subscribed to and
remove the "fictitous FB pic" etc. posts.

Second, and more interestingly: people have different facets that they show in
different subreddits. As an example here on HN people prefer tech-oriented
stuff. But not everyone here is _that_ into tech. They just sort or organize
the content, so they come to HN for in-depth stuff, and (say) Engadget for
rumors, and sbnation for sports etc. So someone who upvotes a stupid FB pic in
/r/funny might vote the same photo down in /r/politics. If the person is
"sorting" content that's appropriate in different situations, it's not useful
to discount their opinion entirely.

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jmduke
I see this argument a lot, and I have two counterpoints:

1\. I don't want to have to spend time researching subreddits just to figure
out what I'd like. Content aggregators are meant to remove steps from the
process, not add them. 2\. While the content of smaller subreddits are usually
improved, the level of discourse in comments are not. Even if you say 'okay,
no meme posts, no meme comments', the fact is that you're going to have a glut
of commentors whose first impulse are to crack a joke or make a surface-level
comment. The difference in comments between a post on here and a post on
/TrueReddit/ are astounding.

(The one pretty ready example to the above are < 100 member subreddits, but
those usually have the issue of insufficient content.)

~~~
AlexanderZ
And how are you going to tell content aggregators what you like? By
upvoting/liking? Doesn't it count as spending time?

I don't want to spend time upvoting 50 submissions to tell the recommendation
engine what my interests are (and with the current state of technology it will
get my interests wrong anyway). I just want to click one button (subscribe to
a subreddit) and that's it.

And when I become less interested in a certain topic (fitness, starcraft) I
can just press the unsubscribe button once and never see submissions for that
topic again.

~~~
jmduke
Ideally -- and take this with a huge caveat, as I'm not exactly in the
aggregation business -- measure it by clicks, comments made, and time spent on
page/bounce.

Overall, I'd like to see aggregators move to the Pandora model, rather than
the Hype Machine one. With Pandora, I can specify a jumping off point (genre,
artist, song) but it still refines my tastes from there.

Hype Machine, I've 'liked' hundreds of songs but I still need to manually
peruse through specific blogs to find new songs I like. It's unideal.

~~~
AlexanderZ
I believe that in the future that's the way to do it, but not right now.

Besides, I'm not a fan of automatic recommendations as they have a lot of
drawbacks. Their major problem is: they won't help you find something you
didn't know you liked.

~~~
huggyface
_Their major problem is: they won't help you find something you didn't know
you liked._

This is patently untrue. It is more likely to find you stuff that you didn't
know you like than the lowest common denominator strategy.

~~~
AlexanderZ
Are you talking about any existing recommendation engine that I can try out to
prove myself wrong?

Just how exactly will they do it? I'm really interested, maybe I'm missing
something?

Simply speaking, if a system knows all I listen to is classical music, it can
recommend me a new classical composition, but it cannot all of a sudden
recommend me dubstep (which I might actually like).

~~~
huggyface
We're talking about Digg doing this as a differentiation. It is not commonly
used because it is very heavy in IO and CPU for individual users (though a
site like reddit could take a shortcut just by periodically ramping up some
spot high CPU instances and batch generation correlations between users on
every subreddit, then staling that until the next run), and sites like Reddit
and previously Digg ran on stacks that greatly limited their ability to scale
for this.

Regarding music taste, if the system knows that you have a strong correlation
with a number of users who like classical but periodically explore new music,
what they like will likely be something you might be interested in. This, in
practice, is exactly how music discovery happens in the real world (that the
discoveries of the people you share musical tastes with are more likely to
interest you).

~~~
AlexanderZ
What you are talking about is still incapable of recommending (with a high
chance of the recommendation being spot-on) new things. In music a new thing
would be a completely different genre, not a new song in your favorite genre.

The system you are describing will find people who have a strong correlation
with me and who also like:

1) Classical music and Justin Bieber.

2) Classical music and Metallica.

3) Classical music and Dubstep.

And it will recommend me Bieber, Metallica and Dubstep. I might like Dubstep,
but I won't like Bieber and Metallica. How is it better than listening to
random songs?

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nirvana
... not with 504 Gateway Timeouts. I did get a chance to see it last night and
it certainly looked nice, but I'd already seen all the news stories on the
front page at that moment, so I haven't quite gotten the point yet.

I'm not sure that FB and Twitter shares are the same as "diggs".

