

Ask YC: Why are you guys obsessd with reddit? - chez17

As someone new to the site, I am confused at the level of animosity and obsession with reddit. Was reddit once a bastion of intellectual conversation until one day the trolls came in and ravaged the entire site? Is News.YC currently going down the tubes? I think whats important is that the focus and content here will keep a certain demographic of people away from this site. Am I wrong?
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pg
_Was reddit once a bastion of intellectual conversation until one day the
trolls came in and ravaged the entire site?_

Yes, pretty much.

Though Slashdot and Digg have the same problem, I think the reason people here
use Reddit as the canonical example of what not to become is that many of them
are refugees from Reddit specifically. Also perhaps because Reddit had the
greatest fall. (I don't know about Slashdot, but I suspect Digg was never that
great.)

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thaumaturgy
I lurked on Digg shortly after it debuted. It was very briefly pretty good,
and then devolved incredibly fast.

I was also on Slashdot pretty early -- I still have a low 5-digit UID there --
and back around 1999 it was pretty incredible. It's bounced back a little
since the Natalie-Portman-Hot-Grits days, but not nearly enough.

Might be that the other way for me to look at this is, I am the death knell
for any social networking site that I start hanging around on. ;-)

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aston
But are you the last of the good or the first of the bad?

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thaumaturgy
All I have to say to that is, .9999... equals 1.

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davidw
Stories like this are now starting to pop up and get votes:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122287>

Reddit gets mentioned a lot for this reason: it got a huge bunch of users
initially from people following a link that pg posted, so the initial stories
and discussions _were_ pretty good. Then it started devolving into a community
that is often not pleasant to interact with unless you stick to one of the
subreddits. People don't want that to happen here.

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thorax
Yeah, ignore those people. I think anyone worrying about Reddit (or even
mentioning it) is just as likely to hurt this community as those who post
"fluff" stories.

Let it be what it will be and relax, please. :)

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pg
_Let it be what it will be_

That's a good strategy for a startup, because a startup generally wants to
have as many users as possible. In that case you want to let the site evolve
into whatever interests the most users. But this is not a startup; at this
site the goal is quality, not growth.

~~~
mixmax
" But this is not a startup; at this site the goal is quality, not growth."

A sincere thank you for that...

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himanshu
Reddit's programming sub-reddit seems informative though.

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jib1123
reddit is one of the few YC successes. Its expected for them to be obsessed
with reddit ;)

