

Hacker News vs Reddit and Digg - abhishekdesai

Hacker News has completely taken me away from Reddit and Digg. I seldom visit those 2 big news sites as I get all the contents I want on this site. Has it happened to you also?
======
halo
This sort of post is one of the great failures in social news sites. 7
upvotes, 13th on the front page, zero interesting content. The cause is the
plague of feel-good "me too"-ism, groupthink and lowest-common-denominator-ism
that causes people to upvote things uncritically and eventually leads to the
mass-upvoting of poor articles and comments (especially the immortal "[pic]",
agreeable question/'vote up if' or 'hilarious' YouTube video) over good more
thought-provoking, challenging and nuanced ones. I think it's a big flaw in
the concept of social news sites ala Hacker News, Reddit and Digg.

Relevant to the topic, I've been moving towards MetaFilter lately as it
doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to the design of the site, has
the bonus of hand-moderation and the $5 entrance fee is a surprisingly good
way of limiting membership. The flip side of this is that the content is a
very mixed bag in terms of submission quality and topic due to the hugely
different styles and interests of submitters - even more so than other social
news sites. The comments there are often unparalleled in terms of quality,
however, and Ask MeFi is an invaluable resource.

I poked around with Planets (blog aggregators on one topic) for a while but
the amount of content is generally overbearing to make it impractical to read
them for any great length of time.

I'm slowly but surely warming to the idea that old-style blogs that link to
the other content may be a good idea but the question is finding a good ones
that are regularly updated, whose moderation you can trust and whose interests
align with yours. I do read Boing Boing, Ajaxian and Engadget who follow this
format, but I think Slashdot has suffered from it over time by deviating from
its core subject matter, has become a caricature of itself especially with
regards to its biases and suffered from dumbing down over time. Of course,
it's still an open problem as to where they get their content from and how
they filter the good from the bad.

Perhaps the conclusion is that the whole concept of a link-driven news site is
still largely an open problem - and I'm certainly not sure what the solution
is.

~~~
buss
I have been thinking about this problem a lot recently and I think I might
have a solution. Dissatisfaction with the state of social news sites seems
almost universal, digg has almost unspeakably low quality, and reddit is
slowly bleeding to death, and we all know that Hacker News has not been immune
to the same disease of "lowest-common-denominator-ism." There must be a
solution, certainly there's enough data sitting around on all the various
services that meaningful inferences about user preferences can be drawn!

Enter my idea: <http://con.nect.us/>. It's currently under development (it's
my senior project at my university) and will be finished by December. My
advisor is Tim Davis (<http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~davis/>), the brilliant man
who wrote many of MATLAB's sparse matrix libraries, so I have an excellent
mind to tap to help me solve my linear algebra problems.

It goes like this: con.nect.us will track user activity across many different
websites, linking your username on reddit or digg or wherever with your
account on con.nect.us, as well as take submissions for news itself. It then
analyzes what people like and how people are similar to each other and
recommend new content accordingly. Hopefully this will help us avoid the curse
of the least-common-denominator and start to experience the web better.

If you want to be informed of future developments, there's an email submission
form on <http://con.nect.us/>

Also, the name isn't finalized, so if you think you have a better one, please
send it my way.

------
iamelgringo
I was 90/10 HN/Reddit for a while until I found out how to customize using
sub-reddits. I'm now about 40/60 HN/Reddit for reading articles, but I don't
read comments or participate in discussions on Reddit. Simply too many trolls
to make it worth my while.

edit:

This site is the best for startup news. That vibe has almost completely left
Reddit and been transplanted here.

The discussions here are probably among the best Hacker discussions that I've
been able to find anywhere online.

~~~
abhishekdesai
how is the repetition in both these sites? i have found it too much for the
contents i am interested in

~~~
iamelgringo
Most of the programming reddit is reflected here on Hacker News, but if you
pick subreddits like Javascript, Web Design, Haskell, Lisp, Python, Ruby,
Computer Science, Geek, Cognitive Science... You can get a nice selection of
Geeky articles that aren't covered here.

~~~
13ren
I use both HN and progit (programming subreddit); though HN < progit for
technical programming articles.

However, the big plus of HN is the 100% absence of trolls (or maybe I just
don't notice them here because they aren't encouraged). The most horrible
thing on reddit is several people with technical competence who use it to
abuse people - a form of trolling. I find that combination hard work to deal
with.

I wonder if a factor is not "diluting responsibility" (psych 101) too much? HN
is a smaller site (and has pg overseeing it); subreddits have fewer
subscribers; /. has fewer (randomly chosen) moderators. Is too much dilution
of responsibility what undermines social sites like Digg?

------
ashleyw
HN really is the hidden gem of news sites and communities. I love it!

.

* Great stuff on the homepage....ALWAYS something I'm interested in!

* The comment system isn't full of witty comments just said to get karma....Reddit is big for this, and even Digg, even though it doesn't have an overall user karma system!

* Overall, HN makes NEW knowledge, it doesn't just pass on current knowledge - people asking questions, and getting answers, both in submissions and comments, is a massive sign of the quality of the users.

.

Long live the current state of HN!

~~~
ojbyrne
Digg has a karma system. They just don't show your karma. Perhaps that's what
you meant.

------
megatron
Yes the same has happened to me, but I've noticed I go to several different
specific news sites instead of Reddit and Digg now. There was a recent post
about a slinkset site I think it was called Infosec Update or something that
seemed promising. I use a lot of Pligg sites as well now.

Digg is, well, Digg with all it's failings. Reddit recently turned into 4chan.
HN I like as the SNR is quite low but I have started to see posts for things
that are less related appearing as the community grows. I've also spotted the
same sites popping up again and again.

~~~
megatron
Just to reply to my own post, the site was called Infosec Update -
<http://news.mandalorian.com> if anyone is interested.

------
liangzan
well, reddit prgramming is still good. I also follow delicious. digg is
nothing but crap now.

~~~
abhishekdesai
agree i dont understand digg now and what to see on that

------
hs
me too; however, i sometimes check slashdot too ... the comments are wittier
and funnier (while still being thoughtful) than hn

~~~
megatron
Parent voted +5 (Insightful)

------
qhoxie
I still pull top stories from some of their categories, but I never go to the
actual sites. HN is my new home.

------
habibur
Regular visitor. But not completely yet. Still visit Reddit.

------
vecter
It's moved me a bit off of reddit, though I have to say there's a lot of
content that gets cross posted (usually from reddit --> HN).

------
eries
Yes, completely.

------
sztanpet
absolutely, I just hope that HN will not get advertised too much, because then
we will be flooded by the digg-like submissions

