

Reddit Grew 230% in 2010 at Digg’s Expense - iwwr
http://mashable.com/2011/01/03/reddit-2010-growth/

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alex_c
The comparison to Digg feels forced and unnecessary, especially without
numbers for Digg in January and December.

Reddit had 250 million pageviews in January, Digg had 200 million in July
(before the redesign - this likely means Reddit was already ahead in January),
and Reddit ended the year with 830 million.

Most of Reddit's growth couldn't have come from Digg.

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relix
Maybe there's room in the market for a third big player* now? Digg's
reputation has gone down the toilet and is declining.

Reddit has taken over 1st place but they have a few problems: First, Conde
Nast doesn't supply them with enough resources compared to their popularity.
This makes the user experience painfully slow, and the site is down even more
times than Twitter was in the early days.

They also don't have a designer which makes the usability bad.

Third, they lack the creativity to make money off their huge userbase.

I'm sure these three reasons are related. If a start-up would be launched now
it could even exploit the recent delicious-catastrophe by importing those
links. This could bootstrap the community and content, and it'd make for some
good marketing.

* I still count 4chan as an underground site, but maybe they are the third player. They're niche though, so let's say there's still room even then.

~~~
jokermatt999
_They also don't have a designer which makes the usability bad._

I've heard this repeated a number of times, and I completely disagree with it.
Reddit may not be the prettiest site on the block, but it's damn functional.
There is very little unnecessary stuff on the screen, and I quite like it that
way. I tend to turn off custom subreddit styles because they takae away from
the minimal, functional interface. I've heard people talk about "improving
reddit and HN's design", but I've never seen any clear examples of where they
think it's bad.

 _I still count 4chan as an underground site, but maybe they are the third
player. They're niche though, so let's say there's still room even then._

4chan's an entirely different category. They're less about linksharing, and
more about...well, whatever the hell they are. I don't think I'd put them
anywhere near Digg or Reddit except for the fact that they both have memes.
That's pretty much the only comparison.

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getsat
I think the growth was more at Reddit's expense. There was a drastic downturn
in the quality of material hitting the front page in 2010. The comment quality
has gone down significantly, too.

(Yes, I know you can decide which subreddits appear on the front page when you
are logged in).

~~~
guywithabike
The biggest win has been for smaller niche subreddits that now have enough of
a readership to feel like communities now. Reddit's strong suit has always
been in the discussions.

~~~
getsat
I agree. I've been filtering certain default subreddits (e.g., AskReddit) from
the front page because the signal/noise ratio is terrible. As an example, I
like the fact that /r/coding was spawned from the fact that 90% of the
articles in /r/programming are not related to programming.

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david_shaw
It's a very impressive growth spurt, though I wish they could scale the site
accordingly.

They've done well considering the massive amount of traffic and the complex
way they are constantly adding comments, but the site is slow as sin and,
honestly, quite unpleasant to browse sometimes.

I don't want to be reminded of refreshing a page on dial-up.

~~~
redthrowaway
They're working on it. They still only have 4 engineers (!), plus a trainee.
They've hired/are hiring a couple more, so maybe that will work.

Unfortunately, by selling to Conde Nast, they've ceded control on things like
hiring. Every time they want to hire somebody, they have to beg to CN for
permission. If it was VC funded, they'd have 40+ employees by now, and the
site would look/work good. Unfortunately, CN just doesn't know what they have.

Also, never mind the headline; Mashable pretty much lives off of Digg
referals, so this is just linkbait.

~~~
chris11
What's wrong with the design? I love the minimalist feel. I think Reddit's and
HN's design works great for news aggregators.

~~~
redthrowaway
I agree that it's functional, but it's not hugely intuitive, which is why most
people who've only ever glanced at reddit complain about its design. Vim has a
great design with fantastic UI if you're an expert with it, but it's confusing
as all hell for people who've never used it. Similarly, I think reddit (and
HN, for that matter) could probably make more effective use of their space and
lay things out in a way that's more intuitive. That's not to say I want them
to be digg, or one of the many over designed CSS nightmares out there, but
it's be nice if they had a UX expert really sit down and hack away at it.

I'd settle for it loading, however. That'd be nice.

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drivebyacct2
In before senseless reddit bashing...

The reddit admins are quite adamant that their growth was independent of
digg.v4 and if you look at their numbers, they seem to be right. There are
some increases associated with v4, but reddit was enjoying growth prior to
that as well.

~~~
zone411
The graph based on their Google Analytics data
[https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...](https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en#siteDetails?identifier=reddit.com&geo=001&trait_type=1&lp=true)
shows that the increase in reddit's numbers to due to Digg's problems was
major, whether their admins want to admit it or not.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Not really. There was a short term spike, but their year-over-year growth was
much more consistent AND greater in magnitude.

~~~
zone411
Did you look at the graph at all? It shows that the spike right around when
Digg's problems occurred was just as big as their traffic increase over the
last two years with the spike excluded. You need to count the increase in
estimated and direct graphs separately because of the discontinuity.

~~~
drivebyacct2
It looks temporary to me: <http://i.min.us/ibF9ni.png>. It also think this
logic is supported by alex_'s logic [1].

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2098679>

