
A tale of two cultures - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/tale-of-two-cultures.html
======
edw519
A tale of _three_ cultures.

I had been to reddit and digg many times, but have never registered and never
posted.

I came to hacker news years ago, jumped right in, and never looked back.

Why? We can talk about all kinds of complex criteria regarding social
networking, community building, people behavior, systems behavior, etc., etc.,
etc., but let's not overlook the most basic thing of all: _it's simple_.

Simple font, simple layout, threaded conversations, limited options. Easy to
read, easy to explore. No "sub-reddits", no fancy filters, no complex
algorithms begging to be gamed (well maybe). None of the stuff that people
keep asking for to make us "more like digg or reddit".

It's so simple that we actually focus more on the content than anything else.
There's a lesson for all of us developers in there.

~~~
jokermatt999
However, there is a price to all this: Hacker News will never be commercially
viable. I know it's never supposed to be; its purpose is high quality
conversation and links. Still, it's a good idea to note something like that if
you're pointing to HN as an example for developers. HN is very successful at
what it's supposed to be, but profitable is one thing it is not.

~~~
forensic
P.S. If you consider HN to be pg's personal playground, conceptually speaking
it may already be monetized due to pg feeling that the
knowledge/value/exposure he gains from HN leads to him being more profitable.
It's sort of a secondary form of profitability but it's totally a legit profit
in my mind. It should encourage other millionaires to start and curate online
communities around their interests.

~~~
jokermatt999
Yes, my intention was not to imply HN isn't successful. It's incredibly
successful imo; it's the best example that a good, quality community can be
built and not lose focus. However, it is currently not economically
successful. It could be monetized, maybe. However, subscriptions would
drastically lower the number of commenters (better? Worse? Not sure.). Ads
might be a good solution, because they could be very targetted, since this is
a niche community.

~~~
RickHull
> _However, it is currently not economically successful. It could be
> monetized, maybe._

Au contraire. It may be a "cost center", but I have no doubt that it has been
enormously beneficial for YCombinator's bottom line, as a marketing effort.

~~~
duck
Marketing _plus_ creating better entrepreneurs and thus in the end making
better ideas/companies for YC to invest in.

------
jacquesm
The tic-tac-toe hack is absolutely fantastic, and reddits response is really
great.

I think most of the people here have 'tasted' digg for a while and then left,
it never felt like a site I wanted to be a part of to me, I think that
cultural difference is visible on many levels, not just the interaction with
the management.

~~~
eru
I have never used digg. I found about reddit back in the day through a link
from Paul Graham. I was active there for a while and even sent in some bug
report that was answered quite fast.

------
ojbyrne
FYI, the reason digg didn't check for 404 errors, was because it stopped
people from submitting interesting 404 pages.

~~~
llimllib
you mean reddit, right?

(edit: Oh, I see now that you mean Digg, but Digg not checking for 404 errors
is not mentioned in the story, just FYI)

~~~
ojbyrne
Indeed I misread the original post. I wonder if reddit did it for the same
reason.

------
mixmax
I still remember the recursion hack, I had no idea it was you. Funny, harmless
and very clever. Kudos.

~~~
markkat
Yeah, that was nice: "Oh, this is the guy!" Reddit lets their userbase drive
much of the time, and it creates warm feelings all around.

------
edanm
If you haven't read the article yet, read it! It talks about 2 clever "hacks"
of the Reddit/Digg systems, which are really imaginative and wonderful.

There is one thing about the article I'm not sure about. He says the
difference between Digg and Reddit is in their "hacker culture"; Reddit is
made up more of hackers, and therefore likes hacks more.

On the other hand, I think Hacker News is even _more_ slanted towards the
hacker mentality than either Reddit and Digg. But I'm not at all sure what
HN's reactions to such "hacks" of the system would be; I think we tend to
frown on such things.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Read niyazpk's comment for an example of a hack of HN
(although that is literally a hack of the code that runs HN, not a hack of the
"system". Either way, interesting reading).

~~~
niyazpk
_> > I'm not at all sure what HN's reactions to such "hacks" of the system
would be; I think we tend to frown on such things._

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639976>

~~~
jgrahamc
Yeah, I'm still mad about that. But only because I had thought of precisely
the same thing in parallel with dfranke
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640213>) and he had the time to actually
do it. Aargh. People who have time to do clever stuff! :-)

Perhaps I need to get a job where I get to break things.

~~~
dsteinweg
Matsano!

------
niyazpk
I wonder how much of the difference in culture is actually fueled by the
aggressive fund raising of digg early on.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
It probably fueled it quite a bit. When you take $40 million in funding,
you're committing yourself to exit for hundreds of millions of dollars within
a few years, which in turn puts you on a monetization clock.

~~~
billswift
Which _should_ give you _more_ incentive not to annoy users unnecessarily.

------
brianritchie
Very insightful article. I think Digg vs Reddit might be suffering from the
typical "grew large too quickly" issue where due to their sheer size, they
implemented more corporate/mnc type policies for handling hacks etc. By
default most larger companies are anti-hackers which ( to their detriment) is
what powers true innovation. A dire need to expose and solve an itch. Lets
hope Reddit keeps the culture rocking

------
ojbyrne
At the time of this hack, digg had only about 20 employees, had raised not $40
million, but around $6 million, and the culture was quite open and relaxed.
But there were some very smart people there, and most of them including me
agreed with Tim Ellis's opinion on this "hack." It was stupid.

Now perhaps some on the management side overreacted, but we were inundated
with stupid shit on a regular basis.

~~~
jgrahamc
It hurts to hear that lots of people thought it was stupid. Fine. But that
doesn't excuse the public bad mouthing I received.

The really sad thing is that I was a very active Digg user; I was on the site
every day reading stories and submitting. Here's a screenshot of the Digg
front page for July 21, 2006 (five days before my prank and the closest I can
find to that day): <http://i.imgur.com/UE09Z.png> (actual page from
archive.org is <http://web.archive.org/web/20060721035713/www.digg.com/>).

The second link down on the front page was submitted by me. I was looking for
cool stories and submitting them to Digg every day during that period and then
whammo I'm banned and bad mouthed.

~~~
ojbyrne
Well, for what its worth, I wasn't big on the banning of users, and, if I had
been asked in your case, would not have supported it.

------
henning
I always wondered why Kevin and Alex felt the need to hide behind their
laptops on Diggnation.

Unfortunately reddit is not what it used to be. The days when Lisp tutorials I
submitted skyrocketed to the top of the front page (before subreddits) are
only a distant memory now.

~~~
RossM
What I love about reddit with subreddits is that if you want lisp tutorials
you only have to unsubscribe from the high-traffic reddits (e.g. pics,
technology) and subscribe to the lower-traffic but more topical reddits.

~~~
AtTheLast
The subreddits are fantastic! It's like they have created a community inside
of a community.

------
balding_n_tired
Sorry--"dark-tipper"?

~~~
nhebb
He used to run a "Dark Tips" segment on The Screen Savers.

------
otrooso
Sorry to say this, but "A tale of two cultures" is a very glorious title for
something like reddit and digg. Humanistic and scientific cultures, the
profound debate about how we marry them and how to control complexity and
compartmentalization of science and research is not comparable to the other
two "cultures". What term should you use for describing those "cultures" in a
precise and respectful form?

------
tokenadult
Is either of the two cultures successful in monetizing?

------
osopoderoso
What I like about HN:

1.- Intelligent people 2.- Nice content 3.- I don't have to provide an email
or any other personal information.

What I don't like:

1.- I am always submitting very fast. 2.- I have two faces: one with positive
and other with negative karma. But my negative karma is not well here, so my
negative karma face should say that this is not a balanced place.

I prefer HN culture (that is my positive karma speaking)

