None of these things killed Digg. Digg was simply a transitional meme.
Prior to the Internet you had mass media controlling distribution. The Internet comes along and you have things like Usenet and the proto-Web.
Then comes the first crowdsourcing sites to allow people to find content without employing people to curate that information. Slashdot was certainly early in this trend.
What Digg allowed is a certain band of people to control the information flow. People would get paid to promote submissions as it became clear that a front-page submission generated a lot of pageviews.
But what became apparent with all these community sites (and this includes forums) is they start with an early group who provide value to each other. This group ends up becoming insular. De facto standards form. But even in the Usenet days you had the "September" problem (where new college freshmen would get Internet access and not understand the "rules" and conventions that were in place and would ask questions that had already been answered, etc).
Basically all these social sites get worse over time as the masses flood in.
Digg died because the idea that there is a central source for news was a holdover idea from the old media days. Reddit understood this. Global reddit is basically useless. The subreddits are the only remotely interesting thing about reddit.
People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
I've heard the same complaints about Twitter.
Facebook for most people is not a source of news. It doesn't have the same link-sharing mindshare (IMHO) for most people that other mediums have. Ultimately I think the biggest use case for Facebook is still sharing photos. People go to Facebook to find out what their friends are doing. Very few go to find out what's going on in the world (much as Facebook would like that to be the case).
I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
> Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
So I went over there, and the first article is about protocol-less links, and the first comment notes that they have performance issues in css for IE7 & 8. The second article is a link to dadgum and the first comment is about optimizing network communication.
I think the value of a site declines over time relative to how long an individual has been viewing it. The first few weeks I started browsing Hacker News, a large portion of the articles were interesting.
The percentage of interesting articles has declined over time. Is that because I have overdosed a bit on the types of articles and discussions that appear here? Or simply because I have consumed more internet based news now than I had when I started reading HN? Who is to say.
Yes, sites in general can and have declined. However, due to the fact that I have not seen trolls dominate HN, and in my view the quality of HN is approximately as good as it has always been, I find it difficult to measure the quality of the site to a precision that would allow me to track it over time. In my own head.
The short answer is, this site is still among the best discussion news sites on the internet.
I agree with most of your post, but would clarify:
>> People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
Two things:
1. "Worse" is subjective.
2. I think it's more of a trade-off between quality and size. Hacker News doesn't have to get "worse", but would have to remain niche in order to avoid it. That is why subreddits can succeed, because Reddit is essentially a platform for lots of niche communities.
>I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
Reddit is the easiest way I know of to generate a targeted community. I've set up subreddits, forgot about them, and come back to find them with thousands of members and fresh content. Are there other comparable ways to do this?
Reddit as a whole brings immense value in the sheer volume of unusual content. The AMA section varies from banal to fascinating, for example — and the strength of the interesting content far outweighs the easy-to-skip bad.
The quality of individual subreddits varies wildly, of course. This should not be a surprise. In a way, Reddit's subreddits feature brought back the spirit of Usenet.
The value in Digg was the tribe it created, not the software, not the ads, not the human beings keeping the lights on. It was the tribe of people who found interesting news on the internet and shared it.
FB, Reddit, HN did not "kill" Digg. The tribe growing up and or moving on to other things ended Digg. A similar tribe is at Reddit now, but a similar tribe used to live at Slashdot. Before that they probably lived on Usenet message boards or wherever.
In college, the comp sci program I was in had a private message board that ended up having a very similar vibe to digg/reddit/slashdot. Tech heavy, at times very heated political and religious debate. Eventually the original group graduated and it's never been quite the same.
It seems that each generation has something like digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever... that is "the thing" for hanging out and sharing/complaining about the news of the day or whatever is interesting. They might look like fads because on the internet they peak and crumble pretty quick, but really it is probably a natural cycle that communities and tribes go through.
Eventually HN and Reddit will become irrelevant to certain groups and the tribes that live there will move on to the next thing, whatever that might be.
I'm guessing the next site like this already exists or is going to be built soon, so any guesses as to what it will be if it's already out there?
From my perspective, Reddit is qualitatively different from all the sites you mentioned. Reddit is the first large news site which allows its users to create their own communities.
Most of the content on Reddit these days isn't technology- or politically oriented at all. This has changed over the last year or so - there are subreddits for pretty much anything. What makes these communities special is that a lot of them have very specialized and very diverse knowledge, not necessarily related to the subjects Reddit's early adopters were interested in. There are subreddits for science, fitness, finance, sex, art and just about any other subject people would be interested in following. What gets to the default front page doesn't even begin scratching the surface of what the ecosystem has to offer.
I have the contrarian opinion that Reddit won't be displaced for a long time in the realm of primarily text-based news sharing and discussion.
The more popular a community gets the more diluted its culture becomes. The communities become overrun with users who never have a chance to acclimate to the culture of the site because they see more new users like themselves than they do seasoned users. You see this effect taking hold on HN when you go to a thread and see a bunch of short joke comments and none of them are light gray. Eventually the core users leave for greener pastures or for a place that resembles why they joined the previous site to begin with. Every community is doomed to this fate if it continues to gain unchecked popularity. All things will eventually converge on pictures of cats.
When aging HN users get tired of the changing atmosphere they will splinter off.
What I'd like to see come next: A community for hacker+entrepreneur types with an HN-like policy on commenting and etiquette that doesn't pander to Silicon Valley and doesn't need to stay on the good side of tech rags. Bootstrapping, programming, running a company -- that's it. Nothing so vague as "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity."
Nobody killed Digg. Digg committed suicide by telling it's original, loyal user base to go fuck themselves in it's quest for more money and a broader audience. Digg became too greedy.
But it was pretty obvious much earlier on that Digg had zero respect for its users. In many ways, Digg had a very old school broadcast attitude: the users were merely part of the product, only the advertisers mattered.
The problem digg faced is that their loyal customers were not sufficient to warrant the amount of money they had raised. If they had done nothing, it would have been suicide as well.
Here's the blog post TechCrunch flamed me about (called me a liar and whatnot). I wrote it after I tried the alpha of diggv4, but before it was released to the public; I have no idea what happened internally, but the resulting product was indeed pretty devastating -- the final self-inflicted wound after years of encouraging power users and sacrificing the best interests of the userbase: http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
Actually Digg killed Digg with the redesign. One time after the redesign I went to the site and there was NO CONTENT anywhere. It wanted me to make friends with people before I would get to see any content.
I logged in. Still no content. That was the last time I visited digg.com, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
My guess is that if the acquirers just rever to the pre-redesign version Digg will come back to life.
I read a bit of the discussion on Reddit, and there were surprisingly (to me) many people that had used Digg before. Then something called "v4" came and Digg became unusable to many people. As I understood the discussion. Digg didn't care. So its users looked for alternatives and moved to Reddit. Digg still didn't care. People got used to Reddit and stayed. Digg still didn't care.
Yesterday I looked at Digg.com for the first time in years. Only a quick look and I spotted already a number of beginners mistakes only in the front page design.
For example the clickable headlines to the stories: they are the main content. Yet they are very /very/ light and hard to read on the white background. WTF. You want your main content to have /good contrast/ and stand out, and secondary stuff (like "points" or "who submitted" or "vote buttons") to have less contrasts as to not distract from your main content. Yet, even such basic things Digg gets wrong. I didn't dare to digg further.
I was struck by the authors comment "Well, they haven’t redesigned since what appears to be 1997, which has pleased their user base who like the simple look."
How long before web designers start complaining about reddit the way they complain about craigslist's design?
The complaints will happen when that simplicity impedes information flow. It's not a matter of visual aesthetics, it's a matter of usefulness. CL's design impedes its usability, independent of its aesthetics.
In Craigslist case, there are clearly better ways to browse housing spots than in a list of links with non-standardized location information in the linktext. In Reddit and HN, part of the joy is serendipity...you don't need to aggregate the content behind each link at once...because of the voting system, you don't worry that clicking on the top link will be a waste of time. That's not the case with CL's chronologically ordered list.
Reddit has made some concessions with allowing thumbnails of image-based posts to show up. Otherwise, its minimalistic approach serves a real usability purpose and is not simply the result of stagnation.
I guess designers could criticize its visual aesthetic, which is pretty austere, but design is how it works in addition to how it looks. I'd say reddit's devs have shown an interest in improving their interface and making it easier to use over time, whereas craigslist has not. You still can't browse apartment listings on a map, which is the reason why the Padmapper thing blew up so big.
In any such ecosystem where the inmates are running the asylum, pissing them off is not a good course of action.
The tribe knew that it was the reason why Digg was what Digg was. But arrogance on the part of the upper management at Digg was its downfall; they couldn't come to terms with the basic fact that the people were responsible for Digg's success. So they decided to tweak it, "enhance" it, modify it to "Digg 2.0", and the people revolted.
Lesson: if you are a user-driven site, listen to them. Don't piss them off.
As an ex-Digger, I can tell you that it was Digg that killed Digg for me. At one point in time, Digg was cool. Granted, it was still mostly a rehash of news from Reddit, 4Chan and other sites, but the audience base was large enough to provide original content as well, and the UI was considerably better than any of the other sites.
What killed it (for me anyway) was that Digg suddenly allowed advertisers to start posting away. Ads popped up everywhere, and every other post from directly from Mashable. Digg was no longer cool, and mostly, it was Mashable's alternative site. :)
I switched to Reddit. Reddit didn't like all the Digg users migrating over initially, but attitudes have cooled over time. I can't really see a move that Digg could make at this point that would entice me back.
I used to be a huge Digg fan, and checked it religiously. Digg v4 is what completely drove me away.
The Digg v4 idea was good, but poorly executed. They shouldn't have suddenly forced you to follow other people to get your news. They were trying too hard to become a social network like Twitter / Facebook. Instead, I think they should have integrated with Twitter / Facebook to find top news, rather than starting their own social network.
No, sorry, as someone that used Digg regularly on a daily basis, Digg killed Digg.
The day that Digg changed their interface was the day they lost a huge portion of their users, including me. I went back once more after that, and then never again.
I left Digg for Reddit because Reddit's community at the time valued articles with content over images. As Reddit has absorbed Digg's old user base, so too did it absorb much of the culture of Digg. Reddit no longer seems to have much focus on reading and has instead become a place to find funny images, much like Digg in its heyday. It feels inevitable that the culture of a website like Reddit will change over its life span but it bothered me to see it happen first-hand.
But with Reddit, there are thousands of others who agree with you, who have created tons of subreddits that would be relevant to whatever your interests. Obviously some communities are more active and more interesting than others, but they're around if you look. Here are some great article-based reddits:
DIGG killed Digg. The week after V 3.0 launched was a mess. Tons of corporate sponsored posts (AKA intrusive adverts), often multiple submissions by the same person on the front page at the same time, and other weirdness.
Reddit was right place, right time to pick up the exodus. I don't think it did anything to kill Digg.
[+] [-] jgrahamc|13 years ago|reply
One example of being jerks: http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/sense-of-humor-failure-at-digg.h...
After that I was unbanned, but not after an employee of Digg defamed me in a blog post by making false claims: http://blog.jgc.org/2006/07/unbanned-from-digg.html
And here's an example of how reddit people weren't jerks when I inadvertently brought the site great slowness: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/tale-of-two-cultures.html
[+] [-] mibbitier|13 years ago|reply
Digg wanted to make money.
If Conde hadn't bought Reddit, then it would likely have been a far closer race.
When your competition isn't interested in making money, you're always going to be at a major disadvantage.
[+] [-] cletus|13 years ago|reply
Prior to the Internet you had mass media controlling distribution. The Internet comes along and you have things like Usenet and the proto-Web.
Then comes the first crowdsourcing sites to allow people to find content without employing people to curate that information. Slashdot was certainly early in this trend.
What Digg allowed is a certain band of people to control the information flow. People would get paid to promote submissions as it became clear that a front-page submission generated a lot of pageviews.
But what became apparent with all these community sites (and this includes forums) is they start with an early group who provide value to each other. This group ends up becoming insular. De facto standards form. But even in the Usenet days you had the "September" problem (where new college freshmen would get Internet access and not understand the "rules" and conventions that were in place and would ask questions that had already been answered, etc).
Basically all these social sites get worse over time as the masses flood in.
Digg died because the idea that there is a central source for news was a holdover idea from the old media days. Reddit understood this. Global reddit is basically useless. The subreddits are the only remotely interesting thing about reddit.
People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
I've heard the same complaints about Twitter.
Facebook for most people is not a source of news. It doesn't have the same link-sharing mindshare (IMHO) for most people that other mediums have. Ultimately I think the biggest use case for Facebook is still sharing photos. People go to Facebook to find out what their friends are doing. Very few go to find out what's going on in the world (much as Facebook would like that to be the case).
I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.
[+] [-] dminor|13 years ago|reply
So I went over there, and the first article is about protocol-less links, and the first comment notes that they have performance issues in css for IE7 & 8. The second article is a link to dadgum and the first comment is about optimizing network communication.
It's not HN, but awful is an overstatement.
[+] [-] eggnet|13 years ago|reply
The percentage of interesting articles has declined over time. Is that because I have overdosed a bit on the types of articles and discussions that appear here? Or simply because I have consumed more internet based news now than I had when I started reading HN? Who is to say.
Yes, sites in general can and have declined. However, due to the fact that I have not seen trolls dominate HN, and in my view the quality of HN is approximately as good as it has always been, I find it difficult to measure the quality of the site to a precision that would allow me to track it over time. In my own head.
The short answer is, this site is still among the best discussion news sites on the internet.
[+] [-] loganfrederick|13 years ago|reply
>> People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
Two things:
1. "Worse" is subjective.
2. I think it's more of a trade-off between quality and size. Hacker News doesn't have to get "worse", but would have to remain niche in order to avoid it. That is why subreddits can succeed, because Reddit is essentially a platform for lots of niche communities.
[+] [-] mcantelon|13 years ago|reply
Reddit is the easiest way I know of to generate a targeted community. I've set up subreddits, forgot about them, and come back to find them with thousands of members and fresh content. Are there other comparable ways to do this?
[+] [-] gcv|13 years ago|reply
The quality of individual subreddits varies wildly, of course. This should not be a surprise. In a way, Reddit's subreddits feature brought back the spirit of Usenet.
[+] [-] Produce|13 years ago|reply
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
[+] [-] heed|13 years ago|reply
They only get worse for people who don't like mainstream content.
[+] [-] ibisum|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ibisum|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] programminggeek|13 years ago|reply
FB, Reddit, HN did not "kill" Digg. The tribe growing up and or moving on to other things ended Digg. A similar tribe is at Reddit now, but a similar tribe used to live at Slashdot. Before that they probably lived on Usenet message boards or wherever.
In college, the comp sci program I was in had a private message board that ended up having a very similar vibe to digg/reddit/slashdot. Tech heavy, at times very heated political and religious debate. Eventually the original group graduated and it's never been quite the same.
It seems that each generation has something like digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever... that is "the thing" for hanging out and sharing/complaining about the news of the day or whatever is interesting. They might look like fads because on the internet they peak and crumble pretty quick, but really it is probably a natural cycle that communities and tribes go through.
Eventually HN and Reddit will become irrelevant to certain groups and the tribes that live there will move on to the next thing, whatever that might be.
I'm guessing the next site like this already exists or is going to be built soon, so any guesses as to what it will be if it's already out there?
[+] [-] marvin|13 years ago|reply
Most of the content on Reddit these days isn't technology- or politically oriented at all. This has changed over the last year or so - there are subreddits for pretty much anything. What makes these communities special is that a lot of them have very specialized and very diverse knowledge, not necessarily related to the subjects Reddit's early adopters were interested in. There are subreddits for science, fitness, finance, sex, art and just about any other subject people would be interested in following. What gets to the default front page doesn't even begin scratching the surface of what the ecosystem has to offer.
I have the contrarian opinion that Reddit won't be displaced for a long time in the realm of primarily text-based news sharing and discussion.
[+] [-] coderdude|13 years ago|reply
When aging HN users get tired of the changing atmosphere they will splinter off.
What I'd like to see come next: A community for hacker+entrepreneur types with an HN-like policy on commenting and etiquette that doesn't pander to Silicon Valley and doesn't need to stay on the good side of tech rags. Bootstrapping, programming, running a company -- that's it. Nothing so vague as "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity."
[+] [-] rickmb|13 years ago|reply
But it was pretty obvious much earlier on that Digg had zero respect for its users. In many ways, Digg had a very old school broadcast attitude: the users were merely part of the product, only the advertisers mattered.
[+] [-] jshen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kn0thing|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|13 years ago|reply
I logged in. Still no content. That was the last time I visited digg.com, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
My guess is that if the acquirers just rever to the pre-redesign version Digg will come back to life.
[+] [-] yaix|13 years ago|reply
I read a bit of the discussion on Reddit, and there were surprisingly (to me) many people that had used Digg before. Then something called "v4" came and Digg became unusable to many people. As I understood the discussion. Digg didn't care. So its users looked for alternatives and moved to Reddit. Digg still didn't care. People got used to Reddit and stayed. Digg still didn't care.
Yesterday I looked at Digg.com for the first time in years. Only a quick look and I spotted already a number of beginners mistakes only in the front page design.
For example the clickable headlines to the stories: they are the main content. Yet they are very /very/ light and hard to read on the white background. WTF. You want your main content to have /good contrast/ and stand out, and secondary stuff (like "points" or "who submitted" or "vote buttons") to have less contrasts as to not distract from your main content. Yet, even such basic things Digg gets wrong. I didn't dare to digg further.
[+] [-] officemonkey|13 years ago|reply
As soon as that happened, Digg lost the alpha nerds. The rest was destiny played out over time.
[+] [-] butterfi|13 years ago|reply
How long before web designers start complaining about reddit the way they complain about craigslist's design?
[+] [-] danso|13 years ago|reply
In Craigslist case, there are clearly better ways to browse housing spots than in a list of links with non-standardized location information in the linktext. In Reddit and HN, part of the joy is serendipity...you don't need to aggregate the content behind each link at once...because of the voting system, you don't worry that clicking on the top link will be a waste of time. That's not the case with CL's chronologically ordered list.
Reddit has made some concessions with allowing thumbnails of image-based posts to show up. Otherwise, its minimalistic approach serves a real usability purpose and is not simply the result of stagnation.
[+] [-] untog|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajays|13 years ago|reply
In any such ecosystem where the inmates are running the asylum, pissing them off is not a good course of action.
The tribe knew that it was the reason why Digg was what Digg was. But arrogance on the part of the upper management at Digg was its downfall; they couldn't come to terms with the basic fact that the people were responsible for Digg's success. So they decided to tweak it, "enhance" it, modify it to "Digg 2.0", and the people revolted.
Lesson: if you are a user-driven site, listen to them. Don't piss them off.
[+] [-] toddhd|13 years ago|reply
What killed it (for me anyway) was that Digg suddenly allowed advertisers to start posting away. Ads popped up everywhere, and every other post from directly from Mashable. Digg was no longer cool, and mostly, it was Mashable's alternative site. :)
I switched to Reddit. Reddit didn't like all the Digg users migrating over initially, but attitudes have cooled over time. I can't really see a move that Digg could make at this point that would entice me back.
[+] [-] r00fus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxiao|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hybrid11|13 years ago|reply
The Digg v4 idea was good, but poorly executed. They shouldn't have suddenly forced you to follow other people to get your news. They were trying too hard to become a social network like Twitter / Facebook. Instead, I think they should have integrated with Twitter / Facebook to find top news, rather than starting their own social network.
[+] [-] crisnoble|13 years ago|reply
Part 1: http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/04/08/war-13/
Part 2: http://ncomment.com/blog/2009/12/17/war-23/
Part 3: http://ncomment.com/blog/2012/01/06/war-33/
[+] [-] WestCoastJustin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarycrusader|13 years ago|reply
The day that Digg changed their interface was the day they lost a huge portion of their users, including me. I went back once more after that, and then never again.
[+] [-] ojbyrne|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kaedon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zecho|13 years ago|reply
http://www.reddit.com/r/indepthstories/
http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/
http://www.reddit.com/r/longtext/
http://www.reddit.com/r/offbeat/
http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] debacle|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cliveholloway|13 years ago|reply
Reddit was right place, right time to pick up the exodus. I don't think it did anything to kill Digg.