I like Reddit; I was skeptical at first, but it won me over. I don’t bother that much with slashdot or digg as much as I used to. The simple interface, no comments and up/down moderation is the right combination.
Things have changed at Reddit in the last few months due to increase in users, — I’m not talking about the conversion to Python, a fact that I couldn’t care less about, but seemed to rock that little world for odd reasons — you can no longer get karma boosts from random news articles from BBCNEWS or CNN. This is a good thing, because if I want news articles from them I’ll go there directly, I don’t need Reddit as the middlesite.
The flip side is that these days literally every post from some weblogs are being submitted and moderated up. Examples are Dilbert, Schneier, Paul Graham and freaknomics to name a few. These are the best blogs around, no doubt, and highly popular (yes, I know Graham’s not a proper weblog.) Do we need Reddit to keep linking to them? Once or twice is enough, the rest I can get directly if I like it. It’s clogging the nice interface. When I see articles from popular weblogs (some of which I read,) I moderate the link down regardless of how I liked them (Adams’ and Graham’s posts are consistently awesome, but I still moderate them down.)
In short, I want Reddit to inform me of original content I wouldn’t otherwise get to. It does. Some of the time. Linking and encouraging links to highly popular weblogs/news outlets is not going in the right direction.
The other thing that bothers me is the incestuous self feeding at Reddit. Think about slashdot linking to itself, or to an article saying how great it is. Legitimate, but unpleasing. I can’t figure why people moderate these posts skywards. Early on, I submitted “reddit.com” just to see what happens… people moderated me down to oblivion.
So, are you a karma junky? Why worry about how the algorithm works? Link to Reddit praise, Dilbert, Paul Graham or Bush bashing.
My current Karma is 230, I’m going to link to this post, I’ll update what that figure looks like after the hoards of Reddit zealots find this offensive or informative. Who knows. Who cares.
> Do we need Reddit to keep linking to them? Once or twice is enough, > the rest I can get directly if I like it.
What about people who find reddit after that and don’t know them?
Anonymous,
Come on! Is Reddit the only social bookmarking scheme out there? How did people find hugely popular weblogs/sites beforehand? Reddit should cater to regulars, like any other site… you don’t see Slashdot/CNN repeating entries for the sake of newcomers, right?
Once something is popular (and good or really bad) it’s all over the place and is hard to miss. We don’t need Reddit for that.
Sure, a bunch of posts from CNN is a drag, but doesn’t moderation take care of that? If not, then the scheme isn’t working and it has to be changed. Denying interesting posts from CNN or Paul Graham or whatnot isn’t very democratic. I don’t want my _hot_ tab cluttered with boring news reports, but I do want it to contain items deemed interesting (by the community) from all available news sources.
Just as you, I find my self reading less Slashdot these days, and yes, the hot stories on Reddit eventually make it to Slashdot after a day or two.
However, what I love about Reddit, is the really good stories which percolates up and in most cases turn out to be of high quality and/or interesting content.
Where they come from is usually not relevant, and it saves me from scouring the Net for those stories.
Anonymous2,
Slashdot is moderated… that’s why it take an extra day or two to appear there. Not sure if they are considering modifying that process since Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg are taking up their readership.
I agree that _some_ articles at the top are good, atleast for my taste… which I am not claiming is universal (I can only wish!) but encouraging what I describe is going to hurt Reddit in the long run.
Agreed- same 10 people.. and their blogs.. ho-hum.
i like reddit because I like the blogs it links too…. paul graham, dilbert, etc.
but i can’t see it appealing to many people i know, who would rather head on over to slashdot or digg.
“Cater to regulars” catering to regulars, getting stuck in a niche, that’s a fast track to failure. Moreover, if there are enough regulars who feel the same way you do about familiar posts, those sites will eventually be downgraded enough so that you can live in your original-content-utopia.
another point: good material is good material, no matter how old it is. People don’t stop recommending Silence of the Lambs at video stores because it’s no longer new. I guess you would, if you worked there…
I had never heard of reddit before yesterday, but I tried it out, and a lot of the problems you mention were immediately apparent. I saw right away, for example, that whenever Paul Graham posts a new essay, there is going to be a big rush among reddit karma whores to be the first to link the new essay from reddit.
And whenever someone posts a high-scoring link to some blog, there are a bunch of follow-on posts from other people hoping to cash in by linking to other parts of the same site.
For example, after Dumbest Project Manager in the World there was a followon link to Linux vs. Windows costs, another section in the same document.
After I linked to the article about American school lunches vs. French school lunches on Maciej Ceglowski’s journal, and it scored high, there were followup links to other posts from Maciej’s journal.
I also worry that the model will not scale well. Right now fresh stuff gets promoted from the “new” feed to the main page because people are watching the new feed for new stuff. The new feed only gets a new item every minute or two, so it’s possible to keep up with it. So a new item has a chance to get some early support before it vanishes off the “new” page. But if reeddit got big like Wikipedia, to the point where there were thirty new links posted per minute, a lot of good stuff would get lost right away.
not a Reddit newcomer,
Ahh… I wondered when the zealots would start chiming in defending the fort… Congratulations, you made it.
I’ll respond, ignoring the cowardly way you chose to post with a hint of a not too clever personal attacks (which were not necessary at all.)
Niches:
I disagree. Catering to a niche is a very good business model, and a very successful one at that. We’ll stick to Slashdot as an example. What would happen if they decided to expand their niche and also accept posts on arts and crafts? Hey, they’ll expand their readership, right? WRONG! They will annoy/lose the existing ones and never get any new ones before their impending demise.
Good material:
I agree, good material is good material. BUT, Next time you go ranting about it, look at the Reddit subtitle: “WHAT’S NEW ONLINE”!!! Get it?
Well, the “hottest” page seems to me to have been slowing down, was a time when I’d check a couple of times in a day and there’d be different stories in all the top slots. But now it’s the same stories for days on end.
No point in that.
Peronally, I do want all the cool stuff linked – even if I could go find it myself. Because i”m a very lazy person indeed and if I can just check one index then one index I will check.
I should get a proper rss reader maybe. But all the ones I’ve looked at suck.
Mark Dominus,
Good points. More eyes are looking at the “new” page may balance the avalanche of new posts. However, I do see good items (IMO) going down the pipe so fast, they don’t get the attention they deserve… but maybe they didn’t deserve any to begin with. You know, one user can post 15 new items within 10 seconds and get the rest not seen. Maybe Reddit should restrict the amount of links a user can submit per hour?
Pre,
Try the Google reader, I’m giving it a go now, it doing OK so far.
Reddit really caters to all the geeks who went to Paul Graham’s startup school in October. That’s why you see all those Lisp and startup articles.
I would say yes, I would like these blog posts to be always be linked, and let the people decide how popular they are. that is the purpose of reddit isn’t it?
Its like any forum you go to, and ask a question. Then comes the inevitable “don’t ask, search first”.
Well the problem with that is a forum no longer becomes a forum, it becomes an f.a.q. site with rarely any discussion. I’ve seen it happen to a few sites where a few zealous moderators were quite successful in their attempts to their demise.
Reddit is fine the way it is, unless stuff is making its way onto there that shouldn’t be
I think if you login to reddit and moderate, it will eventually personalize your selection so posts from people you continually rate down will be shuffled down and posts from people you usually enjoy will be rated up.
I like lisp news so that news will stay relevant for me.
You rate it down, so it will be shuffled down for you.
I think that’s why there’s a login system. I hope that’s why. :P
Very true…some of the points highlighted in here….And I agree..If Reddit wants to make it prime time, it better reduce the vanity..Any news / blog article describing reddit / paul graham need to be cut down upon…Spread your wings guys, expand your domain beyond the self-indulgence of all news about reddit and paul..
The problem with reddit is that a lot of users seem to think that it is a technology site, in the vein of slashdot and digg, which it is not. It annoys me to no end that mind numbing blather about lisp gets promoted to the top while genuinely insightful and interesting links langish. I suppose that simply reflects the readership: the majority of reddit users are a bunch of nerds.
The blame for every single Paul Graham and Dilbert link geting promoted through the roof lies directly at the feet of the reddit users. The majority of people must LIKE seeing a link to Paul Graham or an article about lisp every day on reddit, or they wouldn’t promote it.
Its a cycle that will only drive reddit down into obscurity. If only tech articles appear on reddit, then only tech-heads will visit the site, and they will only post and promote more tech articles. Everything else will slowly be driven out and you will be left with an inferior digg or slashdot clone. Just look at the all time top articles and see how many are programming or tech related. Are these really the most interesting things going on in the world today?
I think reddit should start slapping down a few of the tech articles. I wouldn’t call it moderation… just tweaking. There might be a minor backlash among the tech-heads, but who cares? Let them cry and run back to slashdot and digg. Maintaining a BROAD appeal is what will allow reddit to grow.
If you like the site now it’s probably because your idea of ‘interesting’ is similar to the small group of web programming, Paul Graham reading, early adapter, technology obsessed nerds that are submitting everything right now. If you took a real cross section of the public at large and made them use reddit, do you really think it would be as easy or fun to find interesting stuff on the ‘new’ page, or do it enough to build a profile from scratch so ‘recommended’ would work (assuming the algorithm does something useful)?
I actualy can’t understand your standpoint. How and why are Paul Graham or “about reddit” promoted stories a problem for you? Just click next and you’ll get more links :)
I see “problem” in fact that most of the time, users rate links up without first reading them, and i believe, they very rarely go back and rate them down if it wasn’t any good.
That’s why i’m giving reddit a try alhought digg is almost all i need(/ed). Can’t understand why won’t they just make frickin’ undugg button.
reddit.com…
Reddit.com is a cool new (well, new to me) Web application which allows you to rate user submitted articles up or down (Karma Voting). The really cool thing is, that you train a filter with these votes and the system is able to present new articles whi…
I’m interested in seeing how high different paul graham, etc. articles rank. And there is still plenty of room for other articles. Like your site, for instance.