review: give “reddit” a try
Paul Graham, who writes magnificent articles IMO, ran his “summer founders program” this summer. He gathered people with ideas he thinks are worthy of investment and gave them seed money and an incubator style development setting (9 companies in all, IIRC.) I wished I could have attended it, but it didn’t work out. One of the resultant websites is Reddit. From their faq:
A source for what’s new and popular on the web–customized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers. You decide what appears on your front page and simultaneously, which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity.
Basically, you submit links to what you deem interesting and others vote on them. If they like them you get more “karma” points, if they don’t you lose them.
I gave it a try and was moderately successful until I thought it would be clever to submit “www.reddit.com” itself (hey, would anyone vote against it???) Other users didn’t think that was clever at all and I was demoted to the rank of scum; I guess people didn’t want to give me any shortcuts, fair enough . I then recovered some, but it still hurts my geek pride. (my user name is “elric” if you want to raise me to a very short-lived obscure stardom.) I am not sure how they prevent geeks with nothing else to care about from registering multiple accounts and self-promoting themselves. Maybe they don’t care because they rely on many concurrent users that would make that scheme ineffective. I really liked the simple layout of the webpage and that there are no ads. I think I’ll give it another serious look when there are more users participating since I think their overall algorithm and scheme relies on it; it will then be a bit more live and dynamic. Give it a look.
All considered, it’s a nice concept to play with for a little while but I think I’ll stick with Slashdot for now. I did find some very interesting articles that I would not have otherwise, so that was refreshing.
I wish the founders all the best with this interesting endeavour. Good job.
August 27th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
You made some great submissions - I guess some people find it hard to take a joke (or take their little ranking VERY seriously).
Gee - if my blogshares account was real money I guess I would take that seriously.