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> submit/upvote/downvote flow was so novel What was the timeline again... Slashdot emerged in 1997, it developed voting on several different criteria, you coul

> submit/upvote/downvote flow was so novel What was the timeline again... Slashdot emerged in 1997, it developed voting on several different criteria, you could filter for "funny" or "insightful" posts, and it had a pretty sophisticated meta-moderation system. Digg simplified that with up- and down-votes. Reddit borrowed digg's model. I'm not 100% sure what the innovation of reddit was at the time, but I feel like these three just had slightly different tones to their communities. Slashdot was the geek site, Digg had more jokes and politics, reddit was sort of... deliberative? The culture was a lot different back then, a bit more like this site.

fweespeech 11y ago
They didn't change the UX and tank their site. That was their innovation, if we are being honest.
- brownbat 11y ago
  That was a weird moment, Reddit's September as everyone flooded in. I'm maybe the one person who enjoys digg more today than before. I like the curation they do on videos, there's far less variation in quality than when it was all user submitted. Really no social interaction there anymore though. I think they killed something broken that a lot of people loved, and replaced it with something kind of neat for a completely different use case. Like if McDonald's started making electric cars or something. Widely hated, I'm still not sure it wasn't the right call though.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    Digg could have survived if it iterated I think.
7952 11y ago
Digg threads become too full and the model just didn't scale up. A thread with 10k up votes and 1000 comments is not inviting to new users. A stupid or insightful comment on such a thread will be completely ignored if it wasn't the first post. In contrast Reddit has thousands of small communities that let new users be heard. Down voting and arguing over "bad" comments gives an impression of authority that make the user want to learn and impress the group. It is really all just a game.
- brownbat 11y ago
  > Reddit has thousands of small communities Was that true at launch? I thought that was added later, but can't remember.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    It was present during the diggsplosion, which is when it mattered.
  - kungtotte 11y ago
    It was added after about a year or so, and there was two real driving forces behind it. The first was that people started using 'tags' in their submission titles to do things like "Ask Reddit" and also that the main page started getting overrun with Ron Paul tributes because apparently he was the second coming of Christ and would be the panacea that the US needed. And since most of us started visiting Reddit for the tech/programming/science content people saw that stuff as spam. Still, the subreddit system is really the only reason I still frequent Reddit. The smaller you go, the higher quality the content becomes and the better the community is (in general).
    - obelisk_ 11y ago
      IMO, 50 000 subscribers is about the tipping point for subreddit quality. Beyond that number things start to go down hill real fast. You also don't want too few subscribers, however, or there will be too little new content posted. At about 10 000 subscribers, the amount of posts should be high enough that there's always something to see.
      - toomanybeersies 11y ago
        The one exception to that, that I've found, is /r/homebrewing. It's >100,000 now, but is still a great community. I think it's a much different demographic to the rest of reddit though, a lot of contributors don't really use any other subreddits and are older.
bobby_9x 11y ago
Digg was great for bloggers around 2005. I created software to add hundreds of friends per day (I think the limit was 250..and the only way to do efficiently was with software). I only had to post a link a few times a week and the friends on my list would up vote it automatically (I never had to ask them). This would hit critical mass at about 20 Diggs and I would get to the front page. Front page at that time would get me about 50,000 unique visitors and a good percentage of other blogs picking up my articles and coming back regularly. The trick was to write good content, not just top 10 lists. I was just a student at that time and didn't have much business experience, but I was able to sell some custom PHP scripts. I think I made about $1000/month for an entire year. Eventually they cracked down on it, and I got a job and stopped updating my blog. I wish I would have been able to capitalize on it a lot more. I probably could have turned it into a much longer-lasting business.
Yhippa 11y ago
I really liked Slashdot's moderation system. Not everybody got to moderate. You got selected at random. Being able to moderate felt much more like a privilege than a right and I took it much more seriously than I do on Reddit.
- eps 11y ago
  And I genuienly hated it. Those one-off 5 mod points made you feel like scraps off someone's moderation feast table and made it absolutely obvious that you had no say in shaping the site. This sucked above all other issues with Slashdot and it was the reason why I jumped ship as soon as I discovered HN.
- gozur88 11y ago
  The other thing about slashdot that's nice is you can't moderate a discussion in which you're taking part.
  - miserablegit 11y ago
    So the fate of a conversation is shaped by the people who are most likely to know absolutely nothing about the topic at hand (or they would have contributed to the thread).
    - zazen 11y ago
      But is that a problem? You don't usually need technical expertise to judge whether someone is speaking in a productive way or not. The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely? It's to stop conversations from being derailed by snarky, aggressive comments, or outright trolling, etc.
      - miserablegit 11y ago
        > The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely? ... and this is why we can't have nice things. Sadly, mainstream discourse works in exactly the same way. You can utter the most outrageous lies, as long as you whisper while smartly dressed; but if you shout the truth with uncombed hair, you will be sanctioned.
hyperpallium 11y ago
HN simplified that with up-votes only. Next: implicit up-vote by following link.
- sehr 11y ago
  HN has downvotes once you have a certain amount of karma
  - tormeh 11y ago
    On stories too?
    - sehr 11y ago
      Oops, no I don't think so
      - hyperpallium 11y ago
        yes, that was my point. but i see some people weren't aware of it, which could explain the (demonstration of) downvoting.
- brownbat 11y ago
  I really like the idea of measuring content quality by objective metrics, like time on page, or even eye tracking. I'm a little frightened by what we might learn about our implicit attitudes, but I think it'd be a fun experiment.

fweespeech 11y ago

They didn't change the UX and tank their site. That was their innovation, if we are being honest.

brownbat 11y ago
That was a weird moment, Reddit's September as everyone flooded in. I'm maybe the one person who enjoys digg more today than before. I like the curation they do on videos, there's far less variation in quality than when it was all user submitted. Really no social interaction there anymore though. I think they killed something broken that a lot of people loved, and replaced it with something kind of neat for a completely different use case. Like if McDonald's started making electric cars or something. Widely hated, I'm still not sure it wasn't the right call though.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  Digg could have survived if it iterated I think.

7952 11y ago

Digg threads become too full and the model just didn't scale up. A thread with 10k up votes and 1000 comments is not inviting to new users. A stupid or insightful comment on such a thread will be completely ignored if it wasn't the first post. In contrast Reddit has thousands of small communities that let new users be heard. Down voting and arguing over "bad" comments gives an impression of authority that make the user want to learn and impress the group. It is really all just a game.

brownbat 11y ago
> Reddit has thousands of small communities Was that true at launch? I thought that was added later, but can't remember.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  It was present during the diggsplosion, which is when it mattered.
- kungtotte 11y ago
  It was added after about a year or so, and there was two real driving forces behind it. The first was that people started using 'tags' in their submission titles to do things like "Ask Reddit" and also that the main page started getting overrun with Ron Paul tributes because apparently he was the second coming of Christ and would be the panacea that the US needed. And since most of us started visiting Reddit for the tech/programming/science content people saw that stuff as spam. Still, the subreddit system is really the only reason I still frequent Reddit. The smaller you go, the higher quality the content becomes and the better the community is (in general).
  - obelisk_ 11y ago
    IMO, 50 000 subscribers is about the tipping point for subreddit quality. Beyond that number things start to go down hill real fast. You also don't want too few subscribers, however, or there will be too little new content posted. At about 10 000 subscribers, the amount of posts should be high enough that there's always something to see.
    - toomanybeersies 11y ago
      The one exception to that, that I've found, is /r/homebrewing. It's >100,000 now, but is still a great community. I think it's a much different demographic to the rest of reddit though, a lot of contributors don't really use any other subreddits and are older.

bobby_9x 11y ago

Digg was great for bloggers around 2005. I created software to add hundreds of friends per day (I think the limit was 250..and the only way to do efficiently was with software). I only had to post a link a few times a week and the friends on my list would up vote it automatically (I never had to ask them). This would hit critical mass at about 20 Diggs and I would get to the front page. Front page at that time would get me about 50,000 unique visitors and a good percentage of other blogs picking up my articles and coming back regularly. The trick was to write good content, not just top 10 lists. I was just a student at that time and didn't have much business experience, but I was able to sell some custom PHP scripts. I think I made about $1000/month for an entire year. Eventually they cracked down on it, and I got a job and stopped updating my blog. I wish I would have been able to capitalize on it a lot more. I probably could have turned it into a much longer-lasting business.

Yhippa 11y ago

I really liked Slashdot's moderation system. Not everybody got to moderate. You got selected at random. Being able to moderate felt much more like a privilege than a right and I took it much more seriously than I do on Reddit.

eps 11y ago
And I genuienly hated it. Those one-off 5 mod points made you feel like scraps off someone's moderation feast table and made it absolutely obvious that you had no say in shaping the site. This sucked above all other issues with Slashdot and it was the reason why I jumped ship as soon as I discovered HN.
gozur88 11y ago
The other thing about slashdot that's nice is you can't moderate a discussion in which you're taking part.
- miserablegit 11y ago
  So the fate of a conversation is shaped by the people who are most likely to know absolutely nothing about the topic at hand (or they would have contributed to the thread).
  - zazen 11y ago
    But is that a problem? You don't usually need technical expertise to judge whether someone is speaking in a productive way or not. The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely? It's to stop conversations from being derailed by snarky, aggressive comments, or outright trolling, etc.
    - miserablegit 11y ago
      > The purpose of moderating a conversation isn't to try to remove technically incorrect arguments, surely? ... and this is why we can't have nice things. Sadly, mainstream discourse works in exactly the same way. You can utter the most outrageous lies, as long as you whisper while smartly dressed; but if you shout the truth with uncombed hair, you will be sanctioned.

hyperpallium 11y ago

HN simplified that with up-votes only. Next: implicit up-vote by following link.

sehr 11y ago
HN has downvotes once you have a certain amount of karma
- tormeh 11y ago
  On stories too?
  - sehr 11y ago
    Oops, no I don't think so
    - hyperpallium 11y ago
      yes, that was my point. but i see some people weren't aware of it, which could explain the (demonstration of) downvoting.
brownbat 11y ago
I really like the idea of measuring content quality by objective metrics, like time on page, or even eye tracking. I'm a little frightened by what we might learn about our implicit attitudes, but I think it'd be a fun experiment.