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First there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us. He called it an "omelet". Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts

First there was Slashdot, but CmdrTaco insisted on picking the stories for us. He called it an "omelet". Kuro5hin came along to fix this, but discouraged posts that were just links to pages elsewhere on the web. IIRC, this was called "link farming". How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. Digg then encouraged links, but shot itself in the foot with a stupid redesign. Nowadays, reddit is king because it avoided the obvious mistakes of its predecessors.

draugadrotten 10y ago
> Nowadays, reddit is king because it avoided the obvious mistakes of its predecessors. reddit even seem to have found a way to deal with obnoxius moderators - allowing multiple subreddits
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  The solution to all problems is let your users do it.
  - iLoch 10y ago
    Not if you want to make money though or have any real control of the direction of your company though, apparently.
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      > or have any real control of the direction of your company though, apparently. Here's the secret: you never have If you push your company in a direction that gets you no customers you're done It's like a boat in the wind, if you're good you can maneuver using the sail and in a way go against the wind with some limitations, but you're still dependent on it
  - nailer 10y ago
    That's actually pretty spot on. I've ran popular communities that ultimately failed because we hadn't scaled moderation. As long as your content is good, scaling moderation will be the hardest thing for any UGC site, and if you don't build it fast enough the site will either get destroyed or you won't be able to work on the product due to fire fighting.
  - ghyttttgg 10y ago
    Or giving each community its own space, rather than forcing everyone into the same room.
- cbd1984 10y ago
  You mean the Usenet model, which worked for decades and is still working, does, in fact, work? Amazing. Edited to add: OK, that comes off as a bit mean. I'm leaving it in case someone likes it, which really just goes to show my point: Beyond a certain size, it's impossible to please everyone. You can please a good standard deviation or so worth of people, but you do that by offering content which almost aggressively cuts off the long tails. Think prime time TV circa 1990. The smaller voices just get drowned out. The solution is so rock-simple obvious to me that I'm surprised it isn't standard practice: Allow the users to create newsgroups (or subreddits, or fora...) and let them manage them mostly-autonomously. Allow the small voices a place to dominate. If they want echo chambers, fine: The mainstream is even more of an echo chamber for people who live almost exclusively in the mainstream.
jldugger 10y ago
> IIRC, this was called "link farming". "Mindless Link Propagation" was the term of art at the time. Still true.
- brianberns 10y ago
  Ah, that was the name. Thank you.
okasaki 10y ago
> How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. k5 had a diary section where you could publish anything you wanted. I think the biggest problem with k5 were the annoying "trolls" that were allowed to to shitpost without any restraint whatsoever and eventually overran the whole site.
- pjc50 10y ago
  There were (at least) two distinct subfactions of trolls. One were the purely destructive, who'd started out on slashdot posting goatse and gnaa vileness. This faction has basically continued, in spirit if not in personnel, to be the pro-abuse faction wherever things are discussed on the internet. The other faction were people fed up of what they percieved as groupthink, who ran a much more subtle and 'traditional' trolling campaign culminating in the foundation of Adequacy.org . I still refer people to their great general-purpose essay "Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics". http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html
  - samth 10y ago
    For people who are fans of adequacy, the author of that essay is Daniel Davies, who blogs at Crooked Timber and on Medium, and has an entertaining Twitter feed.
fossuser 10y ago
Digg had a lot of issues before the redesign. The community had grown huge and become terrible (without small high quality subreddits to retreat into). By the time the redesign happened there wasn't much to lose.
ebbv 10y ago
Digg died not just because it was a redesign, but because it sold out as part of that redesign. Built into it was highlighting the content of media companies, and elevating it above the submissions by regular users. Reddit has avoided getting bitten by this by selling out quietly behind the scenes. It has partnered with those same media companies and advertisers but it simply allows them to present themselves as regular users, or present their content in AMAs or other officially sanctioned channels. Reddit has so far avoided Digg's big misstep; making it obvious to the users that they value the money from media companies more than the memes and other junk regular users make. But make no mistake, Reddit is currently in the same position Digg was in when everybody jumped ship. It's just too subtle for most Reddit users to notice.
- utexaspunk 10y ago
  I think you're all missing the biggest flaw in Digg- lack of true conversation threading. When your comments have a max depth of 2, any sort of meaningful back-and-forth becomes impossible. For that reason, the comment sections on Digg were as worthless as comments on YouTube or Facebook. People fled to Digg because Slashdot's moderation kept the flow of new links to a trickle, but the conversations on Slashdot were much better. Then came Reddit with a nice comment system and open submission and everyone went there. Reddit was really nice when it was mostly just former slashdot people and other like-minded nerds, but then the hoi polloi who had caught on to Digg jumped ship to Reddit and the conversation has gone downhill ever since. Perhaps if Reddit's comment moderation system were a little more sophisticated- Slashdot's Funny/Informative/Interesting/Etc and meta-moderation may seem a little cumbersome, but it definitely seems to have helped keep the conversation above a junior high level. Hacker news ain't bad, either, mostly because the people who know about this place seem to be fairly intelligent and educated. The interface could maybe be a little better, but I can put up with it to read better, more informed comments.
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    Maybe 2 as max depth is restrictive, but rarely a thread with more than 4 back and forth doesn't degenerate in trolling, except on tightly knit or heavily moderated communities.
Pxtl 10y ago
Except that Reddit is gradually turning into 4chan. Every time I see /r/all, it's a little more mean-spirited, a little younger, a little more toxic. Outsourcing moderation and libertarian ideals all sound nice, but when the rubber hits the road it gradually chases normal people away. Reddit just did it it slower because the strengths of their platform and content overwhelmed it... but it's getting there eventually.
- nobody_nowhere 10y ago
  Regression to the mean...
- lintiness 10y ago
  unsub to all the political nonsense, and reddit's still a valuable resource.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    The politics leaks everywhere, except in the most heavily moderated subreddits like AskHistorians. Not to mention that reddit doesn't police offensive usernames.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Fortunately usernames are short, limited, and easy to filter out visually; there's no space to put something actually offensive in them. It takes one going out of their way to get offended for one to have a problem with Reddit usernames.
  - karmajunkie 10y ago
    I use it almost exclusively for Elixir stories. I think for very narrow topics it still has some value. Then again, I've never been a serious redditor, so take that with a grain of salt. I miss the old days of slashdot...
  - ihsw 10y ago
    He said /r/all and not the default subs. /r/all is generally a cesspool nowadays, especially with all the #TREMENDOUS /r/the_donald shitposts. I have seen Trump-tier shitposting leak into /r/China and other completely unrelated subs as well. It's getting out of hand.
sjs382 10y ago
> How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. There were plenty, and the ones that did were great. If you browsed the Diary section, there were running short story collections like "Fast Times at Phillips 66" that were just amazing. I stopped paying attention around the time that they required payment for new registrations, and then shut down registrations completely. The dupe-account roleplaying was among the best aspects of the site.
Quequau 10y ago
That what was wrong with Digg went wrong well before the infamous redesign.
kn0thing 10y ago
I'd argue the reason we thrived was because we knew we had to be a platform for communities (subreddits) from the beginning. No single frontpage can be home for everyone, but tens of thousands of communities on a common platform, can scale forever. Slashdot was definitely the OG, though. Got to meet CmdrTaco at a talk I gave a little while ago and tell him thanks for everything he did to inspire us at Reddit.
- brianberns 10y ago
  Subreddits are certainly a powerful idea, but I think reddit would still have triumphed as a single humongous community for all.
Shivetya 10y ago
Digg pretty much died when it was co-opted by political players. Even /. took a hit when they allowed politics free reign when it comes to tech sites and geeks the last thing you want in intelligent stories and conversation is politics

draugadrotten 10y ago

> Nowadays, reddit is king because it avoided the obvious mistakes of its predecessors. reddit even seem to have found a way to deal with obnoxius moderators - allowing multiple subreddits

erikpukinskis 10y ago
The solution to all problems is let your users do it.
- iLoch 10y ago
  Not if you want to make money though or have any real control of the direction of your company though, apparently.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    > or have any real control of the direction of your company though, apparently. Here's the secret: you never have If you push your company in a direction that gets you no customers you're done It's like a boat in the wind, if you're good you can maneuver using the sail and in a way go against the wind with some limitations, but you're still dependent on it
- nailer 10y ago
  That's actually pretty spot on. I've ran popular communities that ultimately failed because we hadn't scaled moderation. As long as your content is good, scaling moderation will be the hardest thing for any UGC site, and if you don't build it fast enough the site will either get destroyed or you won't be able to work on the product due to fire fighting.
- ghyttttgg 10y ago
  Or giving each community its own space, rather than forcing everyone into the same room.
cbd1984 10y ago
You mean the Usenet model, which worked for decades and is still working, does, in fact, work? Amazing. Edited to add: OK, that comes off as a bit mean. I'm leaving it in case someone likes it, which really just goes to show my point: Beyond a certain size, it's impossible to please everyone. You can please a good standard deviation or so worth of people, but you do that by offering content which almost aggressively cuts off the long tails. Think prime time TV circa 1990. The smaller voices just get drowned out. The solution is so rock-simple obvious to me that I'm surprised it isn't standard practice: Allow the users to create newsgroups (or subreddits, or fora...) and let them manage them mostly-autonomously. Allow the small voices a place to dominate. If they want echo chambers, fine: The mainstream is even more of an echo chamber for people who live almost exclusively in the mainstream.

jldugger 10y ago

> IIRC, this was called "link farming". "Mindless Link Propagation" was the term of art at the time. Still true.

brianberns 10y ago
Ah, that was the name. Thank you.

okasaki 10y ago

> How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. k5 had a diary section where you could publish anything you wanted. I think the biggest problem with k5 were the annoying "trolls" that were allowed to to shitpost without any restraint whatsoever and eventually overran the whole site.

pjc50 10y ago
There were (at least) two distinct subfactions of trolls. One were the purely destructive, who'd started out on slashdot posting goatse and gnaa vileness. This faction has basically continued, in spirit if not in personnel, to be the pro-abuse faction wherever things are discussed on the internet. The other faction were people fed up of what they percieved as groupthink, who ran a much more subtle and 'traditional' trolling campaign culminating in the foundation of Adequacy.org . I still refer people to their great general-purpose essay "Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics". http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html http://adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html
- samth 10y ago
  For people who are fans of adequacy, the author of that essay is Daniel Davies, who blogs at Crooked Timber and on Medium, and has an entertaining Twitter feed.

fossuser 10y ago

Digg had a lot of issues before the redesign. The community had grown huge and become terrible (without small high quality subreddits to retreat into). By the time the redesign happened there wasn't much to lose.

ebbv 10y ago

Digg died not just because it was a redesign, but because it sold out as part of that redesign. Built into it was highlighting the content of media companies, and elevating it above the submissions by regular users. Reddit has avoided getting bitten by this by selling out quietly behind the scenes. It has partnered with those same media companies and advertisers but it simply allows them to present themselves as regular users, or present their content in AMAs or other officially sanctioned channels. Reddit has so far avoided Digg's big misstep; making it obvious to the users that they value the money from media companies more than the memes and other junk regular users make. But make no mistake, Reddit is currently in the same position Digg was in when everybody jumped ship. It's just too subtle for most Reddit users to notice.

utexaspunk 10y ago
I think you're all missing the biggest flaw in Digg- lack of true conversation threading. When your comments have a max depth of 2, any sort of meaningful back-and-forth becomes impossible. For that reason, the comment sections on Digg were as worthless as comments on YouTube or Facebook. People fled to Digg because Slashdot's moderation kept the flow of new links to a trickle, but the conversations on Slashdot were much better. Then came Reddit with a nice comment system and open submission and everyone went there. Reddit was really nice when it was mostly just former slashdot people and other like-minded nerds, but then the hoi polloi who had caught on to Digg jumped ship to Reddit and the conversation has gone downhill ever since. Perhaps if Reddit's comment moderation system were a little more sophisticated- Slashdot's Funny/Informative/Interesting/Etc and meta-moderation may seem a little cumbersome, but it definitely seems to have helped keep the conversation above a junior high level. Hacker news ain't bad, either, mostly because the people who know about this place seem to be fairly intelligent and educated. The interface could maybe be a little better, but I can put up with it to read better, more informed comments.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  Maybe 2 as max depth is restrictive, but rarely a thread with more than 4 back and forth doesn't degenerate in trolling, except on tightly knit or heavily moderated communities.

Pxtl 10y ago

Except that Reddit is gradually turning into 4chan. Every time I see /r/all, it's a little more mean-spirited, a little younger, a little more toxic. Outsourcing moderation and libertarian ideals all sound nice, but when the rubber hits the road it gradually chases normal people away. Reddit just did it it slower because the strengths of their platform and content overwhelmed it... but it's getting there eventually.

nobody_nowhere 10y ago
Regression to the mean...
lintiness 10y ago
unsub to all the political nonsense, and reddit's still a valuable resource.
- pjc50 10y ago
  The politics leaks everywhere, except in the most heavily moderated subreddits like AskHistorians. Not to mention that reddit doesn't police offensive usernames.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Fortunately usernames are short, limited, and easy to filter out visually; there's no space to put something actually offensive in them. It takes one going out of their way to get offended for one to have a problem with Reddit usernames.
- karmajunkie 10y ago
  I use it almost exclusively for Elixir stories. I think for very narrow topics it still has some value. Then again, I've never been a serious redditor, so take that with a grain of salt. I miss the old days of slashdot...
- ihsw 10y ago
  He said /r/all and not the default subs. /r/all is generally a cesspool nowadays, especially with all the #TREMENDOUS /r/the_donald shitposts. I have seen Trump-tier shitposting leak into /r/China and other completely unrelated subs as well. It's getting out of hand.

sjs382 10y ago

> How many users had the talent and time to create original content, and then survive the ridiculous Kuro5shin editing process? Not many. There were plenty, and the ones that did were great. If you browsed the Diary section, there were running short story collections like "Fast Times at Phillips 66" that were just amazing. I stopped paying attention around the time that they required payment for new registrations, and then shut down registrations completely. The dupe-account roleplaying was among the best aspects of the site.

Quequau 10y ago

That what was wrong with Digg went wrong well before the infamous redesign.

kn0thing 10y ago

I'd argue the reason we thrived was because we knew we had to be a platform for communities (subreddits) from the beginning. No single frontpage can be home for everyone, but tens of thousands of communities on a common platform, can scale forever. Slashdot was definitely the OG, though. Got to meet CmdrTaco at a talk I gave a little while ago and tell him thanks for everything he did to inspire us at Reddit.

brianberns 10y ago
Subreddits are certainly a powerful idea, but I think reddit would still have triumphed as a single humongous community for all.

Shivetya 10y ago

Digg pretty much died when it was co-opted by political players. Even /. took a hit when they allowed politics free reign when it comes to tech sites and geeks the last thing you want in intelligent stories and conversation is politics