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How and why did "news aggregators" become more popular than regular forums? Probably because you could talk about any topic. There is a low barrier for entry (

How and why did "news aggregators" become more popular than regular forums? Probably because you could talk about any topic. There is a low barrier for entry (easy signup). Mods take a more hands off approach. And users kinda moderate each other with upvotes/downvotes.

ilugaslifk 7y ago
1. "Hot"-style ranking 2. Non-dogshit UI
- samstave 7y ago
  The UI is really important. Ive been on Reddit now for 13 years. I still use the old.reddit and desktop mode. With nightshift and RES and hoverzoom. It probides the best information density and consumability. The new reddit ui sucks. Mucking with UI/UX can spell death gir a site, as it did with digg. I will never ho to the new york times as an example of how to have a shitty UX.
  - Scapeghost 7y ago
    > I still use the old.reddit and desktop mode. Same here! I hate the redesign with a passion. Most of my Redditor friends are the same.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      I hate the new design so much I'll actually stop using reddit whenever they sunset the old layout. And I use reddit a lot. And I really really hate v.reddit their embedded video player. I am getting irrationally angry just thinking about it and how it's making the internet a worse place.
      - Razengan 7y ago
        It's full of problems. It'll often fail to load, or load parts in a poor quality that will not improve. You can't easily download them either. I don't even click on posts that have a v.redd.it link anymore.
  - dageshi 7y ago
    I think it's the shift to mobile first design. Old reddit was a desktop site, new site is designed for mobile first.
  - DarthGhandi 7y ago
    Unless we are victims of A/B testing I'm 90% sure old.reddit.com doesn't work anymore. Care to screenshot me the old Reddit design¿?
    - KKPMW 7y ago
      Here it is: http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/old_reddit.png http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/old_reddit.png
      - DarthGhandi 7y ago
        Nice, can I get a link for that you've got there?
        KKPMW 7y ago
        For me it's just https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ But you have to select "opt out of redesign" somewhere in your preference settings.
        samstave 7y ago
        https://i.imgur.com/RIHhpaj.png https://i.imgur.com/RIHhpaj.png https://i.imgur.com/eWOk6xG.png https://i.imgur.com/eWOk6xG.png --- Set your preferences to NOT use the new reddit, and then tell it you want "destop site" https://i.imgur.com/0lSFD3C.png https://i.imgur.com/0lSFD3C.png
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  I liked the UI of digg a lot better, it was cleaner and had thumbnails. I mainly went to reddit for programming stuff back in the day. I think 2 codependent things ruined digg before the redesign though: (1) Users started to game the rankings so that the content was less diverse. (2) The admin's response to that gaming started to cripple the "newness" of posts such that the content on the front page was a lot older than on reddit. These two factors are starting to ruin reddit too, only now instead of MrBabyMan or whoever doing it for fun/money, it seems like it's actual foreign interference or something just as nefarious.
theopsguy 7y ago
A better ranking system is the key
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Waiting for one to show up. We need a better ranking system for content that doesn't confuse "popularity" with "quality". Every comment/article moderation system that has crowdsourced upvotes and downvotes suffers from this. It inevitably leads to groupthink, herd opinion, and shutdown culture.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    I'm really curious what @dang's thought's are on moderation and a better voting system, especially since HN seems to be growing in popularity by quite a bit every year.
    - Scapeghost 7y ago
      Votes on HN are basically meaningless and counter productive now. It's easy to farm them by hopping on the winning bandwagon on divisive topics. There's too much grudge downvoting just like Reddit. I keep seeing perfectly valid, reasonable and polite comments being grayed out just because they didn't hop on the wagon. Worst of all, downvotes are abused to prevent OTHER people from seeing what someone is saying. How do you counter that? I think there should be a cost to upvoting or downvoting, so they can't be handed out willy-nilly.
      - McAtNite 7y ago
        > I think there should be a cost to upvoting or downvoting, so they can't be handed out willy-nilly. It would be really interesting to run an experiment where this was taken literally. If upvotes/karma/whatever you call it were to be treated as almost a type of currency, and submitting a vote directly cost you a vote from your “balance” what would the discussions look like. You could even deal with inflation by lowering the value of votes people already have by increasing the cost for a new vote. I don’t think this would get you away from the groupthink and pandering comments, as people would probably try to appeal to the widest audience so they could bank more votes, but I’d love to see if it would cause people to post more meaningful comments as opposed to predictable jokes.
nefitty 7y ago
The article serves as a prompt for top-level comments. Back in the forum days it really depended on if someone had a question, etc. When I was single digits age my first social internet experiences were on a near-death/paranormal forum. After a couple of years every topic had been exhausted and questions and conversations reoccurred more and more. It got boring.
dsadsa41 7y ago
Because as always, the average user is boring and adds nothing to an online discussion. Reddit allows the average user to participate, but their crap will not be visible to other users unless they willingly sort by new.
- Scapeghost 7y ago
  Did you create a new account just to say that? Were you concerned about backlash for having what might be seen as a grouchy misanthropic view?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Even on Hacker News I’d say that the average commenter has very little to add to a discussion (I’m not excluding myself from this, FYI). Especially if the topic being discussed is “news” about a popular company (I’m sure you’ve seen “Facebook bad”, “Apple is locked down and their keyboards suck”, “Google will sunset this”). Technical articles generally get better results but only for topics that aren’t really divisive (“Electron bad”, “C insecure”).
    - egfx 7y ago
      I don’t agree. HN is the only site I go to where I go to the comments first before reading the article. I treat the comments like cliff notes and sometimes there are competing view points which adds to the fervor. I sometimes post links simply because I want to hear more context with discussion.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        > I treat the comments like cliff notes and sometimes there are competing view points which adds to the fervor. They're often the same competing viewpoints, though. Especially on easy to understand, divisive topics.
    - nothrabannosir 7y ago
      Sometimes I wish we had a “common knowledge base” with all those points, so that we could move beyond beating the same dead horse, as a community. Any post about JS or C is just dreadful. And I’m completely guilty, myself. :S
DoreenMichele 7y ago
Because you need a non threatening but highly engaging reason to talk to strangers all over the world. Very personal stuff is potentially highly engaging, but inherently problematic and threatening. Err too far on the side of "safe" and now people are bored and have no reason to say anything.
elorant 7y ago
Because they provide broad context. Forums are usually specified on a certain interest. You come to HN you can discuss everything from computers to astrophysics and from sex to transport. You go to a computer oriented forum and try to discuss about fertility issues then 95% of the comments are irrelevant. In here everyone focuses on the things they know. Same goes for Reddit. It's a community of communities.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > You go to a computer oriented forum and try to discuss about fertility issues then 95% of the comments are irrelevant. To be clear, you’re including Hacker News in the “computer oriented forum”, right? > In here everyone focuses on the things they know. Haha, nope
ACow_Adonis 7y ago
A couple of pretty rational reasons. Threaded-forums had a format, which I would argue is specifically designed around their fundamental premise: asynchronous small group single-threaded discussion(even if they have a tree-based format of categorisation to help get to the specific thread/topic). That works out great for a small,tightly-knit community, and one where you recognise or want to recognise who it is you're actually talking to and are genuinely interested in a long-form discussion. But that doesn't scale well, for several reasons: 1) Humans can only keep track of a small number of identities. 2) Most people aren't genuinely interested in participating in discussion (that is to say, amongst the general cateogry of humans, and by discussion I mean a back and forth sharing of ideas/information), let alone "long-form" discussion over a significant period of time. 3) On forums you're consistently stuck having to follow the path of a given thread, whether the path it takes interests you or not or veers off on a tangent. 4) The typical format of the forum was weighted towards a classification-drilling-down-search to find specific topics on which one specifically interested, rather than a 'bubbling up' of statistical popularity as the foremost mechanism. Now there are exceptions to all those and forums have differed over time, but bear with me and give me the benefit of the doubt. Now take something like reddit or hacker news. Aside from a very high-level categorisation up front (individual reddit communities/the fact that you're the kind of person who actually visits hacker news), everything is just kinda thrown in together and sorted by some measure of recency+popularity: maximising exposure to the lowest common denomintor conditional upon people already signalling they're interested. And the time-weighting is actually just a conditioned way of always giving the impression of freshness and encouraging the desire to check back regularly. The account names/identities of who you're 'talking' to are now almost irrelevant, because no one can actually keep track of identities across such a large community: with the exception that proves the rule amongst large-scale communities: the celebrity. A handful of well-known accounts that it is partly assumed the general culture will be familiar with. But other than that, its largely effectively anonymous. The upvote mechanism biases automatically towards popularity, maximising exposure to potential audience. And the tree-nature of the comment threads allows individuals to quickly go to the ones that interests them...but... By being hostile to depth (it is a pain on both reddit and hn to read anything more than a cursory N steps deep), and allowing the ignoring of individual branches of non-interest, the format again optimises for short-term, shallow, popularity-driven behaviours: perfect for optimisation towards mass adoption. And lastly, we need to be honest: 90% of people aren't here for discussion (again, the format itself is actually actively hostile to long-form in-depth long-time discussion). They're here to read new content (roughly 24 hour time-based decay of the front page), popular content (upvote-mechanisms, avoiding threads and trees that don't interest them), and when they do post its not because they want to engage with an actual person (they cannot follow that many usernames relative to the size of the community and the format cuts off being practical at a very shallow N deep message length), but like the comment section of the newspaper, its because they have a psychological need to state their opinion/express their worldview/show their knowledge. Facebook and twitter also have these properties to varying degrees, some of them more explicitly targeting these properties or trying to tailor them to the individual user's demand/desires. Facebook tries to do this literally down to the person's personal detail level and explicitly maximising eyeball time, whereas the likes of reddit achieve this through the channels (users self-select into the interesting communities) and then the upvote mechanism drives exposure within-channels/across-site. In short, the medium of news-aggregators is specifically suitable for high-scale popularity. Constant quick turnover to deliver returning eyeballs, allows users to filter easily to their needs, low barrier to entry, explicitly tied to popularity to maximize audience, explicitly pushing overly-specialised/alienating conversation off the front page by limiting deep/long-time period discussions and pushing those discussions off-site.
dmix 7y ago
> Mods take a more hands off approach. And users kinda moderate each other with upvotes/downvotes. This is what originally made Reddit awesome but the reversal of which has been slowly killing the fun. Mods have hijacked Reddit and turned all of the popular subreddits into their own pet newspapers which they are the chief editors/owner and only they themselves decide which content the users will enjoy. You basically can't post any comment or post which doesn't fit with the popular opinions/ideology/etc of the sub without getting banned or rejected from most subreddits these days. That was entirely unsurprising, especially these days, when it happened on the various shamelessly partisan political subreddits. But about two or three years ago I saw it start spreading into other areas like city/country subreddits or generic news subreddits. Now it's on all the major subreddits and based on the moderator newsletters and other admin posts the whole hyper-involved and super careful power-modding approach seems to be encouraged by the Reddit admins.
- Scapeghost 7y ago
  > This is what originally made Reddit awesome but the reversal of which has been slowly killing the fun. Mods have hijacked Reddit and turned all of the popular subreddits into their own pet newspapers which they are the chief editors/owner and only they themselves decide which content the users will enjoy. That is true and I hate it. A handful of people should never get to decide what millions can talk about. But compared to oldschool forums, at least they don't butt into conversations too often and make things awkward. It's definitely time for the Fourth Age (counting NNTP as the first), that combines the best things about oldschool forums with the best things about Reddit.
  - dmix 7y ago
    > It's definitely time for the Fourth Age Agreed, do you have an ideas which would help push us forward?... this is clearly a step backwards, pushing us back towards the super-safe bigco communications world like 5-oclock TV news shows with pre-approved talking points. Obviously developing new Reddit and Twitter alternatives that look like 2000s-era PHP shitholes aren't helping the problem.... or worse clones which merely pander to political extremists on the right or left or fringe groups which then scares off the moderates or politically disinterested.

ilugaslifk 7y ago

1. "Hot"-style ranking 2. Non-dogshit UI

samstave 7y ago
The UI is really important. Ive been on Reddit now for 13 years. I still use the old.reddit and desktop mode. With nightshift and RES and hoverzoom. It probides the best information density and consumability. The new reddit ui sucks. Mucking with UI/UX can spell death gir a site, as it did with digg. I will never ho to the new york times as an example of how to have a shitty UX.
- Scapeghost 7y ago
  > I still use the old.reddit and desktop mode. Same here! I hate the redesign with a passion. Most of my Redditor friends are the same.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    I hate the new design so much I'll actually stop using reddit whenever they sunset the old layout. And I use reddit a lot. And I really really hate v.reddit their embedded video player. I am getting irrationally angry just thinking about it and how it's making the internet a worse place.
    - Razengan 7y ago
      It's full of problems. It'll often fail to load, or load parts in a poor quality that will not improve. You can't easily download them either. I don't even click on posts that have a v.redd.it link anymore.
- dageshi 7y ago
  I think it's the shift to mobile first design. Old reddit was a desktop site, new site is designed for mobile first.
- DarthGhandi 7y ago
  Unless we are victims of A/B testing I'm 90% sure old.reddit.com doesn't work anymore. Care to screenshot me the old Reddit design¿?
  - KKPMW 7y ago
    Here it is: http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/old_reddit.png http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/data/old_reddit.png
    - DarthGhandi 7y ago
      Nice, can I get a link for that you've got there?
      - KKPMW 7y ago
        For me it's just https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/all/ But you have to select "opt out of redesign" somewhere in your preference settings.
      - samstave 7y ago
        https://i.imgur.com/RIHhpaj.png https://i.imgur.com/RIHhpaj.png https://i.imgur.com/eWOk6xG.png https://i.imgur.com/eWOk6xG.png --- Set your preferences to NOT use the new reddit, and then tell it you want "destop site" https://i.imgur.com/0lSFD3C.png https://i.imgur.com/0lSFD3C.png
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
I liked the UI of digg a lot better, it was cleaner and had thumbnails. I mainly went to reddit for programming stuff back in the day. I think 2 codependent things ruined digg before the redesign though: (1) Users started to game the rankings so that the content was less diverse. (2) The admin's response to that gaming started to cripple the "newness" of posts such that the content on the front page was a lot older than on reddit. These two factors are starting to ruin reddit too, only now instead of MrBabyMan or whoever doing it for fun/money, it seems like it's actual foreign interference or something just as nefarious.

theopsguy 7y ago

A better ranking system is the key

ryandrake 7y ago
Waiting for one to show up. We need a better ranking system for content that doesn't confuse "popularity" with "quality". Every comment/article moderation system that has crowdsourced upvotes and downvotes suffers from this. It inevitably leads to groupthink, herd opinion, and shutdown culture.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  I'm really curious what @dang's thought's are on moderation and a better voting system, especially since HN seems to be growing in popularity by quite a bit every year.
  - Scapeghost 7y ago
    Votes on HN are basically meaningless and counter productive now. It's easy to farm them by hopping on the winning bandwagon on divisive topics. There's too much grudge downvoting just like Reddit. I keep seeing perfectly valid, reasonable and polite comments being grayed out just because they didn't hop on the wagon. Worst of all, downvotes are abused to prevent OTHER people from seeing what someone is saying. How do you counter that? I think there should be a cost to upvoting or downvoting, so they can't be handed out willy-nilly.
    - McAtNite 7y ago
      > I think there should be a cost to upvoting or downvoting, so they can't be handed out willy-nilly. It would be really interesting to run an experiment where this was taken literally. If upvotes/karma/whatever you call it were to be treated as almost a type of currency, and submitting a vote directly cost you a vote from your “balance” what would the discussions look like. You could even deal with inflation by lowering the value of votes people already have by increasing the cost for a new vote. I don’t think this would get you away from the groupthink and pandering comments, as people would probably try to appeal to the widest audience so they could bank more votes, but I’d love to see if it would cause people to post more meaningful comments as opposed to predictable jokes.

nefitty 7y ago

The article serves as a prompt for top-level comments. Back in the forum days it really depended on if someone had a question, etc. When I was single digits age my first social internet experiences were on a near-death/paranormal forum. After a couple of years every topic had been exhausted and questions and conversations reoccurred more and more. It got boring.

dsadsa41 7y ago

Because as always, the average user is boring and adds nothing to an online discussion. Reddit allows the average user to participate, but their crap will not be visible to other users unless they willingly sort by new.

Scapeghost 7y ago
Did you create a new account just to say that? Were you concerned about backlash for having what might be seen as a grouchy misanthropic view?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Even on Hacker News I’d say that the average commenter has very little to add to a discussion (I’m not excluding myself from this, FYI). Especially if the topic being discussed is “news” about a popular company (I’m sure you’ve seen “Facebook bad”, “Apple is locked down and their keyboards suck”, “Google will sunset this”). Technical articles generally get better results but only for topics that aren’t really divisive (“Electron bad”, “C insecure”).
  - egfx 7y ago
    I don’t agree. HN is the only site I go to where I go to the comments first before reading the article. I treat the comments like cliff notes and sometimes there are competing view points which adds to the fervor. I sometimes post links simply because I want to hear more context with discussion.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > I treat the comments like cliff notes and sometimes there are competing view points which adds to the fervor. They're often the same competing viewpoints, though. Especially on easy to understand, divisive topics.
  - nothrabannosir 7y ago
    Sometimes I wish we had a “common knowledge base” with all those points, so that we could move beyond beating the same dead horse, as a community. Any post about JS or C is just dreadful. And I’m completely guilty, myself. :S

DoreenMichele 7y ago

Because you need a non threatening but highly engaging reason to talk to strangers all over the world. Very personal stuff is potentially highly engaging, but inherently problematic and threatening. Err too far on the side of "safe" and now people are bored and have no reason to say anything.

elorant 7y ago

Because they provide broad context. Forums are usually specified on a certain interest. You come to HN you can discuss everything from computers to astrophysics and from sex to transport. You go to a computer oriented forum and try to discuss about fertility issues then 95% of the comments are irrelevant. In here everyone focuses on the things they know. Same goes for Reddit. It's a community of communities.

saagarjha 7y ago
> You go to a computer oriented forum and try to discuss about fertility issues then 95% of the comments are irrelevant. To be clear, you’re including Hacker News in the “computer oriented forum”, right? > In here everyone focuses on the things they know. Haha, nope

ACow_Adonis 7y ago

A couple of pretty rational reasons. Threaded-forums had a format, which I would argue is specifically designed around their fundamental premise: asynchronous small group single-threaded discussion(even if they have a tree-based format of categorisation to help get to the specific thread/topic). That works out great for a small,tightly-knit community, and one where you recognise or want to recognise who it is you're actually talking to and are genuinely interested in a long-form discussion. But that doesn't scale well, for several reasons: 1) Humans can only keep track of a small number of identities. 2) Most people aren't genuinely interested in participating in discussion (that is to say, amongst the general cateogry of humans, and by discussion I mean a back and forth sharing of ideas/information), let alone "long-form" discussion over a significant period of time. 3) On forums you're consistently stuck having to follow the path of a given thread, whether the path it takes interests you or not or veers off on a tangent. 4) The typical format of the forum was weighted towards a classification-drilling-down-search to find specific topics on which one specifically interested, rather than a 'bubbling up' of statistical popularity as the foremost mechanism. Now there are exceptions to all those and forums have differed over time, but bear with me and give me the benefit of the doubt. Now take something like reddit or hacker news. Aside from a very high-level categorisation up front (individual reddit communities/the fact that you're the kind of person who actually visits hacker news), everything is just kinda thrown in together and sorted by some measure of recency+popularity: maximising exposure to the lowest common denomintor conditional upon people already signalling they're interested. And the time-weighting is actually just a conditioned way of always giving the impression of freshness and encouraging the desire to check back regularly. The account names/identities of who you're 'talking' to are now almost irrelevant, because no one can actually keep track of identities across such a large community: with the exception that proves the rule amongst large-scale communities: the celebrity. A handful of well-known accounts that it is partly assumed the general culture will be familiar with. But other than that, its largely effectively anonymous. The upvote mechanism biases automatically towards popularity, maximising exposure to potential audience. And the tree-nature of the comment threads allows individuals to quickly go to the ones that interests them...but... By being hostile to depth (it is a pain on both reddit and hn to read anything more than a cursory N steps deep), and allowing the ignoring of individual branches of non-interest, the format again optimises for short-term, shallow, popularity-driven behaviours: perfect for optimisation towards mass adoption. And lastly, we need to be honest: 90% of people aren't here for discussion (again, the format itself is actually actively hostile to long-form in-depth long-time discussion). They're here to read new content (roughly 24 hour time-based decay of the front page), popular content (upvote-mechanisms, avoiding threads and trees that don't interest them), and when they do post its not because they want to engage with an actual person (they cannot follow that many usernames relative to the size of the community and the format cuts off being practical at a very shallow N deep message length), but like the comment section of the newspaper, its because they have a psychological need to state their opinion/express their worldview/show their knowledge. Facebook and twitter also have these properties to varying degrees, some of them more explicitly targeting these properties or trying to tailor them to the individual user's demand/desires. Facebook tries to do this literally down to the person's personal detail level and explicitly maximising eyeball time, whereas the likes of reddit achieve this through the channels (users self-select into the interesting communities) and then the upvote mechanism drives exposure within-channels/across-site. In short, the medium of news-aggregators is specifically suitable for high-scale popularity. Constant quick turnover to deliver returning eyeballs, allows users to filter easily to their needs, low barrier to entry, explicitly tied to popularity to maximize audience, explicitly pushing overly-specialised/alienating conversation off the front page by limiting deep/long-time period discussions and pushing those discussions off-site.

dmix 7y ago

> Mods take a more hands off approach. And users kinda moderate each other with upvotes/downvotes. This is what originally made Reddit awesome but the reversal of which has been slowly killing the fun. Mods have hijacked Reddit and turned all of the popular subreddits into their own pet newspapers which they are the chief editors/owner and only they themselves decide which content the users will enjoy. You basically can't post any comment or post which doesn't fit with the popular opinions/ideology/etc of the sub without getting banned or rejected from most subreddits these days. That was entirely unsurprising, especially these days, when it happened on the various shamelessly partisan political subreddits. But about two or three years ago I saw it start spreading into other areas like city/country subreddits or generic news subreddits. Now it's on all the major subreddits and based on the moderator newsletters and other admin posts the whole hyper-involved and super careful power-modding approach seems to be encouraged by the Reddit admins.

Scapeghost 7y ago
> This is what originally made Reddit awesome but the reversal of which has been slowly killing the fun. Mods have hijacked Reddit and turned all of the popular subreddits into their own pet newspapers which they are the chief editors/owner and only they themselves decide which content the users will enjoy. That is true and I hate it. A handful of people should never get to decide what millions can talk about. But compared to oldschool forums, at least they don't butt into conversations too often and make things awkward. It's definitely time for the Fourth Age (counting NNTP as the first), that combines the best things about oldschool forums with the best things about Reddit.
- dmix 7y ago
  > It's definitely time for the Fourth Age Agreed, do you have an ideas which would help push us forward?... this is clearly a step backwards, pushing us back towards the super-safe bigco communications world like 5-oclock TV news shows with pre-approved talking points. Obviously developing new Reddit and Twitter alternatives that look like 2000s-era PHP shitholes aren't helping the problem.... or worse clones which merely pander to political extremists on the right or left or fringe groups which then scares off the moderates or politically disinterested.