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> Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. D

> Reddit also has the advantage of doing it during a major UI shift - it's easy to justify design changes when everyone is heading for mobile browsers anyway. Digg didn't have that excuse. On the contrary, Digg’s UI changes were happening when “Web 2.0”-hype was peaking, including bold new web-design trends - many sites were actively redesigning themselves with a brighter theme and better visual-effects: this was around 2007-2010 when IE6-support was starting to be discounted by tech-oriented websites so they could start using new CSS features and alpha-channel PNG images that IE7, Firefox, and Opera supported. I argue that the changes to their recommendation algorithm - and the introduction - and eventual promotion - of mainstream news (especially sports news) meant that their early users: technology news readers, lost interest in the site. The redesign of the site was a contributing factor, but a bad redesign is nowhere near as damaging to a site’s popularity than it losing relevance to its core user base.

sparkie 6y ago
Digg's decline began before Web2.0 and any redesign - it was mainly a result of the "bury brigades" killing anything that was remotely interesting through downvotes and leaving it to be a dull feed of mainstream news links, which got progressively worse over time. Reddit has the bury brigades too in some of the more popular subreddits (the ones which you used to be subscribed to by default), but you can avoid them by only participating in the subreddits that interest you. This is where Reddit is a huge improvement over what digg was, but I wouldn't say it's immune to failure. The more they try to be the arbiters of what people ought to find interesting, the less people are going to put the effort into interacting with the platform as a whole.
- entropea 6y ago
  5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Those bury brigades are real, but instead they just remove what they don't want seen or promote content they do want seen with huge influence in the most popular subreddits. The same issue with Digg power users having too much control (among other reasons it failed) is also apparent on Reddit. https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png
  - vkgfx 6y ago
    Yep. Check out r/redditminusmods On average, 80-100% of the content of the frontpage is removed by mods every day.

sparkie 6y ago

Digg's decline began before Web2.0 and any redesign - it was mainly a result of the "bury brigades" killing anything that was remotely interesting through downvotes and leaving it to be a dull feed of mainstream news links, which got progressively worse over time. Reddit has the bury brigades too in some of the more popular subreddits (the ones which you used to be subscribed to by default), but you can avoid them by only participating in the subreddits that interest you. This is where Reddit is a huge improvement over what digg was, but I wouldn't say it's immune to failure. The more they try to be the arbiters of what people ought to find interesting, the less people are going to put the effort into interacting with the platform as a whole.

entropea 6y ago
5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits. Those bury brigades are real, but instead they just remove what they don't want seen or promote content they do want seen with huge influence in the most popular subreddits. The same issue with Digg power users having too much control (among other reasons it failed) is also apparent on Reddit. https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png https://i.redd.it/bfhl8s6o2fn41.png
- vkgfx 6y ago
  Yep. Check out r/redditminusmods On average, 80-100% of the content of the frontpage is removed by mods every day.