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Google Insights: HN vs. Reddit vs. Digg
- gcb 15y agosee here for some better perspective: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=reddit%2Chacker%20news%2Cdigg%2C4chan&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=reddit%2Chacker%20n...
- kittxkat 15y agowow, did reddit actually outnumber 4chan? impossible, no?
- gcb 15y agowell, 4chan had the worst case of DoS attacks on the time reddit line rose like crazy in that graph... maybe this shed a light on the culprit? :D ...also, fueling the conspiracy theory, the week it was back, moot left a sticky post on /b/ about how much superior reddit was, practically calling out a DoS there. i guess it backfired. ...and maybe we can call it the best marketing campaign ever?
- neuromancer2600 15y agoWhen looking at their daily uniques, reddit's upward trend is not that significant: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+digg.com%2C+news.ycombinator.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+digg.com%2... What I find more funny are the trends on Compete: Reddit: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/ Digg: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/ HN: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/
- Kittynana 15y agoI'm confused as to what's being measured in OP's link vs. your links. Is the OP's link measuring number of searches and your trends link measuring the number of daily visitors? Also, I know the reddit admins have mentioned a number of times that third-party statistics about their visitor count are wildly wrong.
- raldi 15y agoThose numbers are guesses and estimates. Here's the graph of uniques that actually comes from reddit's Google Analytics data: https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en#siteDetails?identifier=reddit.com&lp=true https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...
- polshaw 15y agoWorth mentioning that is by cookies.. I visit reddit from a desktop, laptop, and smartphone. and probably 2 browsers on the desktop. So that would show me up as 4 entries. I would not be suprised if the average was at 2 cookies per unique-human-visitor.
- raldi 15y agoThe table on the left shows a guess that tries to account for that -- it appears the ratio is about 1/6.
- zitterbewegung 15y agoSort of disturbing that for reddit jailbait and reddit jailbait are so high. I am guessing that is for that content and not because of the cnn report on reddit...
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoYes, jailbait was one of the top search terms before that story. Note that the jailbait reddit has been closed: http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbait http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbait (SFW). Of course, there is still a lot of material: http://www.reddit.com/r/truejailbait http://www.reddit.com/r/truejailbait (SFW, but don't click the links).
- blutonium 15y agoIt's because 4chan ran a campaign to get it there, not because of the content.
- redthrowaway 15y agoI hadn't heard that, but it sounds about right.
- noactually 15y agono actually it's because teenage girls are extremely sexually attractive to most men, of any age, and they enjoy masturbating to pictures of them. get over it.
- 4ad 15y agoIt's mind boggling that you are downvoted. Sad that many HN readers exhibit this holier than thou attitude.
- Achshar 15y agoWhat is the motive? Comparing the whole of reddit with HN will do no good. Obviously reddit has more users because of its diverse set of sub reddits. Or is there anything i am missing here?
- code_duck 15y agoWe all know that Reddit is far more large than HN. To me, the chart serves to illustrate how far Digg has fallen, and that reddit's profile has risen far above Digg's greatest height. Meanwhile, HN is steadily gaining ground, albeit in a much more narrowly focused area of topics, as you note.
- maaku 15y agoThat's how I read it--the HN comparison was just for vanity's sake.
- parfe 15y ago>Or is there anything i am missing here? You should probably consider why you felt defensive about HN.
- latch 15y agoOff topic, but Google's inability to know that I speak english (even though I'm logged in and I've configured various of its services with this information), is mind boggling. Seriously, how does my search-language setting not override my IP?
- AdamTReineke 15y agoIs your browser sending the wrong language? http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities
- latch 15y agoIt's sending en-US, but as others have pointed out, server-side user settings should > browser headers and ip address.
- phylofx 15y agoI agree. Google doesn't respect the Accept-Language header, just the location. It's really mind-boggling, and that has been the case for ages.
- sceaj 15y agoGoogle sort of respects the header, but my experience has been that the behavior is odd. I was working on adding localization to a web site, and so changed my headers to prefer Japanese. I accidentally left this on when I visited AdWords. I put English back to the top, but it took a week or so of manually changing the interface back to English for it to stick. Took one time to get it in Japanese, and about 50 to get it back to English.
- GigabyteCoin 15y agoPerhaps most/many google users do not own their computers? How annoying would it be for hundreds of internet cafe customers in China or India to search google only to realize it is in English because some foreigner changed the value?
- lukeholder 15y agojust visited digg for the first time in about ~1 year. Wow, front page articles with 21 diggs that's shockingly less than it used to be.
- dhughes 15y agoIt's sad isn't it? It's like a tabloid rag now, the owners of digg should just get it over with and let TMZ buy it.
- vinhboy 15y agoI am not familiar with the aftermath of the digg fiasco, does anyone know if they ever tried back peddling? If it was me, I would return the site back to what it was, and apologize profusely...
- snarkyturtle 15y agoIIRC, they did try to backpedal but by then they'd lost a fair chunk of their userbase, so they rolled out the new features again.
- DanielN 15y agoI'm not convinced that they want to backpedal at this point. They get the sponsored content and users that they wanted (or whatever it was the changes were that upset everyone). And frankly, the content is a lot better now than I ever remember it being.
- lkrubner 15y agoThat would mean admitting you were wrong. Better to blame it on others, blame it on bad technology, blame it on your programmers and blame it on your VP of Engineering. That is the way Kevin Rose chose to play it. I think it is reasonable to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Kevin Rose badly misplayed the situation. Please read: As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineering-door/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri... This manages to be defensive and offensive and stupidly self-centered: Kevin Rose Responds To Digg Criticism On Diggnation, Mostly Tells Users To Chill http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/kevin-rose-responds-to-digg-criticism-on-diggnation-mostly-tells-users-to-chill/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/kevin-rose-responds-to-digg... Kevin tried to place a lot of the blame on Cassandra, saying the technology was not read for prime time, but the community pushed back in a big way and insisted that Cassandra was not the problem with Digg. If Cassandra had been the real problem, then Digg would have given up on it, but they did not: http://gigaom.com/2010/09/08/digg-not-likely-to-give-up-on-cassandra/ http://gigaom.com/2010/09/08/digg-not-likely-to-give-up-on-c... http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-Digg-v4s-technical-failures http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-Digg-v4s-tech... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669645 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669645
- devs1010 15y agoits amusing that a site like digg which was fairly widely popular is now only as popular as a niche site like Hacker News. Don't get me wrong, Hacker News is, IMO far and away much better than either Digg or Reddit but both of those sites have much broader appeal. Digg shot themselves in the foot
- 4ad 15y agoEvery site exhibits some kind of bias which appeals to a certain class of people making the site better in the eyes of that particular group. Every reddit and 4chan user would tell you that their site is superior to every other similar site. Generally, this is good for everyone. There are many comparisons that could be made between different sites that share some traits, but which one is the best is not something you can quantify.
- devs1010 15y agoThats why its my opinion, I said IMO, IMO it is better that those sites and no one else can dispute what my opinion is
- johnconroy 15y agoWhat a shame about Digg. I way preferred the community... I find the reddit crowd far too self-congratulatory. They really, REALLY screwed the pooch though.
- andrewfelix 15y agoGreat to see HN getting more readers. But I'm scared for the future of commenting. More readers != more intelligent commenting.
- peteretep 15y agoEither I've grown up a whole lot in the last two years (possible), or the influx of new Redditors from ... well, everywhere ... pretty much killed the appeal the place had for me. It lost its exclusive feel, and now a 'Redditor' is just any random American college kid. It's HN that I check when I wake up or when I'm bored now - comments here are likely to be things I want to read.
- repsilat 15y ago"Culture" subreddits (/r/askscience in particular, sometimes /r/truereddit and the ones like it) are still mostly alright, though they still get bad when posts hit the front page. A good set of default subreddits is absolutely essential. HN has some of that emphasis on civility, but it (and the moderation system) are certainly less visible than reddit's. Hellbanning certainly has quite a different effect to pages full of deleted comments' "tombstones". I think the passivity of HN will could speed a cultural decline, and the lack of things like subreddits will certainly limit its usefulness if it ever does happen. Even with its countermeasures, though, I'm falling out of love with Reddit. I think the prominence of the karma system rewards a sound-bite circlejerk in the comments. More opaque, curated collections of articles like [www.aldaily.com] and [longform.org] are a more reliable way of finding thoughtful content (though I still need to get news content from somewhere else).
- dbattaglia 15y agoFor me its the mix of juvenile college kids and (as Steve Yegge pointed out) the Simpson's "Comic Book Guy" type meta-commenters that drive me nuts. 4/5 times I hit the "load more comments" link I feel a deep sense of regret. =P
- xxiao 15y agoused to digg a lot, not so in the last few years. kevin rose is a joke, just get over with it and disappear.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- teflonhook 15y agoHaha check the search terms... nsfw, jailbait
- dspillett 15y agoThe surpriing take-away from that graph, assuming we take Google searches as an accurate measure of course, is that the popularity of Digg was steadily falling long before The Event. Of course being a eaily typed domain name (though that counts for reddit too) and people having it bookmarked will reduce the number of occurances where people neeed to search for it over time, so we should probably take these figures with a pinch of salt.
- JeremyBanks 15y agoDigg hit its peak and began to decline in May 2007. This is exactly when the HDDVD fiasco happened. I believe this was Digg's first major user revolt and it was responsible for many users (myself included) moving over to Reddit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy This seems forgotten in most discussions.