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Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Redd
by alaskamiller 14y ago
Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday.
First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale links that's a shade away from being as if they were spun up by a Russian spam squad. Save yourself, redo the logo, redo the color scheme, don't let legacy drag you down.
Second thing is do some soul searching, figuring out what layer Digg wants to play in. Links aggregation? Community building and content creation? Traffic? Attention? Engagement? That elusive ad sharing model for content creators?
After that figure out for who. Reddit's core is dying, and eventually it'll be fully crowded out by the mainstreaming of rage comics, aww pics, and counter-Tumblr-pseudo-nerdy programming. Do you target those people, the walking wounded much like Slashdot?
Or do you go after the youths, the ones addicted to Instagrams, 9gag, imgur, but bored of their Facebook feeds? Then play the waiting game. New is everything old, after all.
The game's so different now from 2005. All the majors have feeds now. All the majors have figured out sharing, commenting, and extracting action on a story item. On top of that you're competing against mobile guys like Flipboard.
This is one of those situations where execution is easier than creating an idea. What is Digg's $1MM idea? Good luck with that because Digg needs to be futuristic but also really lucky twice being at the right place, the right time, with the right idea. Once you're lucky, twice you're good, right?
I bet this kind of flame out, this one thing keeps Mark Zuckerberg from sleeping.
- SquareWheel 14y agoReddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. I didn't know Reddit had their own power plant.
- lazugod 14y agoIs that a joke, or are you unfamiliar with the many definitions of power?
- SquareWheel 14y agoIt was a joke (a bad one, clearly), but it was at the definition of the word literally. The OP presumably meant figuratively.
- eli 14y agoThe OP is fine. You're being overly pedantic. People have been using the word this way for (literally) hundreds of years. Moreover, the truly literal definition of the word is from the Latin for "letter" and means something like "letter-for-letter truth." So using this word to describe anything other than a written document is "wrong" on some level. But language doesn't really work that way.
- simonbrown 14y agoUsing a different definition of the word power doesn't make it any less literal.
- lukifer 14y agoGoogle "definition literally". It's depressing, but that's the way the cookie bounces: language mutates, for better and for worse.
- SquareWheel 14y ago"Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling." Well that just makes me sad. We don't really have another word to use in its stead, do we?
- Hovertruck 14y agoYou could say "for all intents and purposes" or "practically".
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- blhack 14y agoNo it doesn't. Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news. I see 2 items out of 25 links. One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against VISA (in iceland). The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.
- SquareWheel 14y agoMy Reddit frontpage has plenty of news stories, but those are the subreddits I happen to subscribe to. I'm sure the news agencies aren't subscribed to the "Advice Animals" subreddit.
- citricsquid 14y agoThe replies you'll get are "you make your own reddit, just remove the popular subreddits!" but you're right. reddit is usable for hardcore users that want to invest real time into their experience, it's atrocious for casual users (that don't care for the meme spam). There is a large hole that (new) Digg could fill.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- thaumaturgy 14y agoI agree, but I think that Reddit is only usable for a specific subset of hardcore users. Unfortunately, Reddit's admins chose to take a hands-off approach to policing bad behavior in the community. As a result, Reddit regulars have to guard themselves against providing enough information in their comments to attract the attention of a diligent troll. I had a 5-year-old account on Reddit, and had been active on there from just about the beginning. I had hand-picked subreddits and the like. But, ultimately, it was better just to delete my account entirely and become a casual reader. Now Reddit is basically the daily equivalent of reading the comics section in the newspaper. I think Digg has a huge opportunity here. I doubt that they will take advantage of it though.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
- ot86 14y agoThere's a great post by a redditor that explains how Reddit has become "anti-content": http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circlebrokers_what_changes_would_you_make_to/c56x55f http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circ...
- wildmXranat 14y agoVery good analysis there. I wonder whether # of eyeballs is more important that accurate ranking algorithms. Viewers are washed, rinsed and asked to repeat.
- joke-away 14y agoIt's pretty much just ripped from Paul Graham's essay "what I've learned from hackernews": http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
- derleth 14y ago> Reddit's core What core? /r/reddit died a long time ago; not 'died' as in "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" but died as in no longer exists. It's all subreddits now. You can have your own list of subreddits, none of them 'dying' or 'uncool', all of them interesting to you.