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The value in Digg was the tribe it created, not the software, not the ads, not the human beings keeping the lights on. It was the tribe of people who found inte
by programminggeek 14y ago
The value in Digg was the tribe it created, not the software, not the ads, not the human beings keeping the lights on. It was the tribe of people who found interesting news on the internet and shared it.
FB, Reddit, HN did not "kill" Digg. The tribe growing up and or moving on to other things ended Digg. A similar tribe is at Reddit now, but a similar tribe used to live at Slashdot. Before that they probably lived on Usenet message boards or wherever.
In college, the comp sci program I was in had a private message board that ended up having a very similar vibe to digg/reddit/slashdot. Tech heavy, at times very heated political and religious debate. Eventually the original group graduated and it's never been quite the same.
It seems that each generation has something like digg, slashdot, reddit, whatever... that is "the thing" for hanging out and sharing/complaining about the news of the day or whatever is interesting. They might look like fads because on the internet they peak and crumble pretty quick, but really it is probably a natural cycle that communities and tribes go through.
Eventually HN and Reddit will become irrelevant to certain groups and the tribes that live there will move on to the next thing, whatever that might be.
I'm guessing the next site like this already exists or is going to be built soon, so any guesses as to what it will be if it's already out there?
- marvin 14y agoFrom my perspective, Reddit is qualitatively different from all the sites you mentioned. Reddit is the first large news site which allows its users to create their own communities. Most of the content on Reddit these days isn't technology- or politically oriented at all. This has changed over the last year or so - there are subreddits for pretty much anything. What makes these communities special is that a lot of them have very specialized and very diverse knowledge, not necessarily related to the subjects Reddit's early adopters were interested in. There are subreddits for science, fitness, finance, sex, art and just about any other subject people would be interested in following. What gets to the default front page doesn't even begin scratching the surface of what the ecosystem has to offer. I have the contrarian opinion that Reddit won't be displaced for a long time in the realm of primarily text-based news sharing and discussion.
- danielweber 14y agoReading your comment, I think reddit is like a moderated usenet. I think the only thing that would really kill reddit is if the people in charge try too hard to monetize it, like Digg did.
- coderdude 14y agoThe more popular a community gets the more diluted its culture becomes. The communities become overrun with users who never have a chance to acclimate to the culture of the site because they see more new users like themselves than they do seasoned users. You see this effect taking hold on HN when you go to a thread and see a bunch of short joke comments and none of them are light gray. Eventually the core users leave for greener pastures or for a place that resembles why they joined the previous site to begin with. Every community is doomed to this fate if it continues to gain unchecked popularity. All things will eventually converge on pictures of cats. When aging HN users get tired of the changing atmosphere they will splinter off. What I'd like to see come next: A community for hacker+entrepreneur types with an HN-like policy on commenting and etiquette that doesn't pander to Silicon Valley and doesn't need to stay on the good side of tech rags. Bootstrapping, programming, running a company -- that's it. Nothing so vague as "gratifying one's intellectual curiosity."
- samspot 14y agoThat is where reddit shines... they can splinter off to subreddits.