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Philosophically HN is different than reddit and Digg in that the person who runs the site is active in shaping the ongoing conversation. Reddit and Digg ultimat

by icey 18y ago

Philosophically HN is different than reddit and Digg in that the person who runs the site is active in shaping the ongoing conversation. Reddit and Digg ultimately became for-profit companies and in doing so, embraced the democratic method of policing their sites. HN on the other hand is somewhere between an oligarchy and meritocracy; and can only work that way because pg doesn't appear to want to monetize it. My point is that reddit and Digg are far more similar than reddit and HN or Digg and HN.

run4yourlives 18y ago
Philosophically HN is different than reddit and Digg in that the person who runs the site is active in shaping the ongoing conversation. While true, I don't think this matters in the long run. Reddit's founders are pretty active, and clearly the decline started prior to the sale. What I do think though is that the items you bring up work to accelerating the effect, certainly. (Oh, and someone give the parent a free up-mod since I hit the down arrow when I was copy/pasting his comment. Thx)
- iamelgringo 18y ago
  There's also a great number of people that have been around since the site started that are very committed to keeping the signal::noise ratio high. This discussion comes up fairly often, and the level of discourse or quality of content hasn't really degraded at all.
- pg 18y ago
  The level of conversation on Reddit didn't decline because the founders were apathetic. They still care a lot about the site. But they are committed not to censoring anything, either comments or stories, and that tends to make the site something of a free-for-all. A massively successful free-for-all, incidentally: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+ycombinator.com/?metric=uv http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+ycombinator.com/... For most users the change in the character of Reddit couldn't accurately be called "decline," or their traffic wouldn't still be growing so fast. It just seems like a decline to the small minority that includes us.

by icey 18y ago

run4yourlives 18y ago

Philosophically HN is different than reddit and Digg in that the person who runs the site is active in shaping the ongoing conversation. While true, I don't think this matters in the long run. Reddit's founders are pretty active, and clearly the decline started prior to the sale. What I do think though is that the items you bring up work to accelerating the effect, certainly. (Oh, and someone give the parent a free up-mod since I hit the down arrow when I was copy/pasting his comment. Thx)

iamelgringo 18y ago
There's also a great number of people that have been around since the site started that are very committed to keeping the signal::noise ratio high. This discussion comes up fairly often, and the level of discourse or quality of content hasn't really degraded at all.
pg 18y ago
The level of conversation on Reddit didn't decline because the founders were apathetic. They still care a lot about the site. But they are committed not to censoring anything, either comments or stories, and that tends to make the site something of a free-for-all. A massively successful free-for-all, incidentally: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+ycombinator.com/?metric=uv http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com+ycombinator.com/... For most users the change in the character of Reddit couldn't accurately be called "decline," or their traffic wouldn't still be growing so fast. It just seems like a decline to the small minority that includes us.