Think of it in advertising terms: Are you looking for abc1’s, college educated, smart and affluent young people who are usually first movers? Go reddit. Are you looking for 14-year-olds and professional marketing shills trying to make an easy buck? Go digg.

In the long run, the reddits of the world will win. Simply because they are much better at targetting their audience and has a more tight-knit community. This is good for advertising and community and the interwebs as well. We are all heading for smaller and more targeted; the age of the mass market i heading to a close…

My personal experience has been otherwise. I used to like Digg, when it has fewer people, and it was tech focused. The comments were more intelligent. But now, there is so much nonsense similar to other stupid forums like 4chan. The value lies in the quality of comments, where reddit wins over digg.

Actually, reddit is kind of growing too… I guess I’ll be moving to hacker news soon

I’m sorry but social news is not a classic winner-take-most market (whatever that is). To the contrary, adding more people to a social news site only adds value up to a certain point. Once critical mass is reached, additional people have the effect of tabloidizing the content. As numbers continue to grow, the value that the site had is cannibalized in favor of an ever-lower common denominator.

Will social news ever amount to anything more than The National Enquirer of the internet? Certainly not if Digg is the only player.

…a good reason for them doing this, other than “because they can” or “because they’re cool” or “because OSS is cool”.

They’ll have to answer why they did it; here’re some of my thoughts w/r/t why I’m glad they did. Perhaps there’s some overlap:

I can work their platform into my own apps.

Reddit’s a well-proven code base. It being opened – rather than “just” an API – makes it more attractive to me and the people I for whom build products

I can ask their core developers and now-widening community for help with these implementations

You can already create your own reddit, and make it private if you want t keep it between friends.

you can already create those things. They’re great (we use them on parade.com already), and they go to reddit.com. and they do the things the reddit team has time to implement.

Parade works with hundreds of newspapers. Some of them may prefer the convenience of using reddit.com; some may prefer to use reddit features on their own site. They can now do either or both.

M$ controls what gets posted on digg, if that isn’t reason enough to drop that alienated site in favor of reddit, I don’t know what it is.

Until reddit becomes alienated as well.

If it wasn’t for slashdot sucking in the UI department I would stick there but, hey, it really sucks!

I look forward to see where this lead as I am looking for a solid alternative to pligg that seem to dead in the water for my swedish website. Hopefully it will not be to long before it become useful for the greater audience

“Huffman also noted that since Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast (the parent of Wired) in 2006, the site has grown to 4.4 million month uniques and 120 million monthly pages views. He also notes that 23 percent of the sites’ users have signed up since it rolled out its user-created Reddits in January.”

As usual, comScore/compete stats are no better than Alexa. What’s impressive is how much credence people give information sources that have been so conclusively shown to have no bearing on reality.

Reddit Feedback

http://youtube....h?v=uo4O4T-7BiE

Doesn’t anyone care about transparency in their democracy anymore?

Digg is signed up for their tracking service which makes their stats pretty close to exact:

http://www.quan...st.com/digg.com

Reddit isn’t signed up so their stats need to be taken with a grain of salt:

http://www.quan....com/reddit.com

no visual appeal

why are they giving away their code?

i thought purpose of the tech sector was for innovation not to be copycat clones

I’m also not entirely convinced traffic is the right metric for determining who’s #1. Digg drives more traffic to a site but the traffic is worthless. It gets more traffic but that traffic just passes through from search engines on their way to somewhere more worthwhile.

Reddit has a smaller userbase and less traffic but an overall higher quality. And then there’s Slashdot, which is still as good as it ever was, can still force a server to it’s knees, and hasn’t lost control of it’s userbase.

I suspect a large part of digg’s traffic relies on search engines. When the search engines realise *their* users aren’t getting value from digg pages – most of which could be summarised as a page full of idiots cut & pasting ascii art, memes and especially hating and attacking something – they’ll slip further down the results and a significant chunk of the traffic’ll just vanish overnight.