11 ms·

Ready For a Reddit Replacement?

67 points by thenewgreen 15y ago

dreamdu5t 15y ago
Very cool, but he's solving an imagined problem.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  So was Twitter, and Blogger before that.
rorrr 15y ago
Reddit's beauty is in sub-reddits. Don't like the front page? Just unsubscribe from it, and subscribe to whatever you like. http://forhiremedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/map-of-reddit.jpg http://forhiremedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/map-of-re...
- bilalhusain 15y ago
  i like how art is classified as 'for fun' /sarcasm
- dorian-graph 15y ago
  The frontpage isn't some singular magical land that was the only one affected by the apparent degradation of quality, others seem to be following suit.
  - ohashi 15y ago
    It's really up to each subreddit to decide what kind of content it will be filled with - frontpage or not.
- zalew 15y ago
  yes, you can say reddit is what you make it. I no longer subscribe to frontpage and replaced extremely mainstream subreddits such as /r/pics with more fresh and entertaining like r/RedditThroughHistory and so on, and the experience is much more pleasant. yet, the decline of average submission and comment quality is noticable even in smarter subreddits such as r/TrueReddit. the digg migration put reddit in eternal september, first it was easily noticable only in /new (oh boy, going down there is only for hardcore users) and comments, now it's spread all over the site. I've been a big fan of reddit for years, but nowadays, the only reason I don't get out is that if I happen to step by without my account I'd meet the general frontpage and that could be depressing.
- repsilat 15y ago
  The downside is that if a particularly good post in your favourite subreddit hits the front page the Visigoths are going to come in and leave stupid comments one way or another. /r/AskReddit is incredible because of its judicious moderation, but the same can't be said for /r/programming or /r/technology, for example. What reddit really needs is a ranking engine recommending users, submissions and comments to you based on the users you've friended and the comments and submissions you've upvoted. Just take a quick approximation of PCA/SVD/eigenvalue/tachyon-polarity and let the users see if they like it. EDIT: Another simple idea is ranking comment trees by their first few comments instead of ranking them just by their first comment. I'm going to read the immediate replies of the top post either way, and I'd rather get three or four good comments than one great comment and two or three crappy replies to it.
  - prawn 15y ago
    If you're yet to see /r/AskScience check it out ASAP. One of my favourite discoveries this year. The mods are generally pretty merciless when it comes to memepushers.
    - repsilat 15y ago
      Ack, I meant to say /r/AskScience when I said "/r/AskReddit is incredible".
  - rorrr 15y ago
    What reddit really needs is a ranking engine recommending users, submissions and comments to you based on the users you've friended and the comments and submissions you've upvoted. Do you realize the insane amount of calculations that would take? For each pageview you would have to find all stories in that subreddit, find all the authors, find all stories you ever voted on, find all the users you are friends with, and somehow rank all this shit. It will cost millions of dollars a month in CPU time just to run something on the scale of reddit.
    - ak217 15y ago
      Sounds like a challenge :) First, this doesn't have to be for each pageview. Crudely, you want every story to have a vector in some giant hyperspace characterizing it, and every user to have a vector precomputed offline based on their previously shown affinities, and take dot products. This is not necessarily easy, or computationally very cheap, but the payoff can be pretty big. I believe LinkedIn runs something similar to this every night.
- TheFunkyMonk 15y ago
  Not only that, but multi-reddits as well. I've just got a bookmarks folder full of my favorite multi-reddits instead of a single Reddit bookmark to the front page. My Reddit bookmarks folder: Front Page: http://www.reddit.com/ http://www.reddit.com/ News: http://www.reddit.com/r/business+economics+entertainment+liberal+Libertarian+news+PoliticalDiscussion+politics+Seattle+usnews+worldevents+worldnews http://www.reddit.com/r/business+economics+entertainment+lib... Tech: http://www.reddit.com/r/android+androidquestions+apple+baconreader+css+droid+firefox+gaming+geek+googleplus+javascript+programming+tasker+technology+techsupport+webdev+web_design+Wordpress http://www.reddit.com/r/android+androidquestions+apple+bacon... Music: http://www.reddit.com/r/bass+hiphopheads+hiphoptruth+jazzyhiphop+listentothis+metal+metalmusicians+music+musicnews+WeAreTheMusicMakers http://www.reddit.com/r/bass+hiphopheads+hiphoptruth+jazzyhi... Funny: http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals+classicrage+comics+funny+humor+jokes+lolcats+lounge+pics http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals+classicrage+comics+fun... Other: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism+coffee+dating+design+fitness+golf+health+LucidDreaming+malefashionadvice+meetup+relationships+science+Seattle+sex+skeptic+typography http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism+coffee+dating+design+fitness... Random: http://www.reddit.com/r/answers+askscience+announcements+bestof+blog+DoesAnybodyElse+explainlikeimfive+Favors+gonewild+gonewildflicks+howto+IAmA+Ilivein+lectures+offbeat+Pets+pics+raerth+reddit.com+todayilearned+treesgonewild+videos+youshouldknow http://www.reddit.com/r/answers+askscience+announcements+bes...
  - scorpion032 15y ago
    Yup. Just unsubscribe from the popular sub reddits like pics, reddit.com and focus on technology, science, askscience and reddit is still as good as ever.
georgieporgie 15y ago
Give users a basic IQ and personality test. Provide different content based upon where they fall.
- brackin 15y ago
  Surely this won't make those considered stupid any smarter. Why shouldn't someone less intelligent be allowed to read and interact with an intellectual conversation. It's not that easy to group people in such ways.
  - georgieporgie 15y ago
    It's not about segregation, it's about content promotion. Why should content-promotion algorithms be intelligence agnostic?
    - iamdave 15y ago
      it's about content promotion. Why should content-promotion algorithms be intelligence agnostic? Because a "stupid" person might find the same thing interesting as a "dumb" person, hence the upvoting model. People who are inclined to agree are just as inclined to upvote these items, promoting them to a position where other people can consume said content.
      - georgieporgie 15y ago
        And a dumb person may not find the same thing interesting. Do you have any research to indicate one way or the other? If not, why take a position against the notion of intelligence- and personality-based content? Incidentally, in a sense, that's the old OKCupid model, but instead of LOLcats, it showed you potential relationship partners.
        iamdave 15y ago
        If not, why take a position against the notion of intelligence- and personality-based content? See also: "The King's New Clothes".
brackin 15y ago
The Sub-reddits are genius, building all these amazing sub communities. This is a big step back, their answer to the 'supposed' decline in Reddit is let's just make a clone, why? Because it'll have less users. Let's say it did hugely well, it'd be a vicious circle leading to everyone moving to another clone.
- raganwald 15y ago
  Sure it will be a vicious cycle. Same thing with fashions and popular hangouts. It's human nature, and somehow peoe make money in those businesses :-) http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
  - arohner 15y ago
    Thanks for posting this, it's been a while since I've read it. One of the best things he's written. IMO, this is the real solution to the slashdot / digg / reddit /HN problem.
jackolas 15y ago
No social platform is going to disrupt the existing systems until they decouple content and organization. The main issue is that we assume that all 'upvotes' are equal. If a user can select who is in their filter layer (like in Twitter), as opposed to selecting content (a subreddit), there will be a shift away from the cycle of bread and circuses. Hubski may be doing that but only implementing this one graph node deep and only having one default category for information, will probably not create a vibrant and diverse community.
- da_dude4242 15y ago
  >If a user can select who is in their filter layer (like in Twitter), as opposed to selecting content (a subreddit), there will be a shift away from the cycle of bread and circuses. Are you sure this isn't already happening to some degree? What reaches the front page of my account is different from what reaches the front page with cookies cleared. I suspect reddit is already using AI algorithms to filter out what is relevant based on who I upvote, the subreddits I visit, who I interact with, etc...
  - dhugiaskmak 15y ago
    When you're logged in the front page only shows you the content from the reddits you're subscribed to, I believe.
ScottWhigham 15y ago
I always think it's ridiculous when I hear "It's the new reddit" and then see what basically amounts to a Wordpress blog layout. Reddit, digg, HN were all partly successful because of their layout, not in spite of it. I don't want to scroll past the meta of every article today just to see what you have; I want a list of what's happening that is sorted/controlled by the community. And the less images, the better. I like reddit in that I can turn off the images so that I can fit 17-20 article headlines on a page w/o scrolling. Ugh.
- tensor 15y ago
  This comment seems very out of context. Perhaps you've mistaken the wordpress blog for the site it talks about? The site: http://www.hubski.com/ http://www.hubski.com/
- hendzen 15y ago
  I would say that HN is successful in spite of its layout.
  - Dramatize 15y ago
    I think it's perfect. It's easy to see if there are any new posts (and it's clear which ones you have visited). It's also not going to attract much attention if you have it open at work.
  - pbreit 15y ago
    I think if you're going to make the "in spite of" argument (on any site), you have to bring some solid supporting evidence.
- Dramatize 15y ago
  I was playing around with a UI for a HN/Reddit style site: http://beta.dragthelake.org/index.php http://beta.dragthelake.org/index.php
pavel_lishin 15y ago
Sounds just like Google+.
fookyong 15y ago
On Hubski, user follow one another, rather than communities, as they do on Reddit. Instead of voting a post up and down, you simply share it. That propagates it to your readers; the more people share it, the hotter that post becomes. sounds like he has created Twitter.
- akkartik 15y ago
  But with threading, and without artificial length constraints.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- kissickas 15y ago
  That's not fair. It has comment pages for each post (?) with proper comment threads- better than Google+ and facebook in that regard. Edit: And, of course, twitter, the one without comments, comment sections, comment pages...
- BruceLi 15y ago
  Not Twitter, maybe Sina Weibo, hahaha
- Raphael 15y ago
  An HN-Twitter mashup? Sign me up!
potatolicious 15y ago
Reddit is all about its community - you cannot defeat it with just features alone. And if you've figured out how to reliably build a community from scratch on the internet, well, there's a few billion dollars in it for you...
- dillona 15y ago
  Reddit is most certainly having its own Eternal September. I can not say I like that community much at all anymore
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    IMO it's all in the moderation. Reddit's very rudimentary up/downvote system, well, sucks. It lets the lowest common denominator rise to the top, which oddly enough is not what most users want to see. I'm imagining right now a Reddit with Slashdot's moderation system... but, I continue dreaming.
    - phillmv 15y ago
      Slashdot… just failed remarkably. Randomly assigning moderation points based on existing karma was clever but… somehow the same, SAME five memes kept getting (Score: 5, funny) and the interface made it actively painful to browse through the comments.
    - haecib 15y ago
      > Reddit's very rudimentary up/downvote system, well, sucks. It lets the lowest common denominator rise to the top, Which is why Hubski's solution is interesting. You're recognizing the quality of the content does not really lie in a singular post or link, but with the poster, in a general sense. There are certainly certain posters on Reddit who I know I can always look to for good content, -makes sense to have your feed populated by good content providers rather than up-votes from the crowd.
      - xtracto 15y ago
frewsxcv 15y ago
I find there's nothing wrong with the open source platform, just a problem with a few of the popular pages. There's no reason to ditch the reddit platform altogether.
krashidov 15y ago
The reason I like reddit is because of the subreddits. There are, however, really great communities for discussing something really niche outside of reddit. Some of which have bigger communities with even better contributors than reddit. The problem is that they are using rather primitive forum systems like phpBB and the like. After using reddit, phpBB is like going to the stone age, imagine if hacker news was on a simple forum system like that. I know reddit is an aggregator site, but I think they are the strongest competitor to forums, think about it: how hard is it get the gist of a discussion on one of those forums, where you have to scroll through tens of pages on a really popular topic. my point is: why doesn't reddit create a product that will allow any site to to have their own subreddit style page completely autonomous of reddit.com?
- ek 15y ago
  Do they have to create a "product"? Reddit is open source, and you can download it if you like, from http://code.reddit.com/ http://code.reddit.com/ . You could literally build what you are describing on the Reddit platform right now.
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    Apparently RedditOSS is in shambles, and very difficult to get working. They were looking to address that with the new hires, however.
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      Have you checked recently? I'm familiar with the sentiments you're echoing but I think they're beginning to address this issue. The GitHub repo is seeing some activity at the very least.
      - redthrowaway 15y ago
        The last I knew of it, there was a post on HN. I later asked hueypriest if their new hires would be trying to fix up redditOSS, and he said it was one of their priorities. This was a couple months ago (if not more), so it's entirely possible that they've done significant work on it. If that's the case, I suspect we'll see a blog post before too long.
molecularbutter 15y ago
Ready for needing glasses? This site requires superhuman vision to be able to read size 4 font!
plainOldText 15y ago
Hubski looks to me more like a HN clone and less like a Reddit replacement.
mwill 15y ago
Site needs some work, right now it feels more like HN (Similar visual style aside), just one big spread of submissions. As mentioned, the great part of reddit is sub-reddits, Hubski needs some sort of greater way to sort out and separate content. The proposed following users doesn't seem prominent enough to me yet, though maybe this will change as the site grows.
ChrisArchitect 15y ago
reddit is almost entirely in existence due to its community/userbase. it's all it had when digg imploded, and it's pulled them through from dark to the traffic heights they are at now. thing missing from reddit, despite the forum-like discussion thread part, is that it isn't social. it doesn't promote following users or anything of that nature or has little of those features (one thing that digg has/had) thing is, currently, the way reddit is/is going -- there's not much that needs to be changed. it covers alot of use cases for alot of its userbase (i.e. I use it solely for submission and upvoting/link popularity tracking, and hardly for anything discussion/forum related)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
goebbels 15y ago
REDDIT IS INTERNET DEMOCRACY.
naner 15y ago
All these news discussion sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, HN, hell even 4chan) started out very good when the communities were small and then they grew to massive size and lost their personalities, got more generalized, were gamed more frequently, succumbed to group think, and had a bazillion other problems related to their popularity and size. Reddit can somewhat mitigate this with subreddits and MeFi can slow the process by charging a fee. Perhaps their downfall is still inevitable. His comments about reddit's recent mood swings, however, don't mean much. That type of thing has been happening every few weeks for a couple years now. The reddit community is always in a huff about something. Maybe this idea (Google circles for news aggregators?) will help. Or maybe we should just abandon this discussion model all together.
- morrow 15y ago
  I don't think abandoning the discussion model is the right answer, I think it just needs to get better. All of these communities seem to follow a simple principle: they grow in size until their ability to self-filter, self-organize, and maintain community valuse is compromised by a volume of traffic or overall size of membership larger than they are capable of handling. The latest batch of discussion sites and tools (reddit, news.yc, digg, /., etc.) are simply the latest and best models of a continuously growing and improving application space. I think the only way for a "community" to exist long term in this space is to either continue advancing the state of it's filtering tools in order to handle the increased load, or not, and let it naturally degrade back into a smaller community and just exist at the level that it is capable of filtering (though this is not as simple as a community capable of holding X users will always have X users -- momentum and network effects are definitely important here).
Fuzzwah 15y ago
I've always wondered why these aggregation sites need up and down voting at all. Can't we just compare the number of times the link has been displayed to users with the number of clicks on the link?
- stewbrew 15y ago
  This would measure the popularity of titles/headlines (and maybe domain names) but not of content.
newredditor 15y ago
Unlike many of you here, I am a reddit late adopter. I first joined HN (like 3 years back), there were plethora of good posts so I never explored more. I never heard much about reddit for 1 year I think. Then there was this major discussion about how reddit is not relevant enough these days, that put me off reddit altogether. Then about 6 months back (I think) a good man posted a long discussion about how subreddits are the best things about reddit. I thought I would go and check. I made my account in March I think and randomly searched for subreddits. That makes me perhaps the latest adopter here. And I must tell you, I like those subreddits much better than HN now. There are many reasons for that but first remember, to each his own okey. So no need to flame me about my opinions and choices. 1. Its actually more relevant. I have many interests but CS is not a prominent one. There are some good intellectual discussions here but most of them are about highly technical stuff I cannot understand or comment on. I am a Electronics major so I like /r/ece and /r/electronics. They are smart people and have great discussions. Sure I do not comment much there. But still the comments are more valuable than the post itself (just like HN). Apart from that there are subreddits about prowrestling which of course will never be mentioned here. So I find subreddits are actually more relevant to my life. 2. They are smart people. Contrary to popular beliefs, not every redditor is abour lolcats. Most of the people I interact with on reddit are very smart. Not only in technical subreddits but reddits like r/SquaredCircle/ and /r/prowrestling see very interesting discussions. Pro wrestling is a technical thing and they do justice to it even while comparing thoughts about story lines. 3. I like the light hearted part. I don't know about you but people here are very focused on their work perhaps. Some light hearted comments (even if they are witty or clever jokes) will get downvoted and fade into the background (literally). To some extent these things are permissible in subreddits. I like that. I am not in the mood for a fierce discussion every time. Many times comment section can be clearly divided into two parts, relevant discussions and witty comments. The latter will fade into the background here. Also due to this, nobody rides high horses there. People on HN are many a times guilty of that. Like in the recent discussions about game industry and endeavors like facebook and 4chan where people think that intellect is wasted on such things. Why would you judge what people want to do for there whole life? I wouldn't and I don't like people who do. 4. New subreddits come up when I like. I am going to join either ai-class or ml-class (dammit I need to decide), subreddits of both are available. Isn't that fantastic? So this is why I like reddit more than HN now. Sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings but that is how it is.

67 points by thenewgreen 15y ago

dreamdu5t 15y ago

Very cool, but he's solving an imagined problem.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
So was Twitter, and Blogger before that.

rorrr 15y ago

Reddit's beauty is in sub-reddits. Don't like the front page? Just unsubscribe from it, and subscribe to whatever you like. http://forhiremedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/map-of-reddit.jpg http://forhiremedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/map-of-re...

bilalhusain 15y ago
i like how art is classified as 'for fun' /sarcasm
dorian-graph 15y ago
The frontpage isn't some singular magical land that was the only one affected by the apparent degradation of quality, others seem to be following suit.
- ohashi 15y ago
  It's really up to each subreddit to decide what kind of content it will be filled with - frontpage or not.
zalew 15y ago
yes, you can say reddit is what you make it. I no longer subscribe to frontpage and replaced extremely mainstream subreddits such as /r/pics with more fresh and entertaining like r/RedditThroughHistory and so on, and the experience is much more pleasant. yet, the decline of average submission and comment quality is noticable even in smarter subreddits such as r/TrueReddit. the digg migration put reddit in eternal september, first it was easily noticable only in /new (oh boy, going down there is only for hardcore users) and comments, now it's spread all over the site. I've been a big fan of reddit for years, but nowadays, the only reason I don't get out is that if I happen to step by without my account I'd meet the general frontpage and that could be depressing.
repsilat 15y ago
The downside is that if a particularly good post in your favourite subreddit hits the front page the Visigoths are going to come in and leave stupid comments one way or another. /r/AskReddit is incredible because of its judicious moderation, but the same can't be said for /r/programming or /r/technology, for example. What reddit really needs is a ranking engine recommending users, submissions and comments to you based on the users you've friended and the comments and submissions you've upvoted. Just take a quick approximation of PCA/SVD/eigenvalue/tachyon-polarity and let the users see if they like it. EDIT: Another simple idea is ranking comment trees by their first few comments instead of ranking them just by their first comment. I'm going to read the immediate replies of the top post either way, and I'd rather get three or four good comments than one great comment and two or three crappy replies to it.
- prawn 15y ago
  If you're yet to see /r/AskScience check it out ASAP. One of my favourite discoveries this year. The mods are generally pretty merciless when it comes to memepushers.
  - repsilat 15y ago
    Ack, I meant to say /r/AskScience when I said "/r/AskReddit is incredible".
- rorrr 15y ago
  What reddit really needs is a ranking engine recommending users, submissions and comments to you based on the users you've friended and the comments and submissions you've upvoted. Do you realize the insane amount of calculations that would take? For each pageview you would have to find all stories in that subreddit, find all the authors, find all stories you ever voted on, find all the users you are friends with, and somehow rank all this shit. It will cost millions of dollars a month in CPU time just to run something on the scale of reddit.
  - ak217 15y ago
    Sounds like a challenge :) First, this doesn't have to be for each pageview. Crudely, you want every story to have a vector in some giant hyperspace characterizing it, and every user to have a vector precomputed offline based on their previously shown affinities, and take dot products. This is not necessarily easy, or computationally very cheap, but the payoff can be pretty big. I believe LinkedIn runs something similar to this every night.
TheFunkyMonk 15y ago
Not only that, but multi-reddits as well. I've just got a bookmarks folder full of my favorite multi-reddits instead of a single Reddit bookmark to the front page. My Reddit bookmarks folder: Front Page: http://www.reddit.com/ http://www.reddit.com/ News: http://www.reddit.com/r/business+economics+entertainment+liberal+Libertarian+news+PoliticalDiscussion+politics+Seattle+usnews+worldevents+worldnews http://www.reddit.com/r/business+economics+entertainment+lib... Tech: http://www.reddit.com/r/android+androidquestions+apple+baconreader+css+droid+firefox+gaming+geek+googleplus+javascript+programming+tasker+technology+techsupport+webdev+web_design+Wordpress http://www.reddit.com/r/android+androidquestions+apple+bacon... Music: http://www.reddit.com/r/bass+hiphopheads+hiphoptruth+jazzyhiphop+listentothis+metal+metalmusicians+music+musicnews+WeAreTheMusicMakers http://www.reddit.com/r/bass+hiphopheads+hiphoptruth+jazzyhi... Funny: http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals+classicrage+comics+funny+humor+jokes+lolcats+lounge+pics http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals+classicrage+comics+fun... Other: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism+coffee+dating+design+fitness+golf+health+LucidDreaming+malefashionadvice+meetup+relationships+science+Seattle+sex+skeptic+typography http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism+coffee+dating+design+fitness... Random: http://www.reddit.com/r/answers+askscience+announcements+bestof+blog+DoesAnybodyElse+explainlikeimfive+Favors+gonewild+gonewildflicks+howto+IAmA+Ilivein+lectures+offbeat+Pets+pics+raerth+reddit.com+todayilearned+treesgonewild+videos+youshouldknow http://www.reddit.com/r/answers+askscience+announcements+bes...
- scorpion032 15y ago
  Yup. Just unsubscribe from the popular sub reddits like pics, reddit.com and focus on technology, science, askscience and reddit is still as good as ever.

georgieporgie 15y ago

Give users a basic IQ and personality test. Provide different content based upon where they fall.

brackin 15y ago
Surely this won't make those considered stupid any smarter. Why shouldn't someone less intelligent be allowed to read and interact with an intellectual conversation. It's not that easy to group people in such ways.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  It's not about segregation, it's about content promotion. Why should content-promotion algorithms be intelligence agnostic?
  - iamdave 15y ago
    it's about content promotion. Why should content-promotion algorithms be intelligence agnostic? Because a "stupid" person might find the same thing interesting as a "dumb" person, hence the upvoting model. People who are inclined to agree are just as inclined to upvote these items, promoting them to a position where other people can consume said content.
    - georgieporgie 15y ago
      And a dumb person may not find the same thing interesting. Do you have any research to indicate one way or the other? If not, why take a position against the notion of intelligence- and personality-based content? Incidentally, in a sense, that's the old OKCupid model, but instead of LOLcats, it showed you potential relationship partners.
      - iamdave 15y ago
        If not, why take a position against the notion of intelligence- and personality-based content? See also: "The King's New Clothes".

brackin 15y ago

The Sub-reddits are genius, building all these amazing sub communities. This is a big step back, their answer to the 'supposed' decline in Reddit is let's just make a clone, why? Because it'll have less users. Let's say it did hugely well, it'd be a vicious circle leading to everyone moving to another clone.

raganwald 15y ago
Sure it will be a vicious cycle. Same thing with fashions and popular hangouts. It's human nature, and somehow peoe make money in those businesses :-) http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
- arohner 15y ago
  Thanks for posting this, it's been a while since I've read it. One of the best things he's written. IMO, this is the real solution to the slashdot / digg / reddit /HN problem.

jackolas 15y ago

No social platform is going to disrupt the existing systems until they decouple content and organization. The main issue is that we assume that all 'upvotes' are equal. If a user can select who is in their filter layer (like in Twitter), as opposed to selecting content (a subreddit), there will be a shift away from the cycle of bread and circuses. Hubski may be doing that but only implementing this one graph node deep and only having one default category for information, will probably not create a vibrant and diverse community.

da_dude4242 15y ago
>If a user can select who is in their filter layer (like in Twitter), as opposed to selecting content (a subreddit), there will be a shift away from the cycle of bread and circuses. Are you sure this isn't already happening to some degree? What reaches the front page of my account is different from what reaches the front page with cookies cleared. I suspect reddit is already using AI algorithms to filter out what is relevant based on who I upvote, the subreddits I visit, who I interact with, etc...
- dhugiaskmak 15y ago
  When you're logged in the front page only shows you the content from the reddits you're subscribed to, I believe.

ScottWhigham 15y ago

I always think it's ridiculous when I hear "It's the new reddit" and then see what basically amounts to a Wordpress blog layout. Reddit, digg, HN were all partly successful because of their layout, not in spite of it. I don't want to scroll past the meta of every article today just to see what you have; I want a list of what's happening that is sorted/controlled by the community. And the less images, the better. I like reddit in that I can turn off the images so that I can fit 17-20 article headlines on a page w/o scrolling. Ugh.

tensor 15y ago
This comment seems very out of context. Perhaps you've mistaken the wordpress blog for the site it talks about? The site: http://www.hubski.com/ http://www.hubski.com/
hendzen 15y ago
I would say that HN is successful in spite of its layout.
- Dramatize 15y ago
  I think it's perfect. It's easy to see if there are any new posts (and it's clear which ones you have visited). It's also not going to attract much attention if you have it open at work.
- pbreit 15y ago
  I think if you're going to make the "in spite of" argument (on any site), you have to bring some solid supporting evidence.
Dramatize 15y ago
I was playing around with a UI for a HN/Reddit style site: http://beta.dragthelake.org/index.php http://beta.dragthelake.org/index.php

pavel_lishin 15y ago

Sounds just like Google+.

fookyong 15y ago

On Hubski, user follow one another, rather than communities, as they do on Reddit. Instead of voting a post up and down, you simply share it. That propagates it to your readers; the more people share it, the hotter that post becomes. sounds like he has created Twitter.

akkartik 15y ago
But with threading, and without artificial length constraints.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
kissickas 15y ago
That's not fair. It has comment pages for each post (?) with proper comment threads- better than Google+ and facebook in that regard. Edit: And, of course, twitter, the one without comments, comment sections, comment pages...
BruceLi 15y ago
Not Twitter, maybe Sina Weibo, hahaha
Raphael 15y ago
An HN-Twitter mashup? Sign me up!

potatolicious 15y ago

Reddit is all about its community - you cannot defeat it with just features alone. And if you've figured out how to reliably build a community from scratch on the internet, well, there's a few billion dollars in it for you...

dillona 15y ago
Reddit is most certainly having its own Eternal September. I can not say I like that community much at all anymore
- potatolicious 15y ago
  IMO it's all in the moderation. Reddit's very rudimentary up/downvote system, well, sucks. It lets the lowest common denominator rise to the top, which oddly enough is not what most users want to see. I'm imagining right now a Reddit with Slashdot's moderation system... but, I continue dreaming.
  - phillmv 15y ago
    Slashdot… just failed remarkably. Randomly assigning moderation points based on existing karma was clever but… somehow the same, SAME five memes kept getting (Score: 5, funny) and the interface made it actively painful to browse through the comments.
  - haecib 15y ago
    > Reddit's very rudimentary up/downvote system, well, sucks. It lets the lowest common denominator rise to the top, Which is why Hubski's solution is interesting. You're recognizing the quality of the content does not really lie in a singular post or link, but with the poster, in a general sense. There are certainly certain posters on Reddit who I know I can always look to for good content, -makes sense to have your feed populated by good content providers rather than up-votes from the crowd.
    - xtracto 15y ago

frewsxcv 15y ago

I find there's nothing wrong with the open source platform, just a problem with a few of the popular pages. There's no reason to ditch the reddit platform altogether.

krashidov 15y ago

The reason I like reddit is because of the subreddits. There are, however, really great communities for discussing something really niche outside of reddit. Some of which have bigger communities with even better contributors than reddit. The problem is that they are using rather primitive forum systems like phpBB and the like. After using reddit, phpBB is like going to the stone age, imagine if hacker news was on a simple forum system like that. I know reddit is an aggregator site, but I think they are the strongest competitor to forums, think about it: how hard is it get the gist of a discussion on one of those forums, where you have to scroll through tens of pages on a really popular topic. my point is: why doesn't reddit create a product that will allow any site to to have their own subreddit style page completely autonomous of reddit.com?

ek 15y ago
Do they have to create a "product"? Reddit is open source, and you can download it if you like, from http://code.reddit.com/ http://code.reddit.com/ . You could literally build what you are describing on the Reddit platform right now.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  Apparently RedditOSS is in shambles, and very difficult to get working. They were looking to address that with the new hires, however.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    Have you checked recently? I'm familiar with the sentiments you're echoing but I think they're beginning to address this issue. The GitHub repo is seeing some activity at the very least.
    - redthrowaway 15y ago
      The last I knew of it, there was a post on HN. I later asked hueypriest if their new hires would be trying to fix up redditOSS, and he said it was one of their priorities. This was a couple months ago (if not more), so it's entirely possible that they've done significant work on it. If that's the case, I suspect we'll see a blog post before too long.

molecularbutter 15y ago

Ready for needing glasses? This site requires superhuman vision to be able to read size 4 font!

plainOldText 15y ago

Hubski looks to me more like a HN clone and less like a Reddit replacement.

mwill 15y ago

Site needs some work, right now it feels more like HN (Similar visual style aside), just one big spread of submissions. As mentioned, the great part of reddit is sub-reddits, Hubski needs some sort of greater way to sort out and separate content. The proposed following users doesn't seem prominent enough to me yet, though maybe this will change as the site grows.

ChrisArchitect 15y ago

reddit is almost entirely in existence due to its community/userbase. it's all it had when digg imploded, and it's pulled them through from dark to the traffic heights they are at now. thing missing from reddit, despite the forum-like discussion thread part, is that it isn't social. it doesn't promote following users or anything of that nature or has little of those features (one thing that digg has/had) thing is, currently, the way reddit is/is going -- there's not much that needs to be changed. it covers alot of use cases for alot of its userbase (i.e. I use it solely for submission and upvoting/link popularity tracking, and hardly for anything discussion/forum related)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

goebbels 15y ago

REDDIT IS INTERNET DEMOCRACY.

naner 15y ago

All these news discussion sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, HN, hell even 4chan) started out very good when the communities were small and then they grew to massive size and lost their personalities, got more generalized, were gamed more frequently, succumbed to group think, and had a bazillion other problems related to their popularity and size. Reddit can somewhat mitigate this with subreddits and MeFi can slow the process by charging a fee. Perhaps their downfall is still inevitable. His comments about reddit's recent mood swings, however, don't mean much. That type of thing has been happening every few weeks for a couple years now. The reddit community is always in a huff about something. Maybe this idea (Google circles for news aggregators?) will help. Or maybe we should just abandon this discussion model all together.

morrow 15y ago
I don't think abandoning the discussion model is the right answer, I think it just needs to get better. All of these communities seem to follow a simple principle: they grow in size until their ability to self-filter, self-organize, and maintain community valuse is compromised by a volume of traffic or overall size of membership larger than they are capable of handling. The latest batch of discussion sites and tools (reddit, news.yc, digg, /., etc.) are simply the latest and best models of a continuously growing and improving application space. I think the only way for a "community" to exist long term in this space is to either continue advancing the state of it's filtering tools in order to handle the increased load, or not, and let it naturally degrade back into a smaller community and just exist at the level that it is capable of filtering (though this is not as simple as a community capable of holding X users will always have X users -- momentum and network effects are definitely important here).

Fuzzwah 15y ago

I've always wondered why these aggregation sites need up and down voting at all. Can't we just compare the number of times the link has been displayed to users with the number of clicks on the link?

stewbrew 15y ago
This would measure the popularity of titles/headlines (and maybe domain names) but not of content.

newredditor 15y ago

Unlike many of you here, I am a reddit late adopter. I first joined HN (like 3 years back), there were plethora of good posts so I never explored more. I never heard much about reddit for 1 year I think. Then there was this major discussion about how reddit is not relevant enough these days, that put me off reddit altogether. Then about 6 months back (I think) a good man posted a long discussion about how subreddits are the best things about reddit. I thought I would go and check. I made my account in March I think and randomly searched for subreddits. That makes me perhaps the latest adopter here. And I must tell you, I like those subreddits much better than HN now. There are many reasons for that but first remember, to each his own okey. So no need to flame me about my opinions and choices. 1. Its actually more relevant. I have many interests but CS is not a prominent one. There are some good intellectual discussions here but most of them are about highly technical stuff I cannot understand or comment on. I am a Electronics major so I like /r/ece and /r/electronics. They are smart people and have great discussions. Sure I do not comment much there. But still the comments are more valuable than the post itself (just like HN). Apart from that there are subreddits about prowrestling which of course will never be mentioned here. So I find subreddits are actually more relevant to my life. 2. They are smart people. Contrary to popular beliefs, not every redditor is abour lolcats. Most of the people I interact with on reddit are very smart. Not only in technical subreddits but reddits like r/SquaredCircle/ and /r/prowrestling see very interesting discussions. Pro wrestling is a technical thing and they do justice to it even while comparing thoughts about story lines. 3. I like the light hearted part. I don't know about you but people here are very focused on their work perhaps. Some light hearted comments (even if they are witty or clever jokes) will get downvoted and fade into the background (literally). To some extent these things are permissible in subreddits. I like that. I am not in the mood for a fierce discussion every time. Many times comment section can be clearly divided into two parts, relevant discussions and witty comments. The latter will fade into the background here. Also due to this, nobody rides high horses there. People on HN are many a times guilty of that. Like in the recent discussions about game industry and endeavors like facebook and 4chan where people think that intellect is wasted on such things. Why would you judge what people want to do for there whole life? I wouldn't and I don't like people who do. 4. New subreddits come up when I like. I am going to join either ai-class or ml-class (dammit I need to decide), subreddits of both are available. Isn't that fantastic? So this is why I like reddit more than HN now. Sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings but that is how it is.