Comments on: Reddit and Digg compared

By: Simone Manganelli

Simone Manganelli — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 23:06:29 +0000

P.S. Ted: digg's homepage defaults to just the technology section. You can similarly subscribe to a feed of Digg's tech-only articles. This should bring you back to digg's days of yore. :) (I agree that there is a proliferation of lame stories in the non-tech-related articles, but I still do find some interesting submissions in there, which is why I continue to scan through them.)

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 15:57:01 +0000

Simone: All true.

Ted: Reddit is rife with political stories too, but it has a big advantage over digg: The recommendation engine. If you downvote everything political, your recommended page (separate from the front page) will be trained to not give you anything political. That's its big win, even moreso than the downvote button itself.

By: Ted

Ted — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:28:07 +0000

I've found that DIGG has really become SUCK since they've expanded beyond mainly being a tech news/social site. It's been overrun with too many political ideologues who don't even read the content of most of the stories that they "digg". I've given reddit a try, and unfortunately, it looks worse than digg. Slashdot still has better filtering, but since most of the readers have left for Digg and Reddit, its content isn't nearly as current as the other sites.

I'm probably a minority here in my thoughts, but I think the 'net is ripe for a new tech news social site. Basically what Digg used to be before it got overrun by Moveon.org and Dailykos readers.

By: Simone Manganelli

Simone Manganelli — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:14:08 +0000

This is a misleading comparison, at least in terms of the scores. You can't actively subtract from a score on digg as you can on reddit. Digg stories just drop off the homepage if they are buried enough, but they still retain however many diggs they had.

So it's possible that there were more people who buried the story than digged it, yet digg only shows you the number who digged the story. Of course, this would mean it would gain the "buried" tag which it still doesn't appear to have, although I did see a later digg story that indicated that this was a hoax.

More than anything I think it just highlights the different mechanisms for promoting or burying stories on the sites. And the fact that digg seems to have many, many more users than reddit; not that that's necessarily good, especially given the comments.