Ask YC: Why are you guys obsessd with reddit?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122540

by chez17 • 18 years ago

4 10 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

As someone new to the site, I am confused at the level of animosity and obsession with reddit. Was reddit once a bastion of intellectual conversation until one day the trolls came in and ravaged the entire site? Is News.YC currently going down the tubes? I think whats important is that the focus and content here will keep a certain demographic of people away from this site. Am I wrong?

thorax• 18 years ago

Yeah, ignore those people. I think anyone worrying about Reddit (or even mentioning it) is just as likely to hurt this community as those who post "fluff" stories.

Let it be what it will be and relax, please. :)

pg2• 18 years ago

Let it be what it will be

That's a good strategy for a startup, because a startup generally wants to have as many users as possible. In that case you want to let the site evolve into whatever interests the most users. But this is not a startup; at this site the goal is quality, not growth.

mixmax• 18 years ago

" But this is not a startup; at this site the goal is quality, not growth."

A sincere thank you for that...

davidw• 18 years ago

Stories like this are now starting to pop up and get votes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=122287

Reddit gets mentioned a lot for this reason: it got a huge bunch of users initially from people following a link that pg posted, so the initial stories and discussions were pretty good. Then it started devolving into a community that is often not pleasant to interact with unless you stick to one of the subreddits. People don't want that to happen here.

pg2• 18 years ago

Was reddit once a bastion of intellectual conversation until one day the trolls came in and ravaged the entire site?

Yes, pretty much.

Though Slashdot and Digg have the same problem, I think the reason people here use Reddit as the canonical example of what not to become is that many of them are refugees from Reddit specifically. Also perhaps because Reddit had the greatest fall. (I don't know about Slashdot, but I suspect Digg was never that great.)

thaumaturgy2• 18 years ago

I lurked on Digg shortly after it debuted. It was very briefly pretty good, and then devolved incredibly fast.

I was also on Slashdot pretty early -- I still have a low 5-digit UID there -- and back around 1999 it was pretty incredible. It's bounced back a little since the Natalie-Portman-Hot-Grits days, but not nearly enough.

Might be that the other way for me to look at this is, I am the death knell for any social networking site that I start hanging around on. ;-)

aston• 18 years ago

But are you the last of the good or the first of the bad?

jib1123• 18 years ago

reddit is one of the few YC successes. Its expected for them to be obsessed with reddit ;)

himanshu• 18 years ago

Reddit's programming sub-reddit seems informative though.

Ask YC: Why are you guys obsessd with reddit?

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