Ready For a Reddit Replacement?

http://www.dailydot.com/business/hubski-reddit-mark-katakowski/

by thenewgreen • 15 years ago

67 80 15 years ago

dailydot.com

dreamdu5t• 15 years ago

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

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

So was Twitter, and Blogger before that.

rorrr4• 15 years 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-re...

dorian-graph• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

It's really up to each subreddit to decide what kind of content it will be filled with - frontpage or not.

zalew• 15 years 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.

repsilat2• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

rorrr4• 15 years 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.

bartwe• 15 years ago

Reddit is now a tree with only one level of nesting. What would help is making the subreddits a graph, and not have all the subreddits trunk in the frontpage.

TheFunkyMonk• 15 years 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/

News: http://www.reddit.com/r/business+economics+entertainment+lib...

Tech: http://www.reddit.com/r/android+androidquestions+apple+bacon...

Music: http://www.reddit.com/r/bass+hiphopheads+hiphoptruth+jazzyhi...

Funny: http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals+classicrage+comics+fun...

Other: http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism+coffee+dating+design+fitness...

Random: http://www.reddit.com/r/answers+askscience+announcements+bes...

scorpion032• 15 years 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.

bilalhusain• 15 years ago

i like how art is classified as 'for fun' /sarcasm

georgieporgie7• 15 years ago

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

brackin2• 15 years 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.

georgieporgie7• 15 years ago

It's not about segregation, it's about content promotion. Why should content-promotion algorithms be intelligence agnostic?

parfe4• 15 years ago

What does IQ have to do with content?

Steven Hawking could enjoy lolcats and your garbage man might be an ardent reader of philosophy. Stereotyping based on IQ or profession is fairly stupid. Smart people can like dumb things and dumb people can enjoy intellectual pursuits. If you want to pigeon hole people into categories go back to a high school cafeteria.

hackinthebochs• 15 years ago

Is it even possible to have a dumb person who enjoys truly intellectual pursuits? I'm not outright stating its impossible, but I'd like to see a plausible scenario.

georgieporgie7• 15 years ago

The only stereotyping and pigeon-holing here is on your part.

brackin2• 15 years 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• 15 years 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-ope...

arohner• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

When you're logged in the front page only shows you the content from the reddits you're subscribed to, I believe.

ScottWhigham• 15 years 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• 15 years 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/

hendzen• 15 years ago

I would say that HN is successful in spite of its layout.

Dramatize2• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

Dramatize2• 15 years ago

I was playing around with a UI for a HN/Reddit style site: http://beta.dragthelake.org/index.php

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

Sounds just like Google+.

fookyong• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

But with threading, and without artificial length constraints.

kissickas• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Not Twitter, maybe Sina Weibo, hahaha

Raphael• 15 years ago

An HN-Twitter mashup? Sign me up!

potatolicious2• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Reddit is most certainly having its own Eternal September.

I can not say I like that community much at all anymore

potatolicious2• 15 years 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.

frewsxcv• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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/ . You could literally build what you are describing on the Reddit platform right now.

redthrowaway2• 15 years ago

Apparently RedditOSS is in shambles, and very difficult to get working. They were looking to address that with the new hires, however.

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

"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?"

It's easy to do this on reddit itself:

1. Create a subreddit for your new forum.

2. In the subreddit control panel, enter the domain name you're going to use for it.

3. In your domain name registrar control panel, point your www cname at rhs.reddit.com.

4. Voila, you've got your own subreddit style forum, with the benefit of it being integrated into the reddit supercommunity to whatever extent you want.

robertskmiles• 15 years ago

I've done that, and it's not what you might call seamless. I tried to make the community its own entity, with its own look and feel. The problem is that the pages are full of links that take you back to reddit.com rather than their equivalent on your own domain. That's very confusing to non-redditors who suddenly find themselves on a seemingly unrelated site, with all the disorientation and styling-whiplash that entails.

It's a neat idea but it needs a lot more polish to be really useful.

molecularbutter• 15 years ago

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

plainOldText• 15 years ago

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

mwill• 15 years 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• 15 years 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)

naner• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

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

newredditor2• 15 years 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.

xtracto2• 15 years ago

> this is why I like reddit more than HN now. Sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings but that is how it is.

I do not think they are comparable at all. Maybe we could compare r/technology to HN, but the idea of the subreddits is exactly to cover a wide breadth of topics.

I also love some subreddits and almost never look at the most visited ones (pics, lol, games, etc).

The only thing that is missing for me is a way to "weight" each subreddit so that they higher preference to the stories in the homepage. This is because there are subreddits that only get one or two links every day, and due to the slow amount of subscribers, they get low votes. I'd like to be able to prioritize these in some way so that they get at the top of my front-page. Or better yet, let an algorithm calculate the "importance" of the thread based on the share of upvotes to subreddit subscribers.

>2. They are smart people. Contrary to popular beliefs, not every redditor is abour lolcats

I think the correct way to put it is that there are smart people. However, right now the majority of them are in different subreddits.

>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).

Well, I love the serious nature of HN. In some way it is like the old time Usenet discussions. The only thing I do not like about HN is the heavy nit-picking. But I can live with that in exchange of the really interesting discussion. I came here after leaving Slashdot, due to the decline in quality (there is so much Technology Politics I can stand).

>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?

Yes! this is the great value of reddit. IMO It is like a new type of Usenet. BTW, If you have taken an AI class, I would recommend you to go for that, as I am sure you are going to "touch" ML themes on that. Otherwise, if you are specifically interested in ML then go for it :)

newredditor2• 15 years ago

That is something someone should work on, instead of making a new social aggregation site. The new site will be good for one or two years, then it will hit mainstream and lolcats will ensue. I have heard many people say that if you want to determine how popular one social site is then you just have to calculate the number of mames per post in the public or most general stream.

Well, I love the serious nature of HN

I never said subreddits are not serious. Most of the posts portray the same quality as HN (many a times even more than HN IMHO, maybe there is a section common between the two sites). The problem is, HN is never not serious. That does not seem right to me. I must be able to joke about my work. We also don't have to be judgmental about other people's work. Its one thing to criticize someone's library because it has a badly designed API and it is quite other thing to tell game programmers they are wasting their talent in their own selected job.

I think the correct way to put it is that there are smart people. However, right now the majority of them are in different subreddits.

The correct way to put it is, that if you cannot find smart people on reddit, you are looking in the wrong subreddit. Of course you are not going to find smart people on every damn reddit. After all reddit is a general purpose site and thus many people are not what you would consider "smart". Damn, there are people who come to reddit "just to have a good time". Fools they are. Internet is all about having intelligent discussions dammit ;)

I do not think they are comparable at all. Maybe we could compare r/technology to HN, but the idea of the subreddits is exactly to cover a wide breadth of topics.

I posted it here because I have read many, many times that HN is much better than reddit. That reddit is soon gonna die or something equivalent. No hard feelings, but I despise such proclamations if not the people who make them.

Ready For a Reddit Replacement?

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