Google Insights: HN vs. Reddit vs. Digg

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=reddit%2C%20hacker%20news%2Cdigg&cmpt=q

by solipsist • 15 years ago

71 44 15 years ago

google.com

neuromancer2600• 15 years ago

When looking at their daily uniques, reddit's upward trend is not that significant:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2C+digg.com%2...

What I find more funny are the trends on Compete:

Reddit: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/

Digg: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/

HN: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/news.ycombinator.com/

Kittynana• 15 years ago

I'm confused as to what's being measured in OP's link vs. your links. Is the OP's link measuring number of searches and your trends link measuring the number of daily visitors?

Also, I know the reddit admins have mentioned a number of times that third-party statistics about their visitor count are wildly wrong.

raldi2• 15 years ago

Those numbers are guesses and estimates. Here's the graph of uniques that actually comes from reddit's Google Analytics data:

https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en...

polshaw• 15 years ago

Worth mentioning that is by cookies..

I visit reddit from a desktop, laptop, and smartphone. and probably 2 browsers on the desktop. So that would show me up as 4 entries. I would not be suprised if the average was at 2 cookies per unique-human-visitor.

zitterbewegung• 15 years ago

Sort of disturbing that for reddit jailbait and reddit jailbait are so high. I am guessing that is for that content and not because of the cnn report on reddit...

JoachimSchipper• 15 years ago

Yes, jailbait was one of the top search terms before that story.

Note that the jailbait reddit has been closed: http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbait (SFW). Of course, there is still a lot of material: http://www.reddit.com/r/truejailbait (SFW, but don't click the links).

blutonium• 15 years ago

It's because 4chan ran a campaign to get it there, not because of the content.

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

I hadn't heard that, but it sounds about right.

noactually• 15 years ago

no actually it's because teenage girls are extremely sexually attractive to most men, of any age, and they enjoy masturbating to pictures of them. get over it.

Achshar• 15 years ago

What is the motive? Comparing the whole of reddit with HN will do no good. Obviously reddit has more users because of its diverse set of sub reddits. Or is there anything i am missing here?

code_duck• 15 years ago

We all know that Reddit is far more large than HN. To me, the chart serves to illustrate how far Digg has fallen, and that reddit's profile has risen far above Digg's greatest height. Meanwhile, HN is steadily gaining ground, albeit in a much more narrowly focused area of topics, as you note.

maaku• 15 years ago

That's how I read it--the HN comparison was just for vanity's sake.

parfe• 15 years ago

>Or is there anything i am missing here?

You should probably consider why you felt defensive about HN.

latch2• 15 years ago

Off topic, but Google's inability to know that I speak english (even though I'm logged in and I've configured various of its services with this information), is mind boggling. Seriously, how does my search-language setting not override my IP?

AdamTReineke• 15 years ago

Is your browser sending the wrong language? http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities

latch2• 15 years ago

It's sending en-US, but as others have pointed out, server-side user settings should > browser headers and ip address.

phylofx• 15 years ago

I agree. Google doesn't respect the Accept-Language header, just the location. It's really mind-boggling, and that has been the case for ages.

sceaj• 15 years ago

Google sort of respects the header, but my experience has been that the behavior is odd.

I was working on adding localization to a web site, and so changed my headers to prefer Japanese. I accidentally left this on when I visited AdWords. I put English back to the top, but it took a week or so of manually changing the interface back to English for it to stick. Took one time to get it in Japanese, and about 50 to get it back to English.

GigabyteCoin• 15 years ago

Perhaps most/many google users do not own their computers?

How annoying would it be for hundreds of internet cafe customers in China or India to search google only to realize it is in English because some foreigner changed the value?

jsnell• 15 years ago

Sure, ip geolocation is a very strong hint about what languge should be used. But being logged in and having set the language should override everything else, and I don't see how a hypothetical shared computer scenario would change that. It's a shame that's not always the case on some Google sites, though you can usually work around it for a while by adding a hl=en URL parameter.

kbutler• 15 years ago

In Chrome on Mac, I open Preferences, Under the Hood, Languages and Spell-checker Settings..., drag another language to the top of the list, and Google starts giving me whatever language I put on top.

I'm a native English speaker, so I only do this for testing app i18n support, but it seems straightforward (if cumbersome) to me.

lukeholder• 15 years ago

just visited digg for the first time in about ~1 year. Wow, front page articles with 21 diggs that's shockingly less than it used to be.

dhughes• 15 years ago

It's sad isn't it?

It's like a tabloid rag now, the owners of digg should just get it over with and let TMZ buy it.

vinhboy• 15 years ago

I am not familiar with the aftermath of the digg fiasco, does anyone know if they ever tried back peddling?

If it was me, I would return the site back to what it was, and apologize profusely...

snarkyturtle• 15 years ago

IIRC, they did try to backpedal but by then they'd lost a fair chunk of their userbase, so they rolled out the new features again.

DanielN• 15 years ago

I'm not convinced that they want to backpedal at this point. They get the sponsored content and users that they wanted (or whatever it was the changes were that upset everyone). And frankly, the content is a lot better now than I ever remember it being.

lkrubner• 15 years ago

That would mean admitting you were wrong. Better to blame it on others, blame it on bad technology, blame it on your programmers and blame it on your VP of Engineering. That is the way Kevin Rose chose to play it.

I think it is reasonable to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Kevin Rose badly misplayed the situation.

Please read:

As Digg Struggles, VP Of Engineering Is Shown The Door http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/digg-struggles-vp-engineeri...

This manages to be defensive and offensive and stupidly self-centered:

Kevin Rose Responds To Digg Criticism On Diggnation, Mostly Tells Users To Chill http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/kevin-rose-responds-to-digg...

Kevin tried to place a lot of the blame on Cassandra, saying the technology was not read for prime time, but the community pushed back in a big way and insisted that Cassandra was not the problem with Digg. If Cassandra had been the real problem, then Digg would have given up on it, but they did not:

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/08/digg-not-likely-to-give-up-on-c...

http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for-Digg-v4s-tech...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669645

obtu• 15 years ago

They had cleared most of the comments database, which is massive incompetence. I don't think they had any fallback plan.

ChrisArchitect• 15 years ago

they backpeddled much much later by 'reintroducing' some of the aspects of the site that were there before. Thing was, it was really quite a long time after all of the users had left. Initially, imo, the real problem was the shock of change and some serious downtime/bugs in the first 2-4 weeks is what killed it. As an active, dedicated user, not being able to use the site for so long left me no choice but to drop it from my daily habits.

devs10102• 15 years ago

its amusing that a site like digg which was fairly widely popular is now only as popular as a niche site like Hacker News. Don't get me wrong, Hacker News is, IMO far and away much better than either Digg or Reddit but both of those sites have much broader appeal. Digg shot themselves in the foot

4ad2• 15 years ago

Every site exhibits some kind of bias which appeals to a certain class of people making the site better in the eyes of that particular group.

Every reddit and 4chan user would tell you that their site is superior to every other similar site.

Generally, this is good for everyone.

There are many comparisons that could be made between different sites that share some traits, but which one is the best is not something you can quantify.

devs10102• 15 years ago

Thats why its my opinion, I said IMO, IMO it is better that those sites and no one else can dispute what my opinion is

andrewfelix• 15 years ago

Great to see HN getting more readers. But I'm scared for the future of commenting. More readers != more intelligent commenting.

peteretep• 15 years ago

Either I've grown up a whole lot in the last two years (possible), or the influx of new Redditors from ... well, everywhere ... pretty much killed the appeal the place had for me. It lost its exclusive feel, and now a 'Redditor' is just any random American college kid.

It's HN that I check when I wake up or when I'm bored now - comments here are likely to be things I want to read.

dbattaglia• 15 years ago

For me its the mix of juvenile college kids and (as Steve Yegge pointed out) the Simpson's "Comic Book Guy" type meta-commenters that drive me nuts. 4/5 times I hit the "load more comments" link I feel a deep sense of regret. =P

xxiao• 15 years ago

used to digg a lot, not so in the last few years. kevin rose is a joke, just get over with it and disappear.

gcb2• 15 years ago

see here for some better perspective:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=reddit%2Chacker%20n...

kittxkat• 15 years ago

wow, did reddit actually outnumber 4chan? impossible, no?

gcb2• 15 years ago

well, 4chan had the worst case of DoS attacks on the time reddit line rose like crazy in that graph...

maybe this shed a light on the culprit? :D ...also, fueling the conspiracy theory, the week it was back, moot left a sticky post on /b/ about how much superior reddit was, practically calling out a DoS there. i guess it backfired.

...and maybe we can call it the best marketing campaign ever?

dspillett• 15 years ago

The surpriing take-away from that graph, assuming we take Google searches as an accurate measure of course, is that the popularity of Digg was steadily falling long before The Event. Of course being a eaily typed domain name (though that counts for reddit too) and people having it bookmarked will reduce the number of occurances where people neeed to search for it over time, so we should probably take these figures with a pinch of salt.

JeremyBanks• 15 years ago

Digg hit its peak and began to decline in May 2007. This is exactly when the HDDVD fiasco happened. I believe this was Digg's first major user revolt and it was responsible for many users (myself included) moving over to Reddit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

This seems forgotten in most discussions.

Google Insights: HN vs. Reddit vs. Digg

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