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Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

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Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#31

Post by davidw »

leoedin wrote: post #24
18pfsmt wrote: post #21

I must admit I'm nauseated by the number of references to reddit on HN. I think reddit is powerful and fills a void, but the few times I've visited > cmnd+w. Twitter is also useful on occasion, but simply not my "cup of tea." These sites feel like eternal September, and make me consider suicide (not to over-dramatize...).

I think to a certain extent 3 or 4 years ago Reddit was very much like HN is now. When I first joined Reddit (2007) there was generally a lot of reasoned discussion, and the submissions were very much programmer orientated in a way that's long since passed. I'd imagine (although I suppose I have no real evidence for this) that the people who talk about Reddit and HN in the same context were active on Reddit a few yea…

A lot of us discovered reddit when Paul Graham mentioned it in an essay.

It was pretty cool in the beginning, but then it started tending towards Ron Paul, and various political stories rather than stuff that was actually interesting. And thus, HN...

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#32

Post by leoedin »

willvarfar wrote: post #26
leoedin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think to a certain extent 3 or 4 years ago Reddit was very much like HN is now. When I first joined Reddit (2007) there was generally a lot of reasoned discussion, and the submissions were very much programmer orientated in a way that's long since passed. I'd imagine (although I suppose I have no real evidence for this) that the people who talk about Reddit and HN in the same context were active on Reddit a few yea…

(blog author) yes I was rather hoping this blog post would turn up on proggit and, instead of hate-clicking, there'd be a discussion about rediscovering proggit's past. I've tried to think of solutions before too: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-... Being pro-content anti-community is not so popular over on proggit ;)

It's nice to get confirmation! I did once get a lot of comment upvotes lambasting the poor quality of comments on the science reddit, but frankly I think the sheer size of the reddit community will make it very, very hard to return to how it was. The culture that seems to be pushed by a subset of (mostly non-technical) reddit users is largely incompatible with the culture that I (and I assume others) are looking for in a social news site.

There are of course some areas of reddit which maintain a largely engaged user base willing to make in depth and interesting comments, but they tend to be rare, hard to find and often suffer from the mainstream reddit culture being dragged in by more casual visitors.

Perhaps we have to simply resign ourselves to a migration between social news platforms every few years.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#33

Post by willvarfar »

18pfsmt wrote: post #28
willvarfar wrote: post #4

According to my own mining, I should have waited a few hours before posting this :) Anyway, some time next week I'll be in a position to add a line describing the success of "deeply meta" posts like this one ;) We just have to get someone to post it to proggit too, I guess. And perhaps dzone...

As an amateur, beginner programmer, I'm curious why you don't use something like Jekyll+S3 rather than tumblr. The dude that pulls my espresso shots uses tumblr...

Its a good question.

Despite wishing they'd hire people to add features http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18002362007/tumbl... (note the comment there from someone using Google Pages + Jekyll), I'm generally happy enough not to invest time nor money in self-hosting or paid hosting.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#34

Post by 18pfsmt »

aw3c2 wrote: post #27
18pfsmt wrote: post #21

I must admit I'm nauseated by the number of references to reddit on HN. I think reddit is powerful and fills a void, but the few times I've visited > cmnd+w. Twitter is also useful on occasion, but simply not my "cup of tea." These sites feel like eternal September, and make me consider suicide (not to over-dramatize...).

To enjoy Reddit (nowadays) you have to select specific sub-reddits you are interested in. It can be very interesting and nice then.

Personally, I will never use reddit, no matter the subreddits, or whatever. Usenet and IRC are new again; killfiles and /ignore are powerful, and user-focused.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#35

Post by [deleted] »

aw3c2 wrote: post #27
18pfsmt wrote: post #21

I must admit I'm nauseated by the number of references to reddit on HN. I think reddit is powerful and fills a void, but the few times I've visited > cmnd+w. Twitter is also useful on occasion, but simply not my "cup of tea." These sites feel like eternal September, and make me consider suicide (not to over-dramatize...).

To enjoy Reddit (nowadays) you have to select specific sub-reddits you are interested in. It can be very interesting and nice then.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#36

Post by joshuahedlund »

> Nobody actually follows the links in tweets though; click-through is often in the low digits per tweet

Tweet click-through data is obscured in Google Analytics because anyone who clicks from a mobile app shows up as a "direct" hit because there is no referring URL. There's some speculation and evidence[1] that this, at least in some cases, shows up as "Mozilla Compatible Agent".

[1] http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/02/15/why-simply-believing-se...

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#37

Post by willvarfar »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #36

> Nobody actually follows the links in tweets though; click-through is often in the low digits per tweet Tweet click-through data is obscured in Google Analytics because anyone who clicks from a mobile app shows up as a "direct" hit because there is no referring URL. There's some speculation and evidence[1] that this, at least in some cases, shows up as "Mozilla Compatible Agent". [1] http://www.seo-theory.com/2012/0…

I've assigned the t.co domain trickle to Twitter.

The 'reactions' thing on Disqus doesn't seem 100% sadly.

Mouse-hovering over those reactions can be a nice pat on the back, when the reaction system works.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#38

Post by danssig »

radicalbyte wrote: post #3

> A comment on HN is going to be mature and reasoned; often expanding or exploring technical issues raised That's what I love about HN : the content of comments here are of a very high quality. It's something that I've noticed with my own posts - well reasoned comments attract a lot of positive karma. Even if you're taking a controversial stance on an issue.

This is true. Historically, I've gotten the most points on posts I posted expecting massive downvotes on due to their controversial nature.

Re: Reddit vs Hacker News vs Twitter

#39

Post by RollAHardSix »

nikcub wrote: post #19
kijin wrote: post #8

> The per-page time is actually quite high; often over 5 minutes on average for a lot of my stories even when its a big crowd. I suspect some subtle misreading of Google Analytics on my part, or else people might actually be reading the whole thing carefully!? That might be because a lot of people do what I do: keep the article open while browsing comments on HN or Reddit, and switch back and forth between the two ta…

This is why I wrote my own datapoint gathering script (I started it while at Techcrunch, curious about who scrolls down to comments, etc.). It measures body focus, number of times unfocused, total focus time, scroll position, scroll rate and a bunch of other things. It isn't completely working cross-browser yet, but it is close and useful enough where for Safari and Chrome visitors I can see how far down the page the…

This sounds extremely useful, would you consider opening the script for public usage?
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