161–170 of 207 posts
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When you put it like that, I really prefer some of the precursors.
Reddit is just Usenet.
Step 1: convince your main competitor to piss of its entire user base. Step 2: ? Step 3: get Obama and other major celebrities to establish you as a media company brand.
Step 2 probably has a bunch of stuff, but includes: They posted content using fake accounts to stimulate adoption. To my recollection they allowed a lot of skeevy (illegal and/or immoral) content to proliferate. I think they probably ran at a loss for a long time; leaning heavily on volunteer personnel. ?
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Slack is just irc, Dropbox just nfs, Google just grep, Craigslist just newspaper classifieds, amazon just Walmart, Netflix just charter, hacker news just coffee shops and bars, and on and on, what's your point
> hacker news just coffee shops and bars Ok, I really follow you on the rest and the overall point. But this one … hacker news is how : delicio.us/Reddit/digg/slashdot used to be, before the network effect. I rarely talk about BRNF at bars and I don’t use drugs while reading HN.
Also I've talked about SQL, made an adobe flash joke, ML, and many other tech things at bars in the last month, with randos.
Had a good hour discussion about ChatGPT with an NFL journalist from the local paper.
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Reddit is just Usenet.
I like reddit because it's a bunch of millennials and has been from the start. My old manager, he talks all glowingly about the haydays of usenet. He's a gen-Xer. Given the equivalency of social networks features, the most important thing is just going to be the identity of the users consuming them.
I once emailed Steve with some questions about software technology choices and architecture for a new project I was on, in the early days of Reddit, and he replied with some advice.
This is not a obituary (I think?)
I ask myself on a weekly basis when old.reddit.com will disappear. And there is nothing more cruel than the new Reddit, UI-wise. Even Twitter's "threading" of conversations appears to make more sense, even though I have still not figured out how it works.
Really wish more sites were like HN where they established themselves, their purpose and what they believed in, then stuck to it. If HN cost $1/mo to use, I'd use it.
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Digg changed the way comments were threaded meaning there could be no cogent discussion in threads. I am confident that was the mortal wound to Digg.
I don't think you're wrong. Digg did not understand the core features that users valued. They assumed users would stick around through every monetization abuse they threw at them. Users put up with the "power user" bullshit (paid influencers and astroturfing) because the comments tied to those submissions could be worthwhile. I think digg's fundamental problem was they viewed their user base like a passive audience.…
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Yep, that was him. He had an admin login to their prod database. Honestly wish that signing comments was supported in more forums/aggregators. I know I can do it manually but I want verification built into the site.
Huffman also seems to be the guy who edited a list of co-founders to remove Aaron Swarz. [0] He also said - after Swarz's death - that Swarz wasn't a co-founder. 'Unpersoned', I think is the correct term for such as this. So... I'm left wondering why anyone is listening to this guy. Especially on a subject where he has been caught lying and rewriting history multiple times. 0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20201005184…
Hot take: Because their push for more users was successful, resulting in a massively large user base, the majority of which I would argue is the "lowest common denominator" crowd (read: mindless consumption) and would more quickly go, "Reddit cool, spez cool" than actually pay attention to what's happening there internally.
Edit: at the 34:00 minute mark he mentions him.