Ready For a Reddit Replacement?

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.

An HN-Twitter mashup? Sign me up!

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.

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.

    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.