Very cool, but he's solving an imagined problem.
So was Twitter, and Blogger before that.
Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 base…
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, an…
Sounds like a challenge :)
First, this doesn't have to be for each pageview. Crudely, you want every story to have a vector in some giant hyperspace characterizing it, and every user to have a vector precomputed offline based on their previously shown affinities, and take dot products.
This is not necessarily easy, or computationally very cheap, but the payoff can be pretty big.
I believe LinkedIn runs something similar to this every night.
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#63The 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 s…
"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.
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#64Reddit'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...
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 base…
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.
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#65Reddit'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...
i like how art is classified as 'for fun' /sarcasm
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 base…
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, an…
how is it much different from the ranking engines netflix and amazon use?
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#67All 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 pr…
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).
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#68Unlike 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…
> 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 :)
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 base…
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.
Ack, I meant to say /r/AskScience when I said "/r/AskReddit is incredible".
Re: Ready For a Reddit Replacement?
#70Unlike 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…
> 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…
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.
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.