Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

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>Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.

Could somebody please explain this sentiment to me? I feel like all the "cool kids" are constantly falling over one another to talk about who hates digg the most.

Is there some trove of horrible things that Kevin Rose has done floating around somewhere or something? I used to watch diggnation every week, and he genuinely seemed like an incredibly nice guy. Why so much hate for him? He's living what I think a lot of us dream about. He's got an incredibly popular website, he's got tons of funding, he's got lots of very brilliant engineers working for him, and he's really really young...

He's living the freaking life, guys, and as far as I can tell he hasn't ever done anything to deserve all the hatred.

As far as digg itself goes...why is it always being comparied to reddit? To me, this is about as apt as comparing reddit to msnbc.com; they're not even in the same category of websites.

Digg is very link-centric. It's all about links, lots an lots of links.

Reddit, on the other hand, is all about comments.

I guess a good comparison would be youtube vs some very popular web forums. On reddit, it's all about the discussion. the comment system they put together is freaking outstanding (when it's working), and that is why people go to the site. Digg is more like youtube; nobody really cares about youtube comments (they're mostly crap anyway), they're there for the video.

Digg and reddit are fundamentally different. Please stop comparing them, and please let me know what it is that everybody hates so much about the former.

Why so much hate for him?

Not so much hate for him as hate for how his website has de-evolved. Early on, it was much like Slashdot or HN. When he started introducing features that benefited power-users, your chances of getting your own stories dropped to 0 while the front page was filled with Cracked-like "top-10" lists.

They also have a whitelist of domains that can show up on the front page which turns digg into an rss feed of those sites and the occasional Reddit story that a poweruser feels like copying.

http://soshable.com/digg-whitelisted-sites/

Once a site gets huge like Digg then the trolls and monkeys of the Internet come in and ruin everything. At least that is why I stop reading digg in late 2007.

>nobody really cares about youtube comments (they're mostly crap anyway)

This is true for funny 30-second videos with millions of views and the like, but there are plenty of youtube videos on niche subjects that will never accumulate more than a few thousand views, all from like-minded people. The comment threads on these videos are a completely different matter.

Only ever looked at Digg a few times and only at Reddit because HN has linked there a bit, but I'm wondering if the Digg hate is more a dislike of the broader community than the owner himself?

I know in the times I visited in the early days, those commenting were mostly pretty hapless and predictable.

Other than that, any success attracts haters.

Where does he say he hates Kevin Rose? Also, The National Enquirer and the New York Times aren't similar in function / category but I can still compare them. (Not to say that that'd be a completely fair analogy to Digg vs Reddit, but you get the idea.)

>Where does he say he hates Kevin Rose?

He didn't. Which is exactly why I didn't say or imply that he did. What he did say, and what I did address is expressing sadness that digg is successful. The question about the Kevin Rose hatred was a question about the general dislike for him that a lot of geeks show and was not directed at OP specifically.

>The National Enquirer and the New York Times aren't similar in function / category but I can still compare them.

And I can compare a bottle rocket to a pile of bananas, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a completely and totally worthless comparison.

I'm sure Kevin's a great guy, but his site is not him. I was regular there for a few months and there was a marked decline in link and comment quality. Eventually, I gave up and left. Many people on reddit share the same experience.

But nonetheless, I have never 'hated' on digg. The site has changed and I realize it's not for me anymore. I'm sure there are many users that love it the way it is, just not me.

Digg is compared to reddit because they are nearly identical in their function.

Digg is about comments as much as reddit is. It just so happens that the comments on reddit are slightly more intelligent and Digg is more commercialized.

My opinion about Digg has nothing to do with Kevin Rose nor is it because "all the cool kids" think so too. The communities surrounding Digg and reddit are ideologically identical to icanhazcheeseburger's. The core of the communities are founded on populism and memes.

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