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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me that digg is having a myspace moment. It's failed to keep up with innovation as the world has changed around it. Digg's value-add has been left in the dust by more targeted sites (reddit, HN, even twitter, facebook, failblog, 4chan, etc.), and they can't fix that problem without fundamentally reinventing digg.

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They did just fundamentally reinvent Digg. That's the problem. They went from being the largest community on the web to being an RSS reader where all the feeds suck and there's no way to change them.

(Technically you can change them, but what I'm describing is the experience that 95% of the users will now have with the site.)

Good call. Digg watchers and insiders speak in hushed tones about "the algorithm" and how hopefully Digg will tweak it to great effect.

On Reddit you get an open source system with a one-stop appliance for any would-be submitters. The comment sorting algorithm is explained in a blog post by the xkcd guy (http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...).

On the flip side, reddit may not be profitable.

> reddit may not be profitable.

Considering they just had to beg for donations...

There's a difference between "not profitable" and "not profitable enough."

Also a difference between "not profitable because they can't be" and "not profitable because they refuse to be".

Reddit is having financial issues because Conde Naste does not give them any money. I assume they are taking money from what little they make from ads.

Reddit Gold was an immense success, allowing them to spin up a number of virtual servers.

Speaking as one, I noticed the slowness and time-out problems basically went away as soon as they spun up those servers.

Whatever the financial relationship with Conde Nast, Reddit Gold is definitely a success.

HN might benefit from that.

The concept of Digg before was fine all they needed to do was remove the power from the power users so everyone gets a shot at hitting the front page.

Now user submits are really hard to hit the front page since their idea of a change algorithm is allowing auto submissions to hit front page with less than 30 diggs while user submits need over 100.

I'm not sure any of those sites are more innovative than Digg. I do think that you're right though that ultimately MySpace was doomed by its own community, which is similar to Digg. It's a catch-22 really, do you decide to turn your back on your current community to grow?

Facebook did, or at least turned its side, when it opened the site to everyone instead of just college students.

4chan and innovation? Wha?

At least when it comes to internet culture, it's where a lot of stuff originates these days--- the same jokes and memes will eventually filter down to digg/reddit/elsewhere a bit later. Sort of the role that SomethingAwful, Fark, and digg have played at various times, to various extents.

That's community, not tech innovation.

Sure, but digg (like most social media companies) has always been more about innovation on the social side than on the technical side. The actual technical meat behind digg or twitter isn't what made them successful; finding a way to make themselves the center of certain kinds of culture is.

Innovation is what happens when you take the friction out of a community.

moot can't really build much on the platform he adopted from 2chan. He's probably going to innovate in the web community / imageboard space with his new startup Canvas.

Well they added Captchas recently, if that counts. I suspect it doesn't.

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