Hacker News Reader

Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

The great irony here, is that Reddit is making the same foolish mistake Digg did with a redesign, costing them their entire userbase, and propelling Reddit.

View on HN

The difference, though, is Reddit has no peers. The closest I'm aware of is Voat, which is basically the Isle of Misfit Toys for Reddit's banned hate speech subs.

Spinning up another Reddit clone, with some nice new features is trivial at this point. You provide a reason for someone to spend time filling a void, and they will.

Very tricky. Reddit is an awesome website not because of any technical reasons. There are both HUGE and very niche communities in reddit. It's really hard to get them. This is not a CS problem, this is a sociology problem.

Eh, I didnt really need a "peer" to replace reddit. After the redesign I just stopped going for the most part; I'm here or on google news if I'm just killing time. I'll still search reddit if I want to see a discussion about a specific subject, but even then I'm mostly looking at 1-2 year old threads. I feel like the content is in a feedback loop with the redesign, and they're both killing the host.

Not sure your age, but I think a lot of us are just growing up, and we're seeking more stable, intelligent news sources. I stopped using Reddit a couple years prior to the redesign. HN and Google News satisfy my news niche as well.

Out of curiosity, why Google News specifically? I stopped going on Reddit and mostly come here or glance at Twitter for social media. If I want news I normally go to a specific outlet's website.

Going to specific news sites always ends up with that feeling of being "captured" and hearing my own opinions repeated back to me. I'd rather read a handful of Fox News articles a month and consider if they have any valid points than just dismiss them entirely.

I always say Reddit is a combination of terrible content from Facebook, the comments from Twitter and the redesigns from Snap and Digg.

I've actually gone back to Digg for interesting stuff on the web. Interesting content, no comments and it usually has about 20-40 articles a day so I dont feel the need to check it every 5 minutes.

> combination of terrible content from Facebook, the comments from Twitter

This just shows how little you actually use or understand Reddit. I'm not sure what I'd do without subs like r/economics, r/badeconomics, r/math, r/learnmath, r/programming, r/<insert programming language here>, any number of friendly and welcoming fetish communities (that aren't just about posting porn), r/fitness, r/keto, r/running, r/weightlifting, etc.

Reddit is just an unrivaled, incredible place where information is gathered and opinions can be shared and support given.

Agreed. I've learned incredible amount from both Reddit and Hacker News. It's all about proper content selection.

Was that from actually using Reddit daily though? Or just Googling, and using Reddit as a result?

How does that matter? If the information is gathered on Reddit in an accessible, helpful and easy to understand way, it doesn't matter whether you get there from hacker news, SO, google, bing or through browsing Reddit. It's still on Reddit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com