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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

Reddit user of 5 years.

I don't see a Digg like exodus happening yet. I recall leaving Digg and thinking with the new version that these guys were taking the piss and completely out of touch with users.

Reddit hasn't gone quite that far but it definitely used to pride itself being a free speech platform and thats changed now - locking sub reddits is restricting ideas and behaviour despite what the admins say. You're only even in favor of free speech so long as you tolerate things that are mean, awful and sometimes even hateful. The bans, firing and lack of communications weren't a good idea and didn't result in a "safer" reddit.

I don't think Ellen Pao is the right person to run Reddit. I think Reddit is facing the same dilemma the music industry faced when they realised that their best customers were also the ones to pirate the most music.

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The Digg exodus was due, in part, to Digg rapid-fire iterating over new site-wide designs in an era when the web was still learning how to deal with things like asynchronous actions and dynamic (vs. static) content. One of the other major issues with Digg v4 that I can remember was the use of iFrames to ensure all traffic never left digg.com. This was also around the time of the Facebook "like" button earning prominence on most sites.

Long story short, EVERY user was affected by Digg's changes and bugs. The issues Reddit faces now affect only the moderators; users only feel the secondary and tertiary affects of these conflicts.

There is not yet any impetus for a mass exodus.

Excellent analysis. I suspect that the secondary and tertiary affects have a lagged but similar impact on the user base as Digg's failed redesigns.

As I recall it the problem with Digg was that preferential treatment was being given in secret for pay, or that is how things appeared. Also that a voting ring had been established such that ordinary users could never get stories off the bottom spots - they simply got duplicated by part of the 'diggerati' and the alternate story gained the early traction needed to launch it to the top pages. Thus the apparent notoriety, the focus that people crave, that pays users back for their submissions was missing from the loop. Then the redesign came and rubbed everyone up the wrong way; but it seemed to me more like the straw that broke the camel's back (i.e. the last in a line of bad things) rather than a reason in itself.

Similar things have happened at Slashdot, user disenfranchisement as the (new) owners try to screw out every last cent from the site forgetting it needs the community to be what it is. Hit with a second punch of not entirely well executed redesign and you've got problems.

But then I think HN perhaps goes the other way, the more I stay the more I hanker after some simple redesign to address the site's deficiencies (collapsing comments threads for example, spacing the up- and down-vote buttons). I'm a big believer in "if it ain't broke ..." but also consider that a design should move with browser/web developments to, in an evolving way. Mind you dang seems to do a great job with the moderating.

From my perspective as a digger during the Digg exodus it snowballed because a viable alternative existed at the time that the trigger event happened (Reddit, Digg v5).

There is no viable community for redditors to flee to this time, but there are probably dozens of teams of people spending the long weekend attempting to cobble together replacements for Reddit.

I've said elsewhere that I'm confident that Reddit will muddle through this debacle because they're the only game in town. But a highly-active contingent of their user-base is now in play, competitors will appear on the horizon over the next few months to draw them away, and they may succeed.

Part of that is there doesn't seem to be a great alternative yet. Even Voat doesn't cut it. Simply different dynamics to the Digg migration. Reddit set the bar way higher and there is no better alternative yet.

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