Reddit reddthat
reddit is a social news site similar to digg, it takes a democratic approach to news allowing the users to choose what is important and what is not. reddit appeals to me because the postings come and go as a somewhat slower pace than Digg which is now so famous it’s next to impossible to read the Upcoming queue due to the amount of spam and dupes located within it. reddit has a smaller community, as a result, less duplicate submissions (but lets not kid ourselves, there are plenty of dupes to be had) and a slightly more fair voting system, where posts don’t generally drop off the face of the Earth with little or no notification (on digg an article buried by any means other than innaccurate simply disappears.) Here when an article is down voted it moves gracefully off the frontpage, a little at a time, allowing others to keep it on the frontpage if it’s not agreed the article should be dismissed (a virtual tug’o'war.) Although when a new submission is entered if it gets too many down votes early on it can quickly disappear into obscurity (still findable though.) What I’d like to discuss is the drawbacks/deficiencies I see in reddit, that taint an otherwise wonderful addition to my daily reading.
RSS Feeds - Rather than taking you to the Reddit page where you can see the comments it takes you directly to the article. While I imagine some people might like this, I don’t. I do vitually all my news reading via Live Bookmarks and if I have no anchor to the comments page it’s a pain to get back there if I want to comment on the article or up/down vote it. This practically makes the feed worthless to me, in Firefox 3.0 there’s a handy option at the bottom of the RSS feed to take me to the main page but that still defeats the purpose of the feed to me.
Linking - I have two options, pretty much everything opening a new tab/window/page or nothing. What I’d really like is to click on the comments button and it takes me to the comments of a posting on the same tab, when I click on the external article it opens a new tab. This is how digg works and that’s the way I like it. If I’m not careful I end up with about 3 or 4 reddit tabs open all on the “hot” or “new” pages from various points in history.
Dupes - Remember I said reddit has less dupes? Yea, but when dupes occur they are harder to get rid of. I’ve seen the frontpage with 3 or 4 duplicate articles.
Lack of description - reddit has a problem where if the submitter doesn’t give a very descriptive title you’re essentially getting mystery meat clicking on the link. digg has this problem but it is much more rare due to the fact you have to list a title AND description, reddit has no such provisions. As a result it’s sometimes impossible to tell what you’re going to get clicking on the link… could be a well thought out article, could be goatse who knows! For example right at this very moment in the “new” queue there is a title that reads “Folder Lock” and that’s it. What is my motivation to read and up vote this article? Nothing, I would have probably ignored it weren’t for the fact I am writing this piece. When I click on it I find out it’s a download for a program that “lets you lock, hide or encrypt confidential files, [and] folders…” So wouldn’t it have made more sense to include this in the title description? Something like “Folder Lock download - Lets you lock, hide or encrypt confidential files and folders. (Windows only)”
Disappearing comments - I like to check up on my comments and see how well/bad they are doing and to check for replies and for some unknown reason some of them just never show up in my comment queue, at first I thought it was the ones that got down voted a lot but I’ve had neutral and positive ones not show up. Sometimes they come back some are never seen again. It’s weird, not really poor design but more likely a bug.
Erlang - Ok I have no problem with the language itself but DAMN does the reddit community has it hard for this language, not a day goes by that I don’t see at least one article on the frontpage giving Erlang fellatio. I never heard of this language until I came to Reddit, haven’t so much have seen it mentioned on Digg or Slashdot, although I suppose Erlang is to reddit what Ajax is to digg, instant karma/frontpage.
digg Envy - The reddit community has a serious hate on for digg, it’s much like the linux/mac vs windows rivalry. While some of their claims are valid a lot of them are based on ignorance and tin foil. One of the main ones I’ve seen published by the user jesusphreak is that digg has an editorial staff that censors anything critical to digg, simply because the warning “[Reported by Diggers as Possible Innacurate]” doesn’t show up on all the buried stories. The thing they don’t take into account is that this warning only shows up when the article is buried because diggers have reported it as innaccurate, if the article is bured because it’s lame or a dupe or old story it will not have a warning message it will simply disappear, as if by magic (word on the street is future versions of digg will show exactly why a story was buried and provide an opportunity to unbury it.) This is a flaw in digg as far as I am concerned but not as nefarious as a secret group of moderators that the reddit community seems to beleive. This is due to the gaming currently going on in Digg, it is currently under almost complete control by a select few, and Kevin Rose has promised to do something about it.
Technorati Tags: Reddit, Digg, Social News, Review, Annoyances
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