Five reasons why I don’t use Reddit for social bookmarking
Reddit Alien vs the Digg Shovel Guy
When I started writing this post, I was thinking about listening ten reasons, as you see finally I decided to share only five major ones. Let’s say the rest might be a little bit discussing. You know there’s a opportunity for Reddit fanboy to appear so it will be better if I don’t give him good arguments to start the fight within comment discussion below my writings.
#1 Reddit is ugly
First time when I saw the design it seemed a bit too simple. For the second time, it seemed definitely too simple. If you ever need an example of simplicity done wrong, head over Reddit. Seriously, it looks like crap; I don’t think I could name any other popular site looking as bad as this one!
#2 Reddit is confusing
There are no descriptions for submitted stories; also, the site doesn’t show the number of points that a newly submitted link has got so far. One can say it gives a better chance at judging a story by the community BUT thanks to that fact the users looking for fresh content are always forced to swim in the cesspit of everything that gets submitted to the site. It doesn’t seem like many of the like to swim across endless stream of spam, content listed on Reedit changes slowly. This leads us to the next heading.
#3 Reddit is so slow
Thanks to much smaller amount of users this service has a much slower rate of submission than Digg. Today I’ve got the news about 84 years old man that still drives his first car — the very same URL got popular on Digg something like a week ago. What kind of fresh content is does this make? The refreshed one, perhaps.
#4 Reddit is SO messed up…
The biggest group of interests always controls the front page. Even though I actively downvote all the links I don’t like seeing there (American politics, American Media, American airlines, all other stuff that may be interesting only for someone living in the USA), I still get the crap on my “personalized” homepage. Can’t the algorithm really learn that I’m not much into things like Walmart, Baloon Boy, Sarah Palin?
#5 Reddit is boring
The major reason why I don’t use Reddit. There’s no way to figure out how the userbase choose the stuff to upvote. At a time of writing this post, my personalized homepage shows only 3 URLs I find relatively interesting. This isn’t much impressive for a total number of 25, isn’t it?
Update!
This post is a travesty. I mean — seriously — it really is. I was wandering if it’s really enough to pick up the right topic (Digg, flame war with Reddit), list 10 nonsense things, and add a funny picture. Turns out, it was.
The thing almost went popular; even though eventually I did not manage to put 10 things on my list, Digg users started to vote this up. That’s just too bad I missed with that submission, I think I would try to actively help it out reach some more!
Or maybe not. The previous version of this post was an epic crime on English grammar like most of my other old blog postings (deleted, now they’re history); I just made a little revision, leaving such a neat thing untouched would be a shame!
Here’s a comment from Tammany posted at August 24th, 2007. There were some more; this is the only one I find being worth keeping here:
the interface is not good but they take pride in that. 2 their credit, reddit people read articles before voting. digg people tend to vote for their friends so their friends will vote for them – and digg has a lot of corporate people digging up their articles and burying others.
if you digg a science article all the physorg.com people will bury your article. if you’re digging a tech site the arstechnica people will. Both of those are just middlemen sites but they are on the front page every day because it is easy to get articles buried and only theirs remain.
I mostly do tech but it may happen in politics 2. None is perfect but reddit gives every site a fair chance. digg doesn’t care about burying as long as it’s the popular people doing it.
Reddit is less easy to game
