> For me, personally, we never really thought about Reddit too much. It was always just this poorly designed site that was slowly gaining traction.
It's also an amazing lack of understanding the competitive marketspace you're operating in.
The reason digg took off was because of two things, content + community. reddit also had those things (with an emphasis on communit(ies)). The digg team just simply didn't understand that they had the second piece. They thought they just had content + comments.
If you look at all of the efforts during Digg's lifecycle, from Digg labs to the redesigns, there was a clear lack of understanding of the need for the community part. From the endless lab projects showing submissions (content) in different ways, to the almost anarchic gamesmanship of gangs of submitters acting as de facto rule makers in the absence of a community guiding presence from digg (and digg's lack of understanding why these kinds of user cliques are bad), to the v4 debacle which was purely a content focused effort...digg never quite got the + community part...which reddit was simply designed to excel at.
It's also an amazing lack of understanding the competitive marketspace you're operating in.
The reason digg took off was because of two things, content + community. reddit also had those things (with an emphasis on communit(ies)). The digg team just simply didn't understand that they had the second piece. They thought they just had content + comments.
If you look at all of the efforts during Digg's lifecycle, from Digg labs to the redesigns, there was a clear lack of understanding of the need for the community part. From the endless lab projects showing submissions (content) in different ways, to the almost anarchic gamesmanship of gangs of submitters acting as de facto rule makers in the absence of a community guiding presence from digg (and digg's lack of understanding why these kinds of user cliques are bad), to the v4 debacle which was purely a content focused effort...digg never quite got the + community part...which reddit was simply designed to excel at.