Digg is a technology focused news site that uses social filtering to rank stories. Translated from geek-speak it means people vote on news stories that interest them, and the stories with the most votes end up on the home page where the most people will see them.
Reddit is a technology focused news site that uses social filtering to rank stories. Translated from geek-speak it means people vote on news stories that interest them, and the stories with the most votes end up on the home page where the most people will see them.
Digg is straight from the Fisher-Price school of Web 2.0 design, all rounded corners and gradient fills. It’s the new shiny happy web your grandma uses. Reddit is like a VT100 terminal, all text and minimal colour. It’s the old school web with thick glasses and a stack of textbooks next to the PC.
On the Digg homepage you’re likely to find articles on consumer electronics and IT industry gossip. On the Reddit homepage there is a good chance you’ll find the notes from a postgraduate level Computer Science course.
Digg has twenty times the traffic of Reddit
It’s interesting that two sites serving the same purpose have such drastically different cultures and designs.
I think you may be a bit confused. The screen shot you show of “reddit” is actually programming.reddit which is for programming-related links. The actual reddit has a much broader spectrum of links than digg has ever had — it’s had it since day 1 as far as I can tell: politics, world news, religion, tech, science, art, philosophy….
You are correct about the traffic differences, but despite being a startup run by a few college kids in an apartment w/o vc funding, PC World declared reddit to be superior to digg.
I compared Digg to programming.reddit.com as they both cover the same area. I didn’t make this explicit (the link goes there, the screenshot is from there, but I didn’t mention this in the text) because I didn’t think it was important for the point I was trying to make. Note that Digg is adding extra categories. Once they’re out of beta Digg and Reddit should cover the same areas.
The point of my post was merely to show how sites with the same concept can end up with very different communities, and how those communities and the site interface are mutually dependent. I tried to keep the article neutral but I admit I much prefer Reddit to Digg. In addition to better quality ilnks Reddit is fast, and Digg is dead slow. A buddy of mine once met one of the Reddit founders on a plane, so the Reddit crew are practically family to us at Untyped! More power to Reddit!