Saturday, August 25, 2007

when bloggers rumble: reddit vs. digg

I was amused when I read this entry lambasting reddit, "Five reasons why I don't use reddit for social bookmarking." And not because I hoped he'd use del.icio.us -- after all, reddit isn't a social bookmarking site (but that's for another blog post). I enjoyed the nice photoshopping of our respective logos: +10 points for using the under appreciated dead alien logo.

Florchakh enumerated his 5 reasons and even aided the reader with the subtle visual cue of ALL CAPS. Spoiler: the 5 reasons are "reddit is UGLY, CONFUSING, SLOW, MESSED UP, and BORING."

Fair enough. I was a bit confused when I read "SLOW," as I know how adamant Steve has been about keeping the site snappy, but it turned out Florchakh was just having trouble getting caught up in our submission rate-limiter. Incidentally, it's something we use to keep down spammers.

As long as he still thinks the site loads quickly.

After digesting the feedback, I thought this was the last time I'd be seeing this entry, but I was wrong.

It turned out one of the reddit loyal, Jon Holato, decided to refute him. His entry, "Why Reddit Is Better Than Digg: My Reply To Florchakh’s Anti-Reddit Post", certainly has a catchy title. He even used one of my pieces of reddit propaganda: +11 points.

I'm not going to say which of these posts I agreed with, but Jon did use a nice analogy involving Google and Yahoo.

Anyway, before this escalates (when geeks fight, everyone looks like a loser -- trust me) I'd like to step in and offer each of you reddit shirts. If you'd like a shirt to wear (Jon) or burn (Florchakh) email me and I'll gladly mail one out to you.

Today is supposed to be a happy day, Chris is getting married, so hopefully this reddit-shirt-wrapped-olive-branch will be accepted and I can get back to liveblogging the wedding.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It really annoys me when people call reddit a social bookmarking site and then complain about why it's a sucky social bookmarking site. The first time I noticed someone calling it that, I assumed it was an isolated misunderstanding. Then it happened again, and again... and again. It really baffles me! How can someone think reddit is a social bookmarking site? Then I realized a lot of people's complaints about reddit probably come from the fact that they're trying to use it like a social bookmarking site when it's not.

alexis [kn0thing] said...

I feel your pain, Melissa. I've written an entry I'll probably finally post tomorrow about social bookmarking (and how reddit isn't a social bookmarking site).

You might be on to something though, because we definitely see that kind of "I'll submit everything I want to bookmark" behavior.

It makes me sad :-(