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Filtering Reddit and Hacker News

engtech — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:38:35 +0000

Giles had a fantastic rant this week that cut to the heart of what’s wrong with all of these “social web application sites”:

People who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it – to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking.

It’s analogous to what’s wrong with the entire massively online roleplaying game genre (eg: World of Warcraft) in that success is a greater factor of the time invested than of skill or talent. Many social web applications add extra features to keep the users interacting with the site, even if this interaction offers dubious value to their lives.

It’s a Game and We’re All Losers

Is it more important for a site to be useful or to be sticky?

The worst obstacle of all is the system of upmodding and downmodding comments. Your search for news becomes derailed into a video game – anything which involves computers and scoring points ultimately becomes a video game – and as video games go, it isn’t a lot of fun. It sure as hell isn’t Tetris.

Worse yet, it’s almost ubiquitous. If you’re highly vulnerable to distraction, this game will steal your time. We should all know that it’s an incompetent social networking strategy because it comes from Slashdot originally – a site which specializes in crashing innocent servers so that nerds have an excuse to swear at each other – but despite this horrible pedigree, it’s a very popular approach. Every site which uses this approach inevitably ends up hated by former users, so it’s kind of weird that the approach is so popular, but there’s an easy explanation. The ultimate reason, of course, is a mistaken belief – specifically, the idea that user numbers are a better metric for Web app success than usefulness. This implies that anything which generates more traffic is inherently better. But purely for the sake of argument, let’s abandon this 1997 mentality and ask ourselves how useful a site like Reddit or Hacker News can ever really be.

When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site. Votes appear to be free, like contribution is with Wikipedia, but in reality you have to register to vote, and you have to be there frequently for your votes to make much difference. So the votes aren’t really free – they cost time. If you do the math, it’s actually quite obvious that if your popularity contest for ideas inherently, by its structure, favors people who waste their own time, then your contest will produce winners which are actually losers. The most popular ideas will not be the best ideas, since the people who have the best ideas, and the ability to recognize them, also have better things to do and better places to be.

I use social networking sites as information gatekeepers, but when time invested is the greatest factor of success then the people who are most successful will be the ones who invest the most time. You have to ask yourself if those are the people whom you want to be shaping and seeding your thoughts and ideas. Popularity contests always reduce the discussion to the lowest common denominator between the participants. Is that what you want to limit yourself to?

Delicious Gets It

Delicious remains one of the few “web2.0″ sites that has been around for a long time and maintained a ridiculously high signal to noise ratio, mainly because the programmers wanted to avoid the social networking devolution:

As the population gets larger, the bias drifts; del.icio.us/popular becomes less interesting to the original community members. Work out ways to let the system fragment in to different areas of attention.

“Spam is attention theft” – that’s one of the reasons del.icio.us doesn’t have a top 10 links of all time – it’s an attractive nuisance.

When you’ve figured out someone is spamming, don’t let them know – let them keep posting and just silently junk their stuff. Automatic tags lose a lot – doesn’t help the user really achieve their goals. That’s why the “add to del.icio.us” badges don’t let you suggest tags. Value in Delicious is in the “attention” – auto-tagging detracts from this.

Measure behavior rather than claims. del.icio.us doesn’t have stars because why would you bookmark something that was no good? This way people bookmark things that they really care about rather than trying to tell the system things.

It’s a tool. The community can grow elsewhere. No threading etc. “del.icio.us sux” is an awful experience I’d rather user’s didn’t have.

The only way to make sense of this information glut is by having the appropriate filters in place.

Filter Reddit and Hacker News

I decided to solve Giles’ problem with Hacker News / Reddit and create a Greasemonkey script that lets you maintain a personal ban list.

Click on the “ban site” link beside any site you never want to see again on Hacker News or Reddit. You can edit your list of banned sites at any time.

Your personal list of banned sites lives in your web browser and is shared between Reddit and Hacker News. Use it to remove the most popular sites so you can pay more attention to the long tail, or to cut out the domains you already read using RSS. It’s your web.

Click here to install the script (you will need Greasemonkey and Firefox).

Crunching the Friend Feed Stats to Find the Most Popular Web Apps

engtech — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:02:54 +0000

One of the nicest things about the Internet is that if you sit on your ass for long enough, someone will code up whatever little side project you’re thinking about starting. In my case, I was interested in finding out general statistics about Friend Feed as a tape measure of how popular certain social bookmarking sites are. Enter Friend Feed Stats. Thank you, lazyweb.

What Is the Most Popular Web Service?

Ben has even broken up the stats by web service. Twitter leads the pack, account for 50% of the total items on Friend Feed. With the latest changes allowing you to merge the commenting interface with Twitter, I rapidly see Friend Feed as becoming my Twitter web client instead of the twitter.com site. All they have to do is give you a quick way to send tweets, and make the “reply on Twitter” option a default plus include the 140 character counter.

Trend #1: 90% of the Friend Feed participation comes from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). 46% of that comes from Twitter. It’s not surprising that Twitter leads the pack, because the nature of the service makes it easy to update many times a day.

The bottom 12 services (not include the ones added this week) can’t even manage to scrape 1% of the total between them (Pandora, Ma.gnolia, Upcoming, Picasa, iLike, Google Shared, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Furl, Yelp, Zooomr, SmugMug).

The blog number might be inflated because people could be using it as “generic RSS”. I was a little shocked to see that Google Reader shares were more popular that Delicious bookmarks, but it is easier to share on Google Reader than del.icio.us.

Tumblr is doing surprisingly well as a blogging platform.

In the instant messenger space, Twitter kills all. I hope Google got whatever mobile phone smarts they needed for Android from Jaiku because Twitter would have been such a better buy.

In the social voting space, Digg is the winner, with StumbleUpon giving a good showing. Reddit is pretty weak.

In the social bookmarking space, Delicious and Google Reader are king. Together they account for 17x the participation of Ma.gnolia, Google Shared Stuff (the Google equiv to delicious that NO ONE uses), and Furl.

In the social music space, Last.FM is kicking ass.

In social video, YouTube all the way.

In social photos, Flickr wins big, with Picasa showing a small but not insignificant number.

Trend #2: the top web service in every category is the first notable major player in that space. The copycats are barely blips on the radar. Of course, the Friend Feed audience is almost entirely early adopters who read blogs, so it isn’t surprising that they’d be early adopters for other services as well.

But it shows that you can’t ignore the Network Effect. People will use the service that the people they want to network with use. Once an incumbent has a critical market share, it is very hard to oust them.

Trend #3: the social bookmarking space is dead, dead, dead. Delicious has always held the lions share of the space, but Google managed to come in sideways and leverage their RSS reader to become as popular as Delicious. Everyone else is burning VC money.

Google vs Yahoo vs Microsoft?

This is a trick question, because Microsoft doesn’t have any web services supported by Friend Feed

Google: Google Reader, YouTube, Jaiku, GTalk, Picasa, Google Shared Stuff
Yahoo: Delicious, Flickr, Upcoming

Google and Yahoo are very competitive with each other, but neither hold a candle to Twitter. Is the huge intersection between the Twitter user base and Friend Feed skewing the stats? I think so.

Trend #4: Friend Feed needs to nurture its Twitter audience without becoming Twitter. With half the traffic on Friend Feed being Twitter messages, it would be easy for them to overwhelm the service and destroy the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where Friend Feed is a glorified Twitter client.

Exit Strategies?

Trend #5: there are some great web services out there that are still in startup mode – (Twitter, Digg, Tumblr, Friend Feed) but is their anyone other than Google/Microsoft to buy them? Yahoo has enough going on now that I don’t see them buying any other companies in the foreseeable future. If Google doesn’t have to compete with Yahoo on web apps, is there the same incentive for purchasing other companies?

Amazon has found a great niche in providing infrastructure for these web apps, but I don’t see them buying web apps and integrating them under the Amazon umbrella. EBay bought StumbleUpon and CBS bought Last.FM but are they really looking to expand their portfolios in this space?

I’ve said before that the average person can only handle up to six social web app sites, and I’m finding that Friend Feed makes it easier for me to consolidate that all to one site (bringing the number up to 10). But it’s still evident that a small number of sites have the majority of users, while people haven’t even heard of the rest of them. Monetization isn’t even an option for many sites because they’re providing wants, not needs.