Talkings of a Tyrant

If you don’t know what Reddit is, then check out my review of Reddit. It is an awesome site that allows you to submit and rank links.

Now, they’ve added comments!

However, presumably to curb the vile and flame infested comment system of digg (seriously, don’t read the comments there when you’re in a happy mood, especially about a site you like), they’ve added a reddit-like voting system.

Comments people like and are thoughtful are rated higher, whereas spam, and random hate comments seem to be in the crud levels of ratings.

Regardless of what a surprising number of people say, I think they did the Reddit comments very well. It is functional, yet easy to use.

This is an example of an excellent comment by “afabian.” You can see the rating arrows (I liked it, so I gave it a point), the number of points, etc.

It is indeed remarkably like the normal Reddit system, except you’re judged by what you write, not what you link to. And, yes, the ratings on your comments affect your karma, so don’t write crap.

As you can see here, there are three different modes of commenting, and they are very similar to their normal Reddit counterparts.

“Hot” comments are ones people really seem to like right now, “New” comments are just that, and “Top” comments are the comments of that topic that are ranked the highest.

Within each of these, you can easily switch between “Nested” and “Flat” by clicking in the top-right corner.

“Nested” comments are more-or-less chronological, with the first near the top, and the latest near the bottom. Exceptions are made for when a reply to a specific comment is made, but otherwise…

“Flat” ordered comments are shown regardless of context (by which I mean, you can’t tell what someone is replying to) and sorted from highest rank to lowest.

Conclusions

I’ve wanted reddit to have comments for quite a while, and now it is here. While it isn’t perfect, this is an excellent step for reddit. Reddit has now been opened for debate, with the karma and rating system to keep it from getting out of hand.

Good job reddit. You’ve just found yet another way to keep sucking up my free time on your site!

The one downside with the internet is also its greatest strength: too much information.

I ignore my Bloglines account for 2 days (that’s it!) and I’ve got 950+ new things to read!

The main culprits? Joystiq and Kotaku. Each account for about 200 new posts.

However, 60% of each are about topics I don’t care about. My solution? Subscribe to the individual categories. I’ll try that for a few days and see how it turns out.

Reddit has added a few more things in the last several days:

1. The ability to view post in a frame with a Reddit bar at the top. I don’t really like this one, and neither do most people (there were so many complaints that they had to switch it to ‘off’ by default). It is still useful though - you can rank the site from the Reddit bar.
2. A “recommended” page that has learned from how you rank things. This is excellently done, especially since there are upwards of 130 articles I’ve ranked. The relevence is astounding - just about all of the submittions on that page are articles I’m interested in.
   

   I still use the main page, though. I don’t trust Reddit to read my mind, and I’d never know if I missed some interesting articles if they were on a completely different topic.

3. A “Stats” page. I think it was always there, but I didn’t notice it until recently. It lists both the top 8 people in karma rankings, as well as the top 8 in what their average submittion got ranked as. I’m proud to say I’m number 3 of the top Redditors for rankings per submittion (for now…)

If you haven’t already, go check out Reddit. I’ve given it a review already, so for more information check out my review!

Reddit
Reddit - A Review :: Talkings of a Tyrant

Reddit is a rather unique site. I’ve never come across any other site that is quite like it, though Digg comes close.

When I say “Digg comes close,” I really mean, “this is Digg with a few extra steps.” It is more manageable than Digg, simpler, easier, and, strangely, funner.

Reddit is set up like so: Someone submits a website that they like. It shows up on the “Newest” list, and if people like it, they click on the up arrow. If people don’t like it, they click on the down arrow. It is a pseudo-voting system on websites.

This is most certainly web 2.0 software, as there is very little site restrictions. Anyone can post anything (as long as it isn’t adult content) and people will promote it, or demote it into oblivion. The good stuff ends up on the “Hottest” page, and the really good stuff ends up on the “top all-time” page.

Seriously, don’t visit Reddit if you value your free time on the computer. It will suck up your productivity and focus. It is that addictive.

Unlike Digg, it doesn’t have hoards of fans and users. This is probably one of reddit’s main assets, as people can more easily review and judge new links.

Also unlike Digg, instead of ranking users by simply rank (1 is the best, 1000 is the 1000th best, etc.), Reddit has a karma system. If the stuff you submit is good and people rank it highly, then you get good karma. If it is bad, you get bad karma.

Reddit does need more subscribable feeds. I would like to subscribe to other people’s submissions or something.

Just a note, you do have to register, but it is quick, painless, and asks for very little personal information.

There seems to have been a recent trend in news aggregation sites. By that, I mean there are a lot of them all of the sudden. They range pretty widely, from standard news sources to blogs, from showing the most recent news to showing the most relevant to you, etc. Don’t know what a news aggregation site is? Check out Google News. It was probably the first (or, at least, the first successful) news aggregation website.

But recently, more have been cropping up. There are four I’m going to discuss here.
Findory, Memeorandum, CommonTimes.org, and Blogniscient

Findory

Findory is a good news aggregation site. There isn’t really anything special in how it displays news, but it is very good at what news it displays. It has a good algorithm that tracks what news you read (from their site, of course) and uses that to show more and more relevant news to you. Basically, it personalizes the news it shows to your tastes.

It did this very well, and quickly learned what types of stories and what topics I’m interested in after a few runs with it. It applies this to both blog posts and general news sites, so you get the best of both worlds (in two separate columns).

The only problem, is it doesn’t really have a good overall website design appeal. It is very good at what it is intended to do, but it is rather difficult to look at a wall of text. Also, the snippets it pulls from the articles aren’t all that effective at telling what it is about. If it wants to personalize it to my tastes, it is going to need to ensure that what I’m clicking on is what I want to read. As it is, I end up just clicking on it just to find out what exactly the article says. Luckily, I can edit my viewing history.

Memeorandum

Memeorandum gets the prize for the hardest to spell name (and URL) of them all. I always get it confused with memorandum.

Memeorandum has two categories: politics and technology. It shows the hottest and most recent topics of the day, and also shows the network of blogs that have commented on those topics.

As Michael Arrington of TechCrunch so exceptionally states:

Here’s how it works: A post is written. People start to link to it. If enough people link and it becomes very popular, it goes up in the “New Item Finder” area in the top right. If more people link, it will go up in the main area. If a link includes conversation and discourse (substantial text in addition to the link), the linking blog is noted underneath the popular post.

Memeorandum has exceptional quality, mostly because it only shows posts from a select number of blogs. It is simple to view, and easy to tell what the article is about. I would highly recommend this.

CommonTimes.org

CommonTimes.org is another news aggregation site. However, instead of searching the article and finding key words in order to categorize it, it instead uses tags from the web to categorize articles.

An interesting idea, but since they only show headlines, I’m not too big of a fan. (Headlines don’t really tell you anything!)

Still, this is probably the most Web 2.0-ish news aggregator out there.

Blogniscient

There is currently a large debate about whether Blogniscient or Memeorandum is better. Personally, Memeorandum has better stories, though Blogniscient does have some redeeming factors.

First off, Blogniscient, like Memeorandum, is hard to spell.

Blogniscient has 5 categories to Memeorandum’s two - U.S. Politics, Science and Technology, Sports, Entertainment, and Business. It even divides those categories into smaller (but still general) categories. In the U.S. Politics category, you can tell if it is a left-wing point of view, or a right-wing. Sports are divided up into, well, sports. Entertainment is divided up into music and gossip (which says something for all of those Entertainment blogs out there).

To Sum it Up

They are all good for their own reasons. Personally, I like Findory and Memeorandum the most, but the others are good, too. With the rise of several competing news aggregators, we should be seeing some quality features being created between them over the next few months. Stay tuned…