Posts Tagged ‘hacker news’

An Open Letter from Reddit Founder to Kevin Rose

May 29th, 2010

Digg founder, Kevin Rose, has published a new video, in which he presents the new features of Digg.

It seems that Digg is going to try to be a mixture of Facebook and Twitter, putting a stronger emphasis on social features and setting aside the content, making it much less meaningful.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, wrote an open letter to Rose, saying that the new version of Digg is a bad idea:

…this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

…It’s a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.

2.5 years ago, I stopped using Digg as a regular user. It has become irrelevant and annoying – the stupid inner-politics, the Bury Brigade, the worshiping of Apple to the point of fanaticism and the angry mob mentality of the comments – all of these and more made Digg a place I didn’t want to be in any more. It was about the time when Mixx was getting some good attention, but that didn’t last, either.

Nowadays, I enjoy Reddit and Hacker News. Sure, they both have their problems and annoyances, but they are still FUN, and they manage to bring interesting stories to the front. Reddit and Hacker News are what Digg was supposed to be – great social news sites for the technology-inclined crowd, featuring interesting content. Digg is no longer that kind of site, and reforming it in the shape of Facebook and Twitter isn’t going to make it more appealing.

Hacker News Prevents Search Engines from Spidering the Site

March 16th, 2010

Hacker News are making a point, or so it seems. The site tweeted a few hours ago that it now “bans Google and all other search engines”.

Here is the site’s Robots.txt. The reasons for this move are rather unclear at the moment. It might have been triggered by the site’s slowness, in an effort to decrease server loads.

Not all users of Hacker News think that this is a clever move. Quite a few of them complained that now they can’t search for older articles that were submitted to the site.

Hacker News doesn’t really rely on Google and other search engines for traffic. It’s a flourishing community that shows no signs of wanting to expand and becoming the new Digg or something similar. Will the user’s protest change anything? Remains to be seen.