Bitsenbloc

Folksonomies

Tags are beautiful and very useful, I’m sure nobody would say the contrary. Nevertheless they are not always necessary. For instance, del.icio.us and Flickr are two examples of a successful use of folksonomies, on the other hand, Technorati tags are a failure, authors should not be taggers. I don’t like the fashionists that believe that every new and successful feature should be on every single site. It has no sense.

A “magazine” vs. a “toolbox”

I already said that del.icio.us and Reddit are not in competition. They follow completely different models. For me del.icio.us is a huge toolbox where I always can find the appropriate tool for a specific task. For example, when I need a bash tutorial I go to http://del.icio.us/popular/bash and I find what I was looking for. On the other hand, I don’t go to Reddit to look for something specific, I just want to find interesting stuff to read. For me, Reddit is a sort of magazine.

Different community size

Both communities are, and should be, very different. The del.icio.us community must be big and interested in a huge span of subjects, like the wikipedia one. To be useful, del.icio.us must have a good selection of sites under every tag, every concept.

The Reddit community is different. Reedit is a karma based site, as a consequence, the subjects that are found interesting by the users with more karma will go the front page, this is a selection method that depends strongly on the interests of the first users of the site. We all know that Reddit stuff is usually about lisp, tech, science and humour, these are the interests of the creators of the site who have a lot of karma since the beginning. This is what makes Reddit useful, the objective of the site is to create a new and interesting front page everyday. If the community wasn’t homogeneous enough, it would be difficult to find a consensus and, as a consequence, it’ll be hard to find good articles to read. The community must maintain a certain degree of homogeneity and karma is the way to achieve this.

I also would like to have a Reddit on politics. But to tag articles is not the solution, I think it would be better to create a new and parallel site, with its own community interested on politics. This new and different community would be very depend on the first users, so it would not be strange to see two new Reedit like sites on politics, one liberal, the other republican.

It will be very interesting to see the evolution of vote based sites.

Both Reddit and Digg are vote based aggregators. Users submit article URLs, which are voted by the rest of the community. Most voted fresh articles get into the front page. But, these two sites have a big difference: the voting system.

What they have in common: Karma

Both sites are democratic, but their democracy is not like the usual one, votes are weighted, so, not all votes are equal. Users that submit the most voted stories get more karma than the other’s. The weight of your vote is related to your karma. In other words, the users that do more for the community, get more power.

The difference: positive and negative votes

Diggers can only vote for stories they like, on the other hand, redditors can vote for and against them. The consequences are important. The stories that make their way to the Digg front page are the popular ones, on the other hand, the Reddit front page is populated by consensus stories.

I love consensus because it is usually related to quality. Popularity is a more dangerous concept, it’s irrational, it’s populist. Think about newspapers, which ones have the biggest market share? Are they quality newspapers?

I tried to post a comment to this article but I had problems. So I’ll post my comment here and send a trackback.

I believe you miss the point. Reddit and Del.icio.us are not in competition. They have different target audiences and are used in a different way. In fact, I use both.

For me Del.icio.us is a way to store my bookmarks and to find useful pages related to a concept (tag). On the other hand, Reddit is a magazine of very interesting stuff. The motivation to vote is to give karma to people that submit stuff I like.

For me Del.icio.us is a very useful tool and Reddit is a great pleasure.