Re:Ask HN: How are online communities established?
by lxe on Friday September 11, 2020 @12:35PM
(#24444513)
Reddit's single player mode is "news reader." Doesn't matter if it's aggregated by the community or curated. The reason why it blew up was because people migrated from another news aggregator, Digg, in 2010.
Re:Ask HN: How are online communities established?
by jbob2000 on Friday September 11, 2020 @01:02PM
(#24444789)
Why did everyone leave digg? It wasn’t because they fucked up the news aggregation, it’s because they fucked up the community - the ambitious and passionate users couldn’t get their posts to the front page any more, it was reserved for people who were paying digg.
Reddit is awful at news aggregation, the front page is a hot mess of memes and clickbait. You have to weed all that crap out to find the people you actually want to listen to.
Communities start around passionate, interesting individuals. Reddit initially got popular because it was chuffed full of technologists who were openly sharing juicy details about their work. There were hundreds of other websites at the time that allowed you to curate bookmarks and such, but reddit had the people who made interesting comments on those bookmarks.