Lately I’ve been playing around with reddit. Its a social news/bookmarking site where users submit links an everyone else can vote up or down the link. Pretty interesting stuff. If you are familiar with digg, its the same thing, only with a smaller userbase (and less publicity).
Thanks to reddit I’ve found some really great things that I probably wouldn’t have found as quickly or if at all. Plus I’ve gotten to see some pretty interesting behaviors from the community of users:
- People “discovering” a site. Occasionally a link will get tossed up for some cool site. Usually over the next week you’ll see other entries from that site getting posted. If its a new site (to you) this is pretty cool, but if its a site you’re already familiar with, it can get kinda old fast.
- Flavor of the week vs Holy wars: Sometimes a topic is kinda hot so it gets mentioned a lot. This leads to a ton of links about that topic. On the programming side, Joel on Software comes up a lot, and anything he mentions gets analyzed to death. People on both sides of the discussion begin sending in links supporting their side/view. This leads to a ton of links about Haskell, Erlang, and a ton of other programming languages I could care less about.
- One sided politics. I’ve noticed a lot of political-oriented links, and I’ve noticed that most of them seem to lean one way or the other. I’ve always assumed that if one point of view was brought up, an equal number of opposing/different points of view would be presented. On reddit, this doesn’t seem to be the case for some reason. Its an interesting thing to watch.
Like I said, its an interesting site. If you are looking for new content or wondering where the internet is, go check it out. Some day when I have time I’d like to write up something to poll the site and see a breakdown of how the community works. *sigh* Some day when I have time……
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