Paul Graham has an interesting post about Digg potentially censoring Reddit:
I know the guys running reddit, and they’re just religious about never killing stories they don’t like. It’s not because it’s part of some kind of mission statement or code of ethics or anything like that. It’s more the hacker/scientist’s bias against cooking the data. Once you start down that road, where do you stop? They want reddit to evolve into whatever it turns out to be.
The only stories I ever kill on Tailrank are ones that are obviously spam. Every once and a while a neocon like Michelle Malkin will get the top position and it really annoys me that I can’t just kill the story. I never have and feel that doing so would totally compromise the fact that Tailrank needs to remain unbiased (or at leased be biased towards whatever the blogosphere wants to discuss).
Digg could learn a lesson from that. And there is a test right now of whether they will. Someone has submitted a story to Digg that simply links to reddit. It’s not a practical joke about recursion. It’s a link to a collaborative news site called reddit.
For the record, Tailrank doesn’t link to auto-generated sites. We don’t link to Technorati, Feedster, Delicious, Reddit, Digg, Netscape, Newsvine, Planet (an app that re-syndicates RSS) or any other site that isn’t an original post. I’m not sure there are any other memetrackers that do this either. This isn’t a policy against these sites as much as it is a realization that the blogosphere is about conversation where these sites are about discovery of new content.
I have however thought about promoting external content alongside Tailrank or using their metrics/diggs to adjust our recommendation algorithms. For example, if a story is covered by Reddit I could provide a link as well as a few comments there. The goal being that Tailrank should remain unbiased and really deliver what our users want which is discovery of interesting news.
As an aside I noted that a Tailrank story was on Reddit earlier today. Very cool! :)
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Trackback on Jul 26th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Why TailRank is Better
I wish I found sites like digg, reddit, slashdot, and netscape more helpful. Unfortunately I think they are a waste of time. Too often the top story is either a zealotry post or something I have already seen days ago. TailRank is different. Here is why: F
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July 28, 2006 at 10:39 am
To answer the question. No Digg did not censor Reddit. This has been a huge overreaction on Reddit users part. The supposed censorship involves 3 posts.
1) A non story that the writer says was just a joke. The post got removed and the user banned for abusing the system. The fact that part of the ‘joke’ linked to Reddit is moot.
2) A blog entry calling the above banning censorship of Reddit stories spinning the truth of the fact that he was abusing Digg. Digg users saw this as inaccurate and lame and voted it off the front page.
3) A ‘test’ by a Reddit user claiming if the post he made gets removed, it is proof of censorship. The Digg users who also visit Reddit saw through this and modded the story lame. He posted on Reddit he was doing this. His post was not an attempt to inform people of Reddit, but to try and cause more trouble. Paul Graham even admits to abuse of the Democracy he so cheerishes about Reddit by telling people to go vote for this story, not on the merit of whether the story merits being Dugg.
All this press is a spin job on Reddit’s part. The fact is what started this was an abuse of Digg. And the user got banned for it. Everything else about censorship of Reddit stories is spin and lies by the Reddit community.
July 29, 2006 at 11:57 pm
If Alexa is not lying (ha ha), it looks like there the “Reddit Effect” doesn’ exist yet: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=tailrank.com
Can you comment about your traffic observations while TailRank was on Reddit, Kevin?