The top two social news website, Reddit and Digg have their differences. Even though Digg is more popular, Reddit might have the edge right now due to these four cool features (you might not have known were even there).
What’s Hot Now
Reddit’s main page is a lot different from Digg’s. Reddit’s main page stories are all current stories based on the amount of points it has and the time it was submitted. So, if you submitted a story first thing in the morning and throughout the day it only received 10 points, the chances of it being on the main page at night is very slim, but if the story has 100 point it’s a whole different story. Once your story on Digg reaches the homepage, that story can be moved off the homepage within a couple of hours, due to the ongoing stories reaching the same page as yours. It would be great to see a section on Digg for “what’s hot now.â€
Recommended
Reddit tracks the stories you upvoted and then find users with similar voting habits as you and puts it onto one page called, recommended. That’s where Reddit will try and find stories you might like based on your interests. Reddit will then get to know you more and more and will become better at finding you stories that you might like. The more you vote, the better your recommended page will be.
Commenting and voting ads up or down
Like Digg, Reddit too has ads on their site, although Digg has had ads for much longer than Reddit. Reddit gives you the ability to discuss and vote on each ad. Under each ad it says ‘reddit this ad‘, thats where you would go to comment on the ad. For example, if you hate ads that move, you can tell the whole community how you feel. And if the ads are really cool and you don’t mind them on the site, you would be sure to actually upvote the ad.
Clicking on that will then take you to the screen below, where you can then vote and comment on the ad.
Stats
Reddit has a page on their site called the stats page, where you can see the top karma gainers of the day and week. In Digg’s case it would be how many homepage stories you have. Digg did have this feature a while back, and each user had a rank next to their name on the stats page. Christopher Finke has made a webpage with the top 100 users (and top 1000 users) which is updated weekly. This page is a great way to identify the top users on Digg and is also a good way to get some media attention or to give tips to new users of the site.
There have actually been some rumors going around that some of these features might be coming true for Digg. So keep those fingers crossed!
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5 Responses to “4 Cool Features Reddit Has (That Digg Doesn’t)”
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Great post Adam. Out of all of the social news sites reddit seems to be one of the most confusing for a lot of the people I speak to but this post shed some great light on a couple of features that are often missed.
Also – a digg user created this site to show which users got the most homepage stories in the last 30 days (similar to reddit’s biggest karkma gainers). But again, this is something that had to be done outside of digg since they removed any mentions of top users/competition/etc.
Great post…
[...] Beyond the cool factor, Reddit is easily getting new users by paying attention to its user base and even creating surprises when not even necessary. (And Reddit doesn’t stop there.) [...]
Mixx.com also has many of these same features of Reddit and Digg, but additional items too–like the ability to rank Photos (which is really cool) and superior personalization. You can actually create a start page and pick out your topics of interest (any topic–its tag based) and create your own mini-Reddit within that topic.
Check it out: http://www.mixx.com
[...] read more | digg story [...]
[...] 4 Cool Features Reddit Has (That Digg Doesn’t) [...]