Off topic, but Google's inability to know that I speak english (even though I'm logged in and I've configured various of its services with this information), is mind boggling. Seriously, how does my search-language setting not override my IP?
Google sort of respects the header, but my experience has been that the behavior is odd.
I was working on adding localization to a web site, and so changed my headers to prefer Japanese. I accidentally left this on when I visited AdWords. I put English back to the top, but it took a week or so of manually changing the interface back to English for it to stick. Took one time to get it in Japanese, and about 50 to get it back to English.
Perhaps most/many google users do not own their computers?
How annoying would it be for hundreds of internet cafe customers in China or India to search google only to realize it is in English because some foreigner changed the value?
Sure, ip geolocation is a very strong hint about what languge should be used. But being logged in and having set the language should override everything else, and I don't see how a hypothetical shared computer scenario would change that. It's a shame that's not always the case on some Google sites, though you can usually work around it for a while by adding a hl=en URL parameter.
In Chrome on Mac, I open Preferences, Under the Hood, Languages and Spell-checker Settings..., drag another language to the top of the list, and Google starts giving me whatever language I put on top.
I'm a native English speaker, so I only do this for testing app i18n support, but it seems straightforward (if cumbersome) to me.
That would mean admitting you were wrong. Better to blame it on others, blame it on bad technology, blame it on your programmers and blame it on your VP of Engineering. That is the way Kevin Rose chose to play it.
I think it is reasonable to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that Kevin Rose badly misplayed the situation.
Kevin tried to place a lot of the blame on Cassandra, saying the technology was not read for prime time, but the community pushed back in a big way and insisted that Cassandra was not the problem with Digg. If Cassandra had been the real problem, then Digg would have given up on it, but they did not:
I'm not convinced that they want to backpedal at this point. They get the sponsored content and users that they wanted (or whatever it was the changes were that upset everyone). And frankly, the content is a lot better now than I ever remember it being.
they backpeddled much much later by 'reintroducing' some of the aspects of the site that were there before. Thing was, it was really quite a long time after all of the users had left. Initially, imo, the real problem was the shock of change and some serious downtime/bugs in the first 2-4 weeks is what killed it. As an active, dedicated user, not being able to use the site for so long left me no choice but to drop it from my daily habits.
I visit reddit from a desktop, laptop, and smartphone. and probably 2 browsers on the desktop. So that would show me up as 4 entries. I would not be suprised if the average was at 2 cookies per unique-human-visitor.
I'm confused as to what's being measured in OP's link vs. your links. Is the OP's link measuring number of searches and your trends link measuring the number of daily visitors?
Also, I know the reddit admins have mentioned a number of times that third-party statistics about their visitor count are wildly wrong.
Either I've grown up a whole lot in the last two years (possible), or the influx of new Redditors from ... well, everywhere ... pretty much killed the appeal the place had for me. It lost its exclusive feel, and now a 'Redditor' is just any random American college kid.
It's HN that I check when I wake up or when I'm bored now - comments here are likely to be things I want to read.
For me its the mix of juvenile college kids and (as Steve Yegge pointed out) the Simpson's "Comic Book Guy" type meta-commenters that drive me nuts. 4/5 times I hit the "load more comments" link I feel a deep sense of regret. =P
Sort of disturbing that for reddit jailbait and reddit jailbait are so high. I am guessing that is for that content and not because of the cnn report on reddit...
no actually it's because teenage girls are extremely sexually attractive to most men, of any age, and they enjoy masturbating to pictures of them. get over it.
its amusing that a site like digg which was fairly widely popular is now only as popular as a niche site like Hacker News. Don't get me wrong, Hacker News is, IMO far and away much better than either Digg or Reddit but both of those sites have much broader appeal. Digg shot themselves in the foot
Every site exhibits some kind of bias which appeals to a certain class of people making the site better in the eyes of that particular group.
Every reddit and 4chan user would tell you that their site is superior to every other similar site.
Generally, this is good for everyone.
There are many comparisons that could be made between different sites that share some traits, but which one is the best is not something you can quantify.
The surpriing take-away from that graph, assuming we take Google searches as an accurate measure of course, is that the popularity of Digg was steadily falling long before The Event. Of course being a eaily typed domain name (though that counts for reddit too) and people having it bookmarked will reduce the number of occurances where people neeed to search for it over time, so we should probably take these figures with a pinch of salt.
Digg hit its peak and began to decline in May 2007. This is exactly when the HDDVD fiasco happened. I believe this was Digg's first major user revolt and it was responsible for many users (myself included) moving over to Reddit.
What is the motive? Comparing the whole of reddit with HN will do no good. Obviously reddit has more users because of its diverse set of sub reddits. Or is there anything i am missing here?
We all know that Reddit is far more large than HN. To me, the chart serves to illustrate how far Digg has fallen, and that reddit's profile has risen far above Digg's greatest height. Meanwhile, HN is steadily gaining ground, albeit in a much more narrowly focused area of topics, as you note.
well, 4chan had the worst case of DoS attacks on the time reddit line rose like crazy in that graph...
maybe this shed a light on the culprit? :D ...also, fueling the conspiracy theory, the week it was back, moot left a sticky post on /b/ about how much superior reddit was, practically calling out a DoS there. i guess it backfired.
...and maybe we can call it the best marketing campaign ever?
