One of the best things about reading old articles is that you know which predictions came true, as well as those that failed miserably. This article is perhaps even more revealing.
Kuro5hin tried a new model, where users voted on articles, to promote a better, more democratic selection of articles. However, they ran into some trouble:
"the focus of the site ended up not being about technology mainly because it is harder for people to write technology articles than write about everyday topics that are nearer and dearer to their hearts."
Sound familiar? The massively popular Digg attempted a similar revolution of news posting, and, I have to say, they seem to have succeeded where Kuro5hin failed. Digg is a classic example of a successful Web 2.0 company- started by a techie, the first version written by contract on the cheap, and now worth lots and lots of money.
Digg's algorithm is probably the reason it has done better than Kuro5hin. It has been refined many times, and has evolved from what was probably a very simplistic votes*time style algorithm to one that handles gaming relatively decently (depending on how you ask).
However, I have to draw some parallels between K5 and Digg. The most obvious is the quote above about technology news being diluted by "ordinary" news. Digg handled that by creating different sections for different posts, which is probably better than trying to fight it.
Nonetheless, many (including me) have grown weary of Digg's childish top page, which only occasionally has a nugget of interesting technology news. I find reddit's programming section orders of magnitude better than Digg nowadays.
So, let's assume Digg doesn't completely fall off the cliff in the next year or so (which won't happen, considering the huge momentum it has already found). What made it work better than K5? As I mentioned, the algorithm is better. In addition, it came out later, to a more experienced market of users.
What do you think?
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