After very careful consideration, I've come to the conclusion that my current understanding of Digg and Reddit can be expressed in the form of an SAT analogy and terms of a pair of "community" sites from the previous generation.

Digg is to Slashdot, as Reddit is to Kuro5hin

Yeah, I kinda gave it away in the title of this post, didn't I?

Oh, well.

Now, I suppose you want evidence for this odd claim.

Unfortunately, a lot of it boils down to qualitative things: the "feel" of each site and the type of content that surfaces there most often. Slashdot and Digg are tech heavy, while Kuro5hin and Reddit seem to cast a wider net that captures more of science and culture (and occasionally some politics).

Slashdot and Digg both drive a lot of traffic and experience a lot of churn, while Kuro5hin and Reddit are a bit more stable and have smaller (but by no means "small") audiences.

See also: Because You Asked which takes a cursory look at one site's experience appearing on both.

Thoughts? What other similarities do you see, assuming you've been a user of or participant in each of them for a non-trivial amount of time?

Posted by jzawodn at March 29, 2006 08:50 PM