Then reddit was started with the original idea being "del.icio.us with voting".
I believe the original "del.icio.us with voting" was Digg [1]:
Digg also faces competition from other social news services like Reddit, Newsvine, and Netscape, and while none of them has gotten to Digg’s level, it’s still early in the social news race.
The reddit founders had no awareness of Digg until a few months after they launched. Also, Digg didn't have downvotes, which was a key innovation, because technically delicious already had "upvotes" based on how many people bookmarked the same site.
And when we visited Digg later on, we (reddit) discovered that we had double their traffic.
Digg had better marketing but reddit was bigger for most of it's life.
I suspect one factor in early reddit growth was early promotion on and rapid adoption by many of the (original) freenode IRC crowd (and extended spouses, famil, etc).
I recall the days when it was a "proof of concept" single page lisp based site(?) that got taken on as the default place to post links for ranking and persistant comment (alongside other tool sites like pastebin for text content pastes etc.)
The early theoretic comp sci posts died off and cats took over, followed by subredits etc .. and here we are :-)
Comments
We've come full circle. :)
First there was del.icio.us.
Then reddit was started with the original idea being "del.icio.us with voting".
And now we're back to del.icio.us!
I believe the original "del.icio.us with voting" was Digg [1]:
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20061013230150/http://www.conver...
The reddit founders had no awareness of Digg until a few months after they launched. Also, Digg didn't have downvotes, which was a key innovation, because technically delicious already had "upvotes" based on how many people bookmarked the same site.
And when we visited Digg later on, we (reddit) discovered that we had double their traffic.
Digg had better marketing but reddit was bigger for most of it's life.
I suspect one factor in early reddit growth was early promotion on and rapid adoption by many of the (original) freenode IRC crowd (and extended spouses, famil, etc).
I recall the days when it was a "proof of concept" single page lisp based site(?) that got taken on as the default place to post links for ranking and persistant comment (alongside other tool sites like pastebin for text content pastes etc.)
The early theoretic comp sci posts died off and cats took over, followed by subredits etc .. and here we are :-)
Sure. I did not imply reddit copied Digg. Just pointing out the fact that Digg was chronologically the first (or at least earlier than reddit).
This is an interesting anecdote as Digg was already big by then (they actually released Digg 2.0 in July 2005, the same month reddit launched).