Popular social networking sites Digg and Reddit had some interesting things happen to them over the last few days. And if nothing else, their experiences clearly illustrate that social networks are inherently unpredictable.
Let’s begin with Reddit. Reddit was approached by supporters of California’s Prop 19 (a November 2010 ballot proposition to legalize marijuana in the state) to run ads supporting the proposition. Reddit’s parent organization, Condé-Nast (who also owns several traditional magazines like Vogue, Glamour, and Vanity Fair as well as Wired, Ars Technica and Reddit) told them in no uncertain terms that they could not accept Prop 19 revenue. End of story, right? Not exactly. Within hours, Reddit members had voted several different links for Prop 19 ads to Reddit’s front page, for which Condé-Nast receives no ad revenue (ok, that was probably predictable). Reddit administrators announced that since Condé-Nast wouldn’t allow revenue from Prop 19 ads on the site, they were going to be running Prop 19 ads for free, and did so for several hours before they were apparently removed. Reddit members had worked themselves into such a lather that Ben Huh, owner of FAIL blog and I Can Has Cheezburger among other sites, made a public offer to buy Reddit from Condé-Nast. Where this all ends has yet to be decided, but for now the ads are gone from the site.
Meanwhile around the same time, Digg rolled out its much anticipated Version 4 user interface. The result was a resounding thud. Many Digg users were unimpressed, and spent several days complaining loudly and often that the new interface seemed to favor corporate news stories rather than user-generated ones. After a couple of days, Digg members had apparently figured out enough about how the new page rating algorithm worked to game the site into displaying a large number of links on Digg’s home page from “corporate” news aggregator…Reddit (ok, that was also probably pretty predictable). As of this writing, Digg was apparently contemplating a roll back of the user interface to the prior version, although it was possible they would stick with the new release and tune it more to the member’s liking. In the meantime, Digg’s front page was (as of this post) still dominated by links to Reddit and its corporate sister site Ars Technica.
I’m waiting with baited breath for round 2 of this match, when Digg decides to start running Prop 19 ads.
No comments:
Post a Comment