Reddit and Filtering by Design
Reddit is a social news website, where a user posts links to pages on the internet, and then other users up vote or down vote this link. The links are organized Based on the votes and the time since the link was posted.
I have been a user for Reddit for more than a year now. The idea is not totally new, Digg already has the same idea, but the content on Reddit is much better than Digg. Digg is full with (cool stuff), links to topics and pages that tend to be nice, funny, weird, things that could appeal to the masses, but Reddit is much more serious and useful, and the links tend to appeal to the more cultured or intelligent reader. Of course the number of Reddit users is less than that of Digg.
Both Reddit and Digg are social networking sites. The problem with social networking sites is that content depends on the users. The more the website’s popularity increases the more useless stuff you find where untargeted users – users which the site was designed for – use the site. This is a problem that is common to forums, and you have to assign moderators to remove out of topic stuff or ban unwanted users. Although useless uninteresting links are creeping to Reddit with its increasing popularity, it is still one of the most useful social networks in my opinion, and the rate of useless stuff is much less than many other social networking sites.
So how did Reddit attract the more cultured or intelligent readers?
The answer in my opinion is the design. Reddit’s design is plain white, with very simple colors, no gradients, small number of images. Digg on the contrary is colorful site with lots of images, colored text, gradients, etc. The Reddit design could be attractive to a smaller number of highly intellectual readers, who focus on the content, simplicity, usability but not the fancy colors. It is not strange that most of Reddit users are software developers.
I don’t know if this was an intended target for the design or not, and if the developers as a target audience was something in the plan when creating Reddit but this is what the website is now.
So here is a solution to one of the fundamental problems in the social networking applications, where sites that are based on good ideas are full with useless stuff. Think of a design that would attract a given category of users and this will keep the unwanted users away. This is not an easy thing to do. Although they have some weird habits or characteristics, developer’s mentality could be understood and described, and things they like could be expected. This is not easy to do for other categories of users, but if you could do it you can have a more useful social networking website with less (out of topic) stuff.
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