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Reddit brings back its old award system — ‘we messed up’
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Digg messed up and made a bunch of user-punishing changes and the entire internet all at once moved to Reddit, which was brand new, effectively killing Digg.
Digg has been the high example of what Reddit isn't, so we're all very confused whenever Reddit copies things Digg did that were universally hated.
It's basically the life cycle of the internet. A thing is created for the people, it's beautiful and loved, it is not profitable at all, they use their newfound user base to generate money, they abuse their user base to generate even more money, a new "for the people" alternative springs up, mass migration.
Skype, digg, and MySpace sort of followed that trend. Now reddit is completing the cycle. YouTube should be next, but it's significantly more expensive to make an alternative. But I remember when making money from YouTube was a south park punchline. Those were better days.
Don't forget that before Digg we were all on slashdot. Its like the cylons: What happened before will happen again. Or we're living in a horrible simulation.