Digg and Reddit are both sites that let users submit links to be voted on by other users. When lots of people like them, they get featured on their home pages.
TechCruch’s Crunchbase tells us that Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg in the fall of 2004, found programmer Owen Byrne through eLance and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea, and in December of 2004, launched his creation to the world through his blog. He really saw “the power of breaking stories before anyone else” in 2005 when Paris Hilton’s cell phone was hacked and shared with internet speed.
Digg has been a force ever since. Ranking in the top 100 most trafficked sites according to Alexa.com.
Reddit launched in 2005, Crunchbase tells us, as the product of two University of Virginia grads in the Y Combinator program, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. Conde Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Reddit in October of 2006.
TechCrunch shared the results of a two-week, 24-hour-a-day comparison of the two sites sent in by a reader. It’s presented in full color graphics at TechCrunch, but here are the basics:
Of the top 10 users submitting links on each site, the Digg users seem to be busier, posting 3 – 4 times as many links, at any hour of the day, with the peaks being 9am and 1 -2am.
The distribution of the top 10 links that make the homepage are pretty even on Digg. While the same sites appear on Reddit’s homepage too, the distribution is much less heavily weighted (over 50%) to imgur’s images, Reddit.com itself, and YouTube.
Interestingly, the number of links that appear on Reddit first before being posted to Digg are almost 4 times higher than the other way around.
Tags: Internet Speed