I never knew there were people out there who thought Reddit copied Digg. In fact, I'm not sure anyone can copy anyone in this case. It isn't like having people vote a news item up or down is a revolutionary idea in and of itself. What makes Digg, Reddit and yes Hacker News special is the community that was built around them. That, imho, is the innovation in these sites. Founders creating an enviornment in which a vibrant community can flourish.
In a previous Mixergy interview, someone with inside knowledge suggested that Reddit copied Digg. It's been suggested in other places too, so we cleared it up.
But this interview goes beyond that question. I wanted to learn where the seed of an idea comes from and how it grows from that tiny thought into a real business.
Articles being voted up/down is kind of a revolutionary idea, in that it could have been developed years earlier, but it wasn't. Why not? (maybe people tried it, it didn't take off and so we didn't hear about it)
One factor might have been ajax. Being able to vote without having to reload the page is a big deal, but it's only relatively recently that the techniques to do that have become common knowledge.
Not that that stopped slashdot from doing it with comments. It could probably have been made to work with articles as well; quite possibly everyone just thought editors were better at selecting interesting links to publish. The innovation was social rather than technical. (HN's system of articles selected primarily by voting, but with more than cursory editorial oversight, seems to be another social innovation. Did any earlier site do the same thing?)
I worked out how to do this with an invisible 0-size frame, over 10 years ago. From another frame, you put data in the invisible frame (in a form, or as an URL) and submit it; then read the data back. Of course, it was awkward, and maybe there were some cross-browser issues (I don't recall, but such issues were the norm).
But here's my point: I thought it was technically cool, but I didn't do anything with it. Not even a demo. So this is a striking example for me that it really matters how familiar you are with a concept, before you can start using it as a basis of inventing something else. Progress takes a long time, and proceeds in steps. There's a tantalizing possibility that, maybe, knowing this could give you a simple way to leapfrog a decade ahead...
Actually kuro5hin.com did the same thing several years before.
I have said in the past that reddit's early marketing blurbs sure seemed similar to digg's. But I never really meant it to be taken as a substantial criticism. Everyone copies (and more importantly modifies) other people's ideas all the time.
There's no way reddit copied digg. Sure it's feasible that they were inspired by the idea, but the sites are fundamentally quite different. Digg.com is just a chronological feed of stories that have fulfilled the front-page promotion requirements. Reddit, on the other hand, is an actual ranking of stories, so an extremely popular story stays on the front page longer and gets higher up on the page.
