How do these platforms help you improve the relevance of the articles recommended to you? How could these sites be used in a professional sense? What issues could you identify when using them?
I’m comparing the two platforms of Hacker News and Reddit. These platforms are both forum style websites, which rely entirely on contributions by the community for the sites content, with moderators only curating inappropriate content and behaviour, rather then providing direct contributions, and users supporting content with upvotes and comments. This makes them social networks, where users are interacting with each other through posting content and replying with comments (Aichner et al, 2021; Martin, 2022; Hacker News, n.d.a).
The comparison is interesting, because Hacker News is a direct response to Reddit, aiming to provide “deeply interesting” articles, news, posts, and comments. It describes on-topic and off-topic posts as follows:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they’d cover it on TV news, it’s probably off-topic.
(Hacker News, n.d.b)
Reddit focuses on multiple community forums that are separate but equally accessible by all users. This means you get a lot of content being posted on the site, from many communities, and the quality across each may vary greatly, and moderation is more relaxed (Reddit, 2024).
Stoian (2018) outlines the key parts of forum design. Let’s examine how Reddit and Hacker News align with these principals when improving the relevance of articles recommended to users.
Are things easy to find?
Both platforms approach searching for information separately. Reddit uses two methods of discovering content. You can use the search bar at the top of the page, which will provide options of subreddits to visit, or you can explore an algorithmically determined set of posts from both subreddits you’ve followed and recommended content from popular subreddits. The algorithm can be tailored for categories like Best, New, and Hot.
Conversely, Hacker News provides very little search functionality. There’s no direct search. Posts are text-only with links to more content, and are sorted based on upvotes. You can also sort by ‘new’, ‘threads’ (your own posts and comments), ‘past’ (which provides the ability to move back in time in jumps of a day, a month, or a year, but no way to navigate to a particular date directly) and others, like ‘jobs’.
These are two effective but opposed approaches. Reddit provides a dearth of information, while Hacker News focuses on a minimal approach, promoting social interaction and discussion over information sharing.
In a professional environment, Reddit lends itself more to marketing via social media, while Hacker News would be better for professional development, obtaining useful resources, asking questions and finding job listings, none of which Reddit is particularly suited for (Merzel & Goodman, 2016; Smith, 2019).
The issue with Reddit is it’s generality and depth of UI, while the issue with Hacker News is it’s specificity and simple UI (Demirtaş, 2023). In other words, each platform benefits a different category of users seeking social news in their own unique ways.
References
Aichner, T., Grunfelder, M., Maurer, O., & Jegeni, D. (2021). Twenty-Five years of social media: A review of social media applications and definitions from 1994 to 2019. Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 24(4), 215-222. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2020.0134
Demirtaş, F. (2023). The dance of design: minimalism vs maximalism in UX. Medium. https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-dance-of-design-minimalism-vs-maximalism-in-ux-39039f1b32ba
Hacker News. (n.d.). Hacker News guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments
Hacker News. (n.d.). Welcome to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Martin, M. (2022). What is reddit, and should your brand be using it? Hootsuite. https://blog.hootsuite.com/what-is-reddit/
Merzel, C., & Goodman, A. (2016). Becoming a professional: Online discussion boards as a tool for developing professionalism among MPH students. Pedagogy in Health Promotion, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2373379916656639
Reddit. (2024). Reddit content policy. https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
Smith, T. W. (2019). Making the most of online discussion: A retrospective analysis. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 31(1), 21-31. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1206981.pdf
Stoian, F. (2018). 4 steps to designing good forums. Medium. https://medium.com/@flaviastoian_99743/4-steps-to-designing-good-forums-67b35c28f5da