When Reddit was first becoming popular, were it's communities and content basically just clones of other websites like Digg?

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Baku@aussie.zone⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

I saw this comment on c/whitepeopletwitter, and it made me wonder if Reddit was like Lemmy in its early days as well? A lot of the communities here are more or less just Reddit but with (sometimes) different rules and mod teams. Most of the memes here are just yoinked off of Reddit (which to be fair, really is just how the internet works)

But yeah, in Reddit’s early days, were the communities there basically just clones of whatever form of communities Digg/other popular sites had at the time? Was most of the content just reposts of stuff from other sites?

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db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The original reddit was closer to hackernews than the generic site it is now. Not only that but spez has admitted that the original traffic was artificial, by which I mean, the owners themselves were creating fake engagement through various means, such as scraping and cross-posting content from sites like digg via sockpuppets to appear that the site had way more traffic than it had.

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- otter@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Time to make a new original community on Lemmy, just for sock puppets.
  
  Purpose: Art of sock puppets reenacting real life events. The art can be doodles on napkins, AI art, or real physical sock puppets.
  
  I’d like to start off the community with this image
  
  Image
  
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  - db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    here’s a free tool to help you generate images. tinybots.net/artbot/create
    
    Pass existing images as img2img and use controlnets to follow an existing composition
    
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  - Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ohhhh, i saw this place and thought huh really getting to be something for everyone, now i know the origins
    
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leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Reddit was created as a Digg clone so there were no sub’s and no comments, just links to up/down vote.

A lot of those links were scraped in an effort to make it seem popular. Both Aaron and Spez have admitted that.

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BangersAndMash@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Pretty much, but I think originally it didn’t even have subreddits. What set it apart from digg was really the community and comments - the quality of which were much better than digg. Similarly to Lemmy it was originally much more tech related too.

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- Dasnap@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It originally didn’t even have comments, and when they eventually added them, the first comments were complaining about its inclusion.
  
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  - Baku@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s a reddit moment right there
    
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boblin@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t recall Reddit having unique content - what I do remember however was that it had aggregated content. It filled the role of Slashdot, Fark, and other sites, and it had a comment threading system that was far more usable. The memes came after.

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- originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  this is the truth. it was never about original content, it was a link aggregator with threaded discussion. and.. what communities? there were no subs when i started reddit.
  
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NumbersCanBeFun@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yes. There was also brutal infighting, scantly clad images of minors being protected by a cabal of disgusting moderators, including Spez and not to mention the doxxing. Lots of that too.

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YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The Reddit founders basicly stole all the content off Digg and it was a clone for a long time. Original reddit was very different from the garbage the site is now.

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dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Muy brother in pasta, reddit, much like lemmy, is a link aggregator. It was never meant to have original content. It’s supposed to collect links from other sites and offer a spot to discuss them. Was this concept never explained to you.

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- Baku@aussie.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Oh, I must’ve missed that in the very thorough onboarding process I was subjected to
  
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  - 567PrimeMover@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    should've paid attention during the training video, sheesh
    
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sparky678348@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You know, I don’t really remember this being the case. Albeit I was mostly a Stumble Upon user before reddit.

I’m thinking it’s because reddit has had so long being the number one de facto place to go to form your community.

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kadu@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s important to remember that internet culture and interactions themselves changed a lot from early days to now.

So actually, yes, Reddit did have a lot of “cloned” content that was just the same as what we were doing on previous platforms, but things were changing fast enough as to also make Reddit develop a personality of their own.

Lemmy could have that too… If we toned down the generic Linux memes.

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kandoh@reddthat.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah the subjects were essentially the same, except the reddit comments were much more interesting to read than the digg comments.

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