Roll Your Own Reddit
Reddit announced some new features today. Most importantly, they will soon give you the opportunity to run your own reddit:
You will be able to make three kinds of reddits: public, restricted, and private. A public reddit is just like the current reddits: anyone can view and submit to them. A restricted reddit allows anyone to view the content, but only invited members may submit, comment, or vote. A private reddit is like a restricted reddit, but with the additional restriction that only members can view the content as well. Moderators of a reddit will be able to remove posts and ban users from their reddits.
As MG Siegler points out, that’s exactly what Dave Winter was talking about a while back: everybody can run his/her own digg/reddit/social news site.
Right now. the new features are in closed beta, but will open up in about a week.
This is potentially a big thing, but it also comes with some issues.
When Dave Winer floated the idea originally, I was skeptical, because it seems that for a Digg/reddit like site to work, you do need a certain amount of active participants. By starting a new site under the umbrella of reddit or Digg, that might become a non-issue, depending on how it is realized.
Also, while running your own reddit/Digg might sound cool at first, it might also just become a bookmarking site without much user-interaction pretty quickly.
As for now, I am a ReadBurner convert and not really looking for yet another new social news site (besides Steve Gillmor’s NewsGang project, which has gotten little attention, but is actually quite interesting)
No Comments Yet