IAmA and Metafilter
/r/IAmA is an amazing new subreddit I found a few days ago (though I don’t remember how). It stands for “I am a…” with posts that generally end with “AMA” or “Ask me anything”. Essentially people have interesting lives and we get some insight into them via their self-post or the following Q&A session. Pretty brilliant idea I’d say considering the amount of readers are into biographies/books about interesting people such as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Thus far I have read about:
-Someone who was shot in the head
-A mortician
-A stripper
-Someone with a micropenis
-Someone who had sex with a tranny (the comments here are sort of nasty)
In other news, the top post on Reddit right now is a pretty clear indicator of how Digg has really just moved to Reddit. I finally found the bunch of whiners who talk about how they are looking for somewhere else. A few sites were mentioned including Metafilter. I only looked at a few posts here, but it was a surprising first impression. First off, Metafilter isn’t really a social bookmarking website as I see it, so a comparison is sort of moot. Anyways, at first glance it seems sort of archaic without an upvote/downvote system. In addition, the commenting system avoids replies. But I sort of thought, perhaps this is both the cause of success and failure in these community websites. It seems to be a good idea to allow the community to control the content to the extreme that upvoting and downvoting allow, but at the same time it really does filter out some interesting stuff. The differences in the comment system also seemed to have a large effect. Posts actually involved some sort of input, but because each comment was isolated by itself it was difficult to filter through it. Specifically, without upvotes and downvotes you can’t really FIND the good posts (though they do rank comments by popularity, it is really ineffectual to the same extent that Reddit and Digg currently function)–no one really verifies information and such. I probably won’t be going back there to be honest, but it seems decent if you spend several hours a day reading online.
I think I just made a really pitiful attempt at website structure design (what is the actual name for this?).
