Community-driven News

Oh, Apollo 13. Maybe you’ve seen the movie featuring Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon. Or maybe you’ve just heard news reports of the seventh manned mission. Three men returned to Earth against insurmountable odds. An oxygen tank exploded, causing limited power, loss of cabin heat, a shortage of portable water and the need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system.

The crew returned home thanks to a “slingshot” — a move that goes against the traditional “direct abort” that burns every last drop of fuel. History recounts the decision was made by Flight Director Gene Kranz, according to Gizmodo, but now, thanks to the Internet, an MIT graduate student is getting the credit he deserves.

Kevin Rose is the founder of the once popular link sharing site Digg. At one point Google was in negotiations to buy Digg for "around $200 Million" but Kevin Rose wanted to wait until the company was worth more money.

In 2010 Digg had a big fancy redesign that basically killed the site. The users left in droves and a lot of them went to Reddit.

Digg’s new owners can be commended for a couple of things. Having decided to revert to start-up mode again, the entire website has been built on fresh code, rewritten using Agile development methods, and re-launched in record-breaking time – just six weeks to the day that Betaworks snapped up its name and URL for $500,000. There’s also no disputing that the new Digg looks a whole lot cleaner than it did following the previous owner’s Version 4 redesign, which effectively dug the site’s own grave.

But there are two HUGE flaws with the new Digg.

We show consumers neighborhood news and information from local bloggers, journalists and mainstream media on hundreds of trusted news sites across the Outside.in Network including CNN.com as well as www.outside.in

Slashdot, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors pick out the best stories each day for the front page. Users can then post comments on the stories. The influx of web traffic that resulted from Slashdot linking to websites led to the effect being coined as the Slashdot effect.

The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller site, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic that results from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The effect has been associated with other websites or metablogs such as Fark, Drudge Report, Reddit, Twitter and Digg, leading to terms such as being Farked or Drudged, or being under the Reddit effect. Google Doodles, which link to search results on the doodle topic, also result in high increases of traffic from the search results page.[1] Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect.

Reddit /ˈrɛdɪt/, stylized as reddit, is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down", which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.

Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. In September 2011, Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications.