Y Combinator Startup News - a better Digg, Reddit, Netscape? w/video!

There have been loads of "Digg-clones" launching over the past months. Everyone wants a piece of the hot action that is Digg. Today I want to discuss one which is probably closest to Reddit in terms of cloning but has really caught my eye in terms of traffic. While it does not send the mass numbers that Digg does, it sends a more loyal visitor. So which site am I speaking of? It's Y Combinator Startup News. You can read all the details from the launch release about a month ago. You can also check out my video review at the bottom of this article.

From Paul Graham, "We created this partly for our own use: we've now funded about a hundred people, so it doesn't work well anymore to send links around by email.

"Another reason we created news.ycombinator is that there is currently nothing like it. Reddit used to have a good concentration of startup-related links, but that was because so many of Reddit's initial users were connected in some way to Y Combinator. Now that Reddit is so much more popular, the top links tend to be images, or videos, or political news.

"And of course another reason we made this site is that last summer we wrote the first reasonably efficient implementation of Arc, and we were looking for something to build with it."

It's a very simple app as it allows positive votes only and comments. So far the comments seem genuine and authentic. So I thought I would do a twitter-style comparison to the other major voting engines currently in play. This comparison assumes the story has hit the home page of the voting engine and only discusses the traffic/links received.

Y Combinator Startup News

Similar to Reddit except positive voting only. Sends visitors who pick up the RSS and appear to be willing to visit more than the story linked to from the voting page. Traffic is low-medium vs. Digg/Reddit but growing on a daily basis. In addition to some inbound links, I have also received several contacts from this as well.

Digg

Sends the most raw traffic and provides the highest number of inbound links. Most traffic is hit-and-run traffic as the user visits the story and then heads out. Few users pick up the RSS feed.

Reddit

Similar to Y Combinator except offers positive and negative votes. Sends a nice stream of traffic and inbound links but getting stories to the home page is not as straight-forward as Digg. Higher number of RSS subscribers than Digg.

Netscape

This has never worked well for me. Now it might work well for politics and other non-tech segments, but anyone I talk to has never seen much gain for the effort involved with Netscape. I don't even waste my time promoting articles here anymore.

Summary

If you want tech news (50% startup related) then Y Combinator might be the answer for you. I have enjoyed using it so far. The new stories are easy to peruse and vote/comment on. I can only hope that it does not become a spammers heaven like Digg seems to be now-a-days. Try spending time in Industry News on Digg in upcoming to find good news to report/comment on and it becomes overwhelming with the mass numbers of spam.

Video review: (ignore the very weird sounding intro)