3 Big Reasons Why Upvote Sites Are The Future Of Community Driven Brands

Here's why upvoting content is a sustainable mechanism to grow and moderate a community driven website.

Ranked the 28th most popular website in the world and the 10th most popular in the USA, founded in 2005, Reddit is one of the originals in the upvote game.

Unlike Quora and Stack Exchange, Reddit takes a more general purpose approach and allows users to submit links or text-based content which users can vote on the content submitted, and the threaded comments.

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Reddit takes a more general purpose approach and allows users to submit links or text-based content which users can vote on the content submitted, and the threaded comments.

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Reddit allows users to submit links and find interesting links, similar to what Digg did before the Digg v4 update which changed the interface immensely, causing many users to switch over to Reddit.

Digg went from raising over $28 million in 2008 to selling out in 2012 for $500,000. The v4 release was a big mistake, which pretty much wiped out Digg’s growth and handed it off to Reddit on a silver plate.

Unlike Quora and Stack Exchange, Reddit doesn’t have a clear use for karma points gained. Founded 4 years later, Reddit took a unique approach to leveraging upvotes to send StumbleUpon and Digg out of the top 250 most visited websites on the web, and far from returning soon.

The Community Driven Future

These three successful websites have used the powerful mechanism of upvoting to promote the production of useful content and keep their website self-moderated. While sites like StumbleUpon, Answer.com and Yahoo Answers fall, a modern breed of community-driven websites using upvotes will continue to overtake their outdated competitors.

This article has been edited and condensed.

Josh MacDonald is a teenage programmer and entrepreneur who specializes in the development of SAAS and mobile apps. Josh is enrolled in computer science at Canada’s top ranked computer science school at the University of Toronto. To this date, he has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software and is now working on his 3rd and 4th mobile apps. Connect with @JoshMacDonald19 on Twitter.

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