del.icio.us/popular used to be very similar to Hacker News as a source of fresh web-scene-relevant article flow.
Between /popular, and per-tag RSS feeds, in some ways del.icio.us used to be a better Reddit than current Reddit. Tags and tag feeds were a very flexible way to monitor interest topics. What is now a network of reposts between subreddits, used to just be the addition of tags.
Saving a bookmark to your own set of bookmarks also served as an "upvote". This created a nice incentive alignment; if something was interesting, you would want to keep track of it, and add it to your collection, with the tags relevant to you!
Because del.icio.us was not explicitly designed as a "hype machine" like reddit, it turned over a lot of really original content that would have been hard to discover otherwise. It helped that the peak of del.icio.us was during the rise of blogs and self-published websites.
del.icio.us/popular used to be very similar to Hacker News as a source of fresh web-scene-relevant article flow.
Between /popular, and per-tag RSS feeds, in some ways del.icio.us used to be a better Reddit than current Reddit. Tags and tag feeds were a very flexible way to monitor interest topics. What is now a network of reposts between subreddits, used to just be the addition of tags.
Saving a bookmark to your own set of bookmarks also served as an "upvote". This created a nice incentive alignment; if something was interesting, you would want to keep track of it, and add it to your collection, with the tags relevant to you!
Because del.icio.us was not explicitly designed as a "hype machine" like reddit, it turned over a lot of really original content that would have been hard to discover otherwise. It helped that the peak of del.icio.us was during the rise of blogs and self-published websites.