RatherGather started in 2008 as an idea to innovate on the current social news platforms. In order to build a site that was better than the digg and reddits of the world, I thought I would first seek to emulate their technology and then the next step would be to improve upon what they had done.
RatherGather 1.0, which is the current flavor of RatherGather, is basically my attempt to recreate the concepts of Digg and Reddit without much, if any, improvement. Recreating another site may seem like an easy task, but I ran into all the problems that funded startups talk about (without actually having the funding). The database had performance issues and had to be completely redesigned. A contractor being paid to adjust a couple of things stole and then attempted to sell the source code to the site. Costs put the site in jeopardy of being shut down. The list goes on. Never the less, the site is up and has been for more than a year now without changes.
Now change is in the air… RatherGather will now begin to move beyond 1.0, so the site will be moving beyond the concepts of digg and reddit to something which will be more interesting.
First off, I should mention that I deleted all the blog posts prior to this because they had a very corporate feel in the way I had written them, and that wasn’t true to the roots of RatherGather. It’s really just a one man (me) company at this point trying to get off the ground. No sense in hiding that behind a wall of corporate pr speak. This is about grass roots and seeing eye to eye with your users, and that is what I’m setting out to do.
So, here’s a state of the union on where RatherGather is at:
-The site is stable and has been for the last year.
-Traffic is growing slowly on rathergather.com, but the advertising model is not even profitable enough to pay the hosting fees for the server space.
-Rumorwrangler.com, mmacombo.com, and 3hitcombo.com have very low traffic numbers.
-The site is mostly just a news aggregator with some poor sorting and a failed attempt at user created search tags.
Now I’m going to attempt to build something a lot better. I hope you’ll come along. Here’s where the site is going:
-rathergather.com version 2.0 will remove all 3rd party data aggregation. Users will have to submit stories, or the site will be blank. It will no longer show stories from digg.com and reddit.com etc.
-mmacombo.com, 3hitcombo.com, and rumorwrangler.com are being EOL to focus on the more popular rathergather.com which will be a paradigm shift from the current site.
I’ve only just begun work on rathergather.com 2.0, so it could be as much as a year from now before it is completed, but I believe it will be worth the work, because I have several ideas about how to push the site forward that will be a lot of fun.
Sorry for being vague about what rathergather.com 2.0 is, but I’ll just say that I’ve been bouncing the idea off of friends and even people who have no interest in digg or reddit type sites are interested.
As always, your input is welcome. If you have any ideas about what would make the current generation of social news aggregators better please let me know so I can put it into rathergather.com 2.0.
Thanks for your time, and as always, there’s much more to come,
-Dan