Results of the Daily News Digest experiment
A few weeks ago, some of you raised concerns that the amount of news posted to r/kurdistan was drowning out other conversations:
We explained at the time that Reddit is, at its core, a social news aggregation site, and that news is a big part of what brings people here.
Some of you suggested that news should be collected into a digest instead of posted as individual articles. We thought that was worth testing, so for a week we did exactly that:
The digest posts
What we found
For the week of the experiment (7–13 October):
Views went down, not up: 70.9k views, about 6,000 fewer than the previous week.
Discussion didn't grow: 129 published posts (+6) and 1.1k published comments (+85), essentially flat. The same number of discussion-type posts appeared, with similar quality in both the posts and the comments.
The digests themselves got very little engagement. Few people opened them, and fewer commented.
The news people cared about still won. Even with far less news being posted, the highest-engagement posts of the week were still some of the standalone news posts we did allow. Removing most news from the front page didn't free up space for more conversation. It just buried the news. Normally at least some articles rise to the top and spark real discussion; inside a digest, none of them could.
One example would be "Kurds, Arabs want to reverse ‘Arab Belt’ in Syria" article. It was included in the Kurdistan Daily Digest – 15 October 2026. That digest received 753 views, 3 upvotes and no comments with the majority of the views from United States 21.3%, Germany 16% and Sweden 13.1%. One hour after the digest was posted, another user reposted the article as standalone as a series of images (that are hosted on reddit) with a link to the article. The standalone version received 1.6K views, 13 upvotes, 17 comments with the majority of the views from Iraq 18.4%, United States 16.5%, Germany 14.9%. Same article in both the digest and standalone, the digest posted an hour before. The standalone article was twice as popular as the entire digest.
By using the digest format, we are fighting against reddit's intentional design as a social news aggregator, against reddit's own recommendation algorithm, against our own subscribers observed behavior and preferences.
The part that bothered us most
The digests were also where most of the Sorani and Kurmanji content ended up. By restricting Kurdish-language news to the digest, we effectively buried Kurdish-language posts on a Kurdish subreddit. That's the opposite of what we want. Increasing our Kurdish-language coverage also increased our % of viewers with a country designation of Iraq (which we assume are mostly Kurds living in KRG).
What happens next
We will be discontinuing the Daily News Roundup / Digest format. We may reduce the overall number of articles we post, so the feed stays balanced. We remain committed to seeing more Kurdish (Sorani, Kurmanji, and other dialects) posted here, and we won't use any format that pushes it out of sight. Thank you to everyone who raised the concern and to everyone who gave the digest a fair shot. We took the suggestion seriously, tested it, and the numbers gave a clear answer.
If you want to see more discussion here, the best way to make that happen is to start one. Text posts, questions, culture, language, history, personal experiences: all welcome, and they'll get room on the feed.
As always, feedback is welcome in the comments.
— The r/kurdistan mod team