> If you did not have specific plans for 285 domain names (which would cost over $2200 to register for one year), you normally would not purchase them.
Clearly the author has never worked with a content company on the web (writing for a blog aside). This kind of thing happens all the time. Purchasing domain name permutations related to your brand en masse is still usually cheaper than going through the legal process of taking ownership from another party.
I agree. $2200 is close to nothing for a company as big as Condé Nast. And it's certainly less than what a lawyer would cost to try to get back one of these domains.
Also, it's hard to imagine that they could possibly have specific plans for 285 domain names ranging from zenreddit.com to redditsex.com. Oh, and my personal favourite, redditthe.com
Yeah... there's a disconnect here between the idea of "big plans" and spending $2200. The latter is not a particularly large expenditure, representing maybe a week or less of dev. time including all overhead.
To put it in perspective $2200 would be 3.5 billable hours from our IP attorney. Spending this small sum up front could save $500K in legal fees (assuming it only took 3.5 hours to reclaim a squatted domain legally).
Didn't Reddit drop down to one developer sometime recently? If "something big" is coming -- involving 285 domain names -- I would hate to be that one developer.
This is a good example of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.
Big things are indeed coming for reddit, but it has a lot more to do with Conde Nast finally investing some money in personnel than the fact that they registered redditgreen.com and redditblue.com.
I find this rather amusing, that kn0thing would make a post that's essentially the scourge of reddit. Are the reddit admins trying their hand at being a hipster, and /ironically/ posting this? :)
It's okay when the replier is, in some way, an authority on the subject at hand. As in, "I, a cofounder of the site this person is talking about, hereby endorse his position."
Nobody cares if it's just, "I, as some random person on the Internet, endorse his position."
This is a brand protection move, pure and simple. Easier to throw money at it now than to waste a retained lawyer's time writing cease and desist letters later.
Perhaps they got some (dubious?) SEO advice suggesting that splitting subreddits over more registered names would improve their serch rankings and ad rates?
I know the phrase "reddit has become worse over time" is pretty much a meme here on hn but wow has that website been extremely bad as of late. Nothing but rage comics and pictures of pets, and some trolling. Probably a combination of more and more people plus summer vacation for the kids who have too much time on their hands.
Everything is broken into subreddits on reddit and if you learn to select the subreddits that interest you instead of just reading the "rage comic" and "pet picture" subreddits it might be of more interest.
Agreed. My mix of subreddits is article heavy and awesome. I'm always a little surprised when I find myself logged off on the default front page - about 85% imgur links at least.
I haven't seen that at all on the sub-reddits I frequent. Maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough, but I still find /r/machinelearning, /r/semanticweb, /r/compscipapers, /r/csbooks, etc. to be very useful.
It's difficult to find good subreddits. Even if the subject matter of the subreddit interests you, it possibly only has dozen subscribers and received its last submission months ago. So subreddits are better than nothing, but could be better.
As an aside, I have found browsing reddit.com/r/all has allowed me to discover several neat subreddits I otherwise would have never found. (Warning, /r/all is all subreddits, including NSFW ones)
This isn't a big move, it's just good houskeeping. First it was hiring developers. Now this, which helps them with SEO, possibly using all these sites as redirects to sub-reddits.
I bet they are registering the subreddit domains to have them redirect to the subreddits. All of them seem like pretty established subreddits. Perhaps they want the subreddits to function more like stand alone websites?
Vertical (ie. reddit___.com or _____reddit.com) and Horizontal (ie raddit.com riddit.com etc.) domain securing is standard practice. It does not necessarily mean that those market will be actively brought online, instead it means that those markets will be unavailable for pirates and coat tail surfers. However, it's always fascinating to see these little tactical moves on the part of larger companies.
Not in the case of Reddit? As far as I know, Reddit's main issue is constant 502 errors/requests timing out, which to my knowledge would indicate they constantly hit the limits of their webservers or don't understand how to load balance.
Indeed, they're hitting the limits of their webservers. But they already have the most powerful servers EC2 provides. So they have three options:
* Move to a new provider
* Change the way things work so that the job can be spread across more servers
* Fix suboptimal things
All three of those options are extremely difficult to do quickly with a skeleton crew. Reddit's been improving scalability as fast as 3-4 engineers can, but their traffic is growing even faster.
42 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadClearly the author has never worked with a content company on the web (writing for a blog aside). This kind of thing happens all the time. Purchasing domain name permutations related to your brand en masse is still usually cheaper than going through the legal process of taking ownership from another party.
Big things are indeed coming for reddit, but it has a lot more to do with Conde Nast finally investing some money in personnel than the fact that they registered redditgreen.com and redditblue.com.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/
Nobody cares if it's just, "I, as some random person on the Internet, endorse his position."
Agreed. :P
The information density is in kn0thing's username, the comment was merely a nod of the head.
I've said it before, but you can unsubscribe from a subreddit, but you can't unsubscribe from a culture.
I see stories about technology, computer science, physics, all the programming languages and tools I use, Minecraft, Austin Texas, Team Fortress, etc.
My wife logs into her account and she sees a million stories about crafts.
Suscribe to topic specific reddits ( e.g. /r/haskell or /r/Android ).
Enjoy your tenfold improved reddit.
As an aside, I have found browsing reddit.com/r/all has allowed me to discover several neat subreddits I otherwise would have never found. (Warning, /r/all is all subreddits, including NSFW ones)
That's propably why there are good subreddits.
http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/02/conde-nast-has-big-plans-...
* Move to a new provider
* Change the way things work so that the job can be spread across more servers
* Fix suboptimal things
All three of those options are extremely difficult to do quickly with a skeleton crew. Reddit's been improving scalability as fast as 3-4 engineers can, but their traffic is growing even faster.
You can never, ever, register all the variations and new TLDs come out every year.
In this day and age, users are not quite that stupid and all modern browsers have phishing site checks built in.