I wonder what the guys who founded and sold Reddit must be thinking of the site's continued success. Ever since Digg went down Reddit seems to have completely taken over the social news category.
I totally forgot who made that video on youtube that showed the creation process of the hipmunk logo, but tell them to do more videos like it. I don't have a design bone in my body but found it awesome to watch someone go through the process.
Thank you! Yes, that one was me. I asked our designer (he does all of our infographics and random designwork for me) to do a few of his own and it was a blast to watch a real artist at work: http://www.youtube.com/thehipmunk#p/u
(He's the other 2 "making of" videos not about the hotels logo)
This story is from 3 months ago, it's changed a lot since. As a user of reddit, I suspect that the page views have risen even more.
edit: wait the URL just changed again, it was pointing to a story that was listed as being from March and all the comments were from March too, how strange?
No, it's not. Sure _by default_ the frontpage is full of rubbish, but if you spend 10 minutes looking you will find a trove of useful stories and information about whatever you're interested in.
As an example, my favourite Australian radio station (Triple J) has a great subreddit where things relating to music etc is discussed. Not a meme in sight.
You can tune your frontpage as you please, so it's easy to have a great experience with reddit.
But if you've got it in your hosts file (why?) you must really hate it, so I'm probably wasting words.
But your post as akin to saying Hacker News is just full of "I'm a startup!" posts, which it's not.
" so it's easy to have a great experience with reddit."
I've tuned it, more than once, and it's still not a great experience. Maybe if I tried harder I could get it there, but it's certainly not easy. At this point the only way to make it better is to turn off sub reddits about topics I am interested in, but that misses the point doesn't it?
Interesting, this isn't my experience. Yes, turning off the subreddits you're interested defeats the purpose of Reddit. What subreddits do you find this with out of interest?
The problem I have with the subreddit system is that it's an all or nothing thing.
Let's say I like video games, and one of those games is Minecraft. If I subscribe to the Minecraft reddit, it seems that about 1/Nth of the posts on my front page will be about Minecraft (where N is the number of subreddits I have).
I'm pretty conservative with subreddits (added linux and apple, removed politics and atheism, that's pretty much it), so suddenly I have a lot of Minecraft.
Some sort of slider would make subreddits for specific games, programming languages, etc. much more appealing to me, so that I could say, "I really only want to see the best Python-specific stories, but I'll take all of the general programming stories".
> The problem I have with the subreddit system is that it's an all or nothing thing.
Agreed. /r/programming used to have discussions much like HN does. But I've had to remove it from any subreddit I have as its just full of random programmish related stuff, barely.
Out of curiosity, what does everyone on HN think of ways to fix the subreddit problem? Its obvious voting doesn't provide any sort of filter, and tagging would likely only end up with the same problem.
Or are we just condemned to constantly have to flock to new sites for good technical discussions of things?
You fix the problem by realizing editors where in place for a reason. People like crap and without editors to filter bullshit we get a continuing stream of fecal matter.
In theory moderators on Reddit should be some sort of quality control, but usually they just say "well if that is what the community wants..." and let the most ridiculous pandering submissions slide.
Someone needs to blend user submitted stories with editors and find where the sweet spot between the two is.
Until the two systems can be blended in an awesome hybrid, then yes, we will continue to flock to new sites as the old ones fall prey to eternal September.
The problem is that any and all reasonably active subreddits do get more than their fair share of comics and other crap that are dumped solely for karma. Reddit used to be a place where you could get news on any topic you could possibly imagine and discuss it, but now it's nothing more than a mere circlejerk and popularity contest.
The few subreddits with a fair amount of activity that are still good tend to be ones that are primarily discussion with few outside links, like the gamedev and askscience subreddits. There's not much that fills reddit's initial niche, which was compiling news from all around the internet and talking about it.
Perhaps this is a naive (or dumb) question, but what will all those new engineers do? Reddit is doing what it has always done why does just scaling up require so many more engineers?
There is a law of diminished returns at some point in scaling websites. A while ago Reddit hit a scale where a move to Amazon's services seemed like the right thing to do. At that time the argument was solid. Since then the site has outgrown Amazon's services at Reddit's price points. Spinning up new services has an extremely low ROI.
The preverbial wheel of scalling solutions needs to be re-invented, yet again. Not all services are created equal so no one is truly re-inventing anything, just applying unique solutions to unique problems. That takes manpower.
Heck just to move from Amazon to a dedicated will take a team larger than they had a month ago. That's right from the horses mouth. Don't have the energy to fish out the link, though.
In addition to adding new features (many of which are available as previews for Reddit Gold subscribers), the degree to which Reddit must scale means that they can't simply spin up a dozen new servers and call it a day. Due to issues they've encountered on Amazon's infrastructure (http://blog.reddit.com/2011/03/why-reddit-was-down-for-6-of-...) they do indeed require engineering hours to design and implement more robust and scalable approaches to providing their service.
I'd be asking why some other companies in the 1B page views a month range often have up to 60 engineers on hand. Reddit has a very small staff for an operation this size.
I've recently passed the 5 year mark on Reddit and watched my on-site time drop to minutes a week over the last few months.
Not sure why, unlike some people who complain, and have been there less time, the quality of submissions and comments is not really any worse than it has ever been. But then it has always just been a time wasting diversion. It did manage to kill my use of slashdot 5 years back. Maybe my Reddit time has been killed by techmeme/river.
I've been on reddit since 2007 under various names. I think the quality has declined quite a bit if you view /r/all, the front page everyone sees by default. Its really bad.
Individual subreddits are pretty good still though. /r/netsec, sysadmin, wearethemusicmakers, gamernews, philosophyofscience, etc. Smaller ones are still pretty quality.
The article is definitely sensationalist and linkbait, but the title is not a lie. However misleading it is, Reddit doubling its engineering staff is equivalent to hiring three new programmers.
I think the point of the title is combining two pieces of interesting information: A) Reddit has come a hell of a long way with a tiny engineering team and, B) Reddit has hired 3 new engineers.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] thread(He's the other 2 "making of" videos not about the hotels logo)
edit: wait the URL just changed again, it was pointing to a story that was listed as being from March and all the comments were from March too, how strange?
Also straight from the source: http://blog.reddit.com/2011/06/reddit-levels-up-with-three-n...
Daily UV's are growing pretty well. Interesting to see the age skews higher then I would have assumed.
You can tune your frontpage as you please, so it's easy to have a great experience with reddit.
But if you've got it in your hosts file (why?) you must really hate it, so I'm probably wasting words. But your post as akin to saying Hacker News is just full of "I'm a startup!" posts, which it's not.
I've tuned it, more than once, and it's still not a great experience. Maybe if I tried harder I could get it there, but it's certainly not easy. At this point the only way to make it better is to turn off sub reddits about topics I am interested in, but that misses the point doesn't it?
I also get tired of all the stupid pics that get voted up to the top.
That is one of the reasons I love HN. Silly stuff is ignored and downvoted.
Let's say I like video games, and one of those games is Minecraft. If I subscribe to the Minecraft reddit, it seems that about 1/Nth of the posts on my front page will be about Minecraft (where N is the number of subreddits I have).
I'm pretty conservative with subreddits (added linux and apple, removed politics and atheism, that's pretty much it), so suddenly I have a lot of Minecraft.
Some sort of slider would make subreddits for specific games, programming languages, etc. much more appealing to me, so that I could say, "I really only want to see the best Python-specific stories, but I'll take all of the general programming stories".
Agreed. /r/programming used to have discussions much like HN does. But I've had to remove it from any subreddit I have as its just full of random programmish related stuff, barely.
Out of curiosity, what does everyone on HN think of ways to fix the subreddit problem? Its obvious voting doesn't provide any sort of filter, and tagging would likely only end up with the same problem.
Or are we just condemned to constantly have to flock to new sites for good technical discussions of things?
In theory moderators on Reddit should be some sort of quality control, but usually they just say "well if that is what the community wants..." and let the most ridiculous pandering submissions slide.
Someone needs to blend user submitted stories with editors and find where the sweet spot between the two is.
Until the two systems can be blended in an awesome hybrid, then yes, we will continue to flock to new sites as the old ones fall prey to eternal September.
The few subreddits with a fair amount of activity that are still good tend to be ones that are primarily discussion with few outside links, like the gamedev and askscience subreddits. There's not much that fills reddit's initial niche, which was compiling news from all around the internet and talking about it.
The preverbial wheel of scalling solutions needs to be re-invented, yet again. Not all services are created equal so no one is truly re-inventing anything, just applying unique solutions to unique problems. That takes manpower.
Heck just to move from Amazon to a dedicated will take a team larger than they had a month ago. That's right from the horses mouth. Don't have the energy to fish out the link, though.
Note: Please don't edit your comment to make me look foolish. :)
Not sure why, unlike some people who complain, and have been there less time, the quality of submissions and comments is not really any worse than it has ever been. But then it has always just been a time wasting diversion. It did manage to kill my use of slashdot 5 years back. Maybe my Reddit time has been killed by techmeme/river.
Individual subreddits are pretty good still though. /r/netsec, sysadmin, wearethemusicmakers, gamernews, philosophyofscience, etc. Smaller ones are still pretty quality.
Sensationalist title: "Reddit more than doubles its engineering staff!!1!"
Actual event: Reddit hires three new programmers.