Reddit is owned by a billion dollar company, and does not need to be profitable. Especially with all the marketing going through the front page every single day, it's an advertisers paradise. I don't think they're hurting for money.
Contrary to popular belief Reddit is not some grass-roots operations.
It is an interesting definition of independent - they are still owned by another company, and have a minority on the board of directors.
Sure, they are off-leash now, and have been for years. And that may even be the long-term intent. But if someone owns you, they can always change the status quo.
> Reddit is owned by a billion dollar company, and does not need to be profitable.
Tell that to Myspace. A property as expensive as reddit has to have a clear road to profitability or it's going to get the axe. Conde Nast isn't running a charity.
I'm more interested in how imgur survives since they serve up far more bandwidth that reddit does and their own advertising and community efforts are pretty young relatively, not to mention hotlinks bypass that entirely.
I constantly wonder about this....and I was willing to pay them for an account -- which they they axed and made it free for all. How can that be sustainable, how?!
I imagine they will run at a loss until they can monetize effectively like reddit. I know everyone tells us that reddit is not profitable but they are selling their front page to advertisers quietly.
I recently saw a front page post that was just a Taco Bell sign that was 20 years old. A fluff bullshit post with little discernable value. Now I don't suggest that the user paid to post it, that sort of stuff would be found out quickly, but it was up voted enough to get it into the hot\rising queue and by virtue of appearing there it made it to the front page.
We know that in the early days the admins/founders used fake accounts to simulate activity on the site and I not imagine that has changed. So they use these accounts to boost up votes and almost guarantee a front page position.
They are also happy to remove front page posts that advertisers don't like e.g sears
Bandwidth have been going down for years. I don't think they release numbers but the community in imgur is pretty active. There's a lot of people browsing imgur directly (they have a voting system, comments...) and know nothing about reddit.
They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.
I think your blog post was bad. First of all, they have really unobtrusive advertising so it's a non-issue to start with. Second of all, it's their money paying for the traffic so how they choose to respond to HTTP requests is up to them. If people don't like it, they stop using imgur. If people don't mind, all is ok, imgur get their revenue and users get their cat pics.
Not to mention a surprisingly large amount of people don't know what Reddit Enhancement Suite is - so they're going directly to the Imgur page when viewing.
another interesting fact is that reddit just last week released api functionality to access reddits cache of all thumbnails and native resolution of post images on their own infrastructure.
Of course they've must have cached thumbnails before but this seems like a giant expansion that must consume rather much resources... or maybe they did this before and just didn't expose the functionality, but it seems tied to their new mobile webpage
Imgur uses the free/extremely cheap CDN Cloudflare. Same with 4chan. The vast majority of Imgur's content gets served at the CDN layer so Imgur doesn't have to pay for that bandwidth.
moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.
CloudFlare told me that using them to host images/media isn't allowed. That they do the CDN bits for websites, but not to do excessive non-webpage stuff. Their ToS says something like that.
As far as I can tell they go by intent. Hosting a few images and videos for your page is one thing. Hosting an imageboard or video streaming site is another.
CDNs don't host the files, your servers do. They cache copies of the files across their CDN network and serve the files from their cache until the cache expires, then they go and get the file from you again to rebuild their cache.
As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reverse proxying), they see that they don't have a cached version of the file, or their cached version has expired, so the CDN sends a request to your server, copies the file, and then proceeds to serve that file from their cache for the next million user requests or until the cache is set to expire (usually 24 or so hours, more than long enough for the traffic hitting your image url to die down).
Basically, the CDN made it so your actual servers (and thus your host bandwidth bill) served one request. Not 1 million requests.
Now typically you will foot the bandwidth bill for the CDN as well, but Cloudflare has a tiered pricing structure that is well below the rest of the competition. See moot (owner of 4chan) talk about cost savings here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324
There must have been some misunderstanding/miscommunication, if not then Cloudflare has pivoted their business significantly from what my understanding of it was (granted I haven't researched them in over a year).
Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the media embedded in the page.
From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests, but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case by case basis.
...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...
From this data, you can see that reddit is stil highly dependent on the US market. The international part must be the other English speaking countries I suppose. There is still some huge work to do to have a better international coverage. (and also a good potential for further growth).
all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything
How did Obama's AMA impact the site's traffic? Aside from that AMA completely bringing the site down, it seemed to result in a longer term increase in users.
I first visited Reddit the day it opened (June 2005), and then started commenting regularly when they first added comments (Jan 2006).
The first announcement was by Paul Graham to comp.lang.lisp. AFAICT on that first visit, the only active users were the two founders (spez and kn0thing), PG, and spez's girlfriend, along with their sockpuppets. It was pretty boring while it was voting-only, but they kept at it, and once they added comments they got a small but fairly active userbase. The initial users were very technical, usually early-adopter programmers, and it drew heavily out of the Lisp/PL-theory crowd. I think that Reddit's YC batchmates also brought along some users, eg. there were a bunch of Semantic Web folks that presumably knew Aaron Schwartz.
That's actually really surprising. I was part of the Digg exodus and I'd barely heard about Reddit at the time of the v4 debacle, while Digg was a pretty big brand in tech circles. Was it just better marketing while Reddit actually had a larger-but-quieter userbase at the time?
Digg spent a lot of money on marketing, while reddit spent none, so yeah, that was a big part of it. They had a lot of articles written about them because they had a fabulous marketing and PR team. One we were a bit envious of.
As a counter-anecdote, by 2010 I had been a reddit user for 4 years and I had never commented nor had had an account on digg, which felt more like the flashier version of an online phpbb forum.
I had first heard about reddit in the summer of 2005 while holding my first ever job as a programmer doing python work, which I would consider as a "tech circle". I remember that I was a little bummed when the front page first got rid of technical-related content and forced me to go to programming.reddit.com instead. That and the fact that people like Paul Graham were still being judged based on their programming merit not on any crazy start-upy valuations certainly made reddit a very techie community in the beginning, at least from my point of view. And I almost forgot, many people were actually pretty upset when reddit switched from Lisp to Python (in December 2005, I even wrote on my blog about it), because python felt "less pure". Funny times.
yeah my view is coming from just my experience, those around me, and general perceived vibe on the 'tech net' at the time. Digg was the spot where links broke. Then in the backlash due to the botched design launch etc, we all started giving reddit a chance, submitting there first/checking there first. It had always been around, but was more for maybe community/comments on links...not where they broke. Then that started to reverse very rapidly until well.....
Using Google trends basically shows you the people who type "reddit" into their search bar increased. :)
I know that isn't entirely true, but yes, for the most part reddit's popularity in the press exploded afterwards because the press needed something new to write about.
That seems very unusual to have a large uptick in engagement without any corresponding increase in traffic. I'm not sure I understand how the Digg announcement would make existing Reddit users more active.
Keep in mind that commenting and voting don't count as page views since it's all AJAX. If you make no comments, one, or 50 on the same page, it's still one page view.
In fact, that was a main reason cited be people at the time as to why they liked reddit over other options -- because we didn't artificially inflate page views by forcing reloads.
It depends on how "page views" is defined, but I can imagine a case where the same number of pages were viewed, but the interactions on that page increased as people began commenting more on reddit than on digg. Reddit doesn't refresh pages when you comment, so if they didn't count the xhr requests as "page views", you could have more active, engaged users without significantly increasing the actual number of pages viewed.
IIRC we were doubling every 8-12 months, and Digg sped that up a bit for us that year. It wasn't like a make-or-break moment, but we certainly felt it. :)
Fortunately you had just turned up a bunch of new servers just days before.
Personally, I don't buy too deep into v4 causing Digg's death. It certainly helped, but stuff like seeing "mrbabyman" and a dozen other power users controlling all the content became tiresome well before v4. Reddit was a little refreshing as I could post in a subreddit and have my content get a fair shake at being seen. That's still true today. My blog and my old webcomic have both been at the top of /r/comics and /r/android. The traffic and exposure was very nice and I think the upvote process is mostly fair. With sites like Digg or Slashdot there's zero chance my stuff would have gotten any exposure.
I'm not sure we were quite double their size. In July 2010, Digg claimed to have 200M pageviews[0] and we had 279M[1]. So I think we were more like 40% bigger in terms of pageviews, which Chris's post from the time[2] seems to confirm. Though we were undercounting a bit[3], so it was probably more like 55% or 60%.
And when it comes to uniques, my memory's pretty foggy, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Digg actually had more than we did at that point.
That said, you're absolutely correct that we were far from struggling, except in terms of getting approval from Conde Nast to buy more AWS power, or to hire, or to get any support whatsoever from their ad sales team.
> And when it comes to uniques, my memory's pretty foggy, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Digg actually had more than we did at that point.
My recollection was that when we visited them shortly after, we were shocked to learn just how much bigger we were. But we might both be right. It was a while ago.
I was one of them. I was a lurker on r/php (actually commenting using a bugmenot.com account) that I found using Google but somehow didn't understand the rest of the website / frontpage.
Digg v4 forced me to take a deeper look at reddit and since then my life has gone downhill :)
I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do.
I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social experiments. Some of them were one time events, like the Reddit Jet Blue Travels or naming a whale Mr. Splashy Pants or the Rally For Sanity (okay, we technically tagged along for that event, but I was the ones drawn to that pilgrimage). Most of them were short lived, like Soapier or The redditor zine. However, there were successful experiments like IAMA (we finally got the President in the end after making joke IAMA requests), Secret Santa, and shit, we even got Snoop Dogg as an honorary mod of /r/trees.
That was the thing with reddit, it was this general forum that various people showed up on who wanted to try new things or learn something new. Sometimes they took it too far and sometimes they had real life effects. Whatever redditors tried, it was something that broke the regular order of things. Hidden away in the subreddits, I can still see these attempts at trying something new. Try Paleo, donate a pizza, ask a scientist or historian for detailed answers, try not to jack off, meetup with like-minded people, try to be more productive with GTD, try to have this obscure politician win an election, or watch these obscure movies on netflix.
Now the site has gotten so big, so many stuff has been done on there, I'm likely just skimming the surface here.
Anyways, Jedberg, Raldi, if you're still on this thread, thanks for your early contributions to that site. It has brought me fond memories and even a few friends...who I can assure you are not the steretypical reddit weirdos. For reals!
I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about The Simpsons: It used to be good.
Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it.
To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/programming remains fairly lively, but it's still a weak substitute for what it could be given proper community oversight.
Yeah, but that popularity gave us the president and celebrities. Even better, I've seen more instances where someone would post a missing person or object or ask what a mysterious bug was and you'd have high chance of someone successfully completing that request. Tapping into more people for help can be as much of blessing as it is a curse.
Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues.
The defaults are garbage, of course, but so would be literally any other community that size, so I don't really think it should reflect significantly on the nature of Reddit. They really need to start onboarding with "What are 5 things you're interested in?" instead of the defaults, though, or else the average first-time user will have no idea that this variety in community quality exists.
> Eternal September appears to be universal property of online communities - IMO Reddit has tolerated it better than most thanks to it's ability to fractally segment itself into smaller and smaller communities that don't observe these issues.
I think this is the key - Eternal September doesn't generally impact Reddit as a whole (except for the default or frontpage), but rather it impacts each individual subreddit. However, each subreddit this happens to then goes and makes a new, separate subreddit to essentially start again.
Entropy will still build up in the software, infrastructure (both human and hardware), monetization model ("my highly targeted customer base keeps moving subs, and they have ad-block!") and an accumulation of bad "federal-level" decisions that get made and held reddit-wide. The question is when this will this burden begin to stifle the creation of new "escape subs."
Frankly, I don't feel like Reddit's quality has changed altogether too much since even before Digg v4 killed Digg.
There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.
Honestly, I'm enjoying the website more today now than I was a few years ago.
Which, I suppose, is the same thing the people say about The Simpsons.
> There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.
Personally I'm pretty happy there's less of the narwhalbacon joke stuff that used to be rampant in the comments years ago. I think the noise:signal ratio is about the same as I can ever remember it being, but at least I can now stand the noise.
To this day I still don't tell people I visit reddit because I don't want to be associated with or labeled as a "redditor" despite the fact that I find the site to be a valuable source of content. There's a strong faction of the core user base that I just can't relate to.
I feel terribly sad to read that, since I'm still in love with Reddit. I've learned so many cool things there, ranging from technical stuff (even HN was probably introduced to me there) to politics, fitness, drugs, and all kinds of cool stuff I can think about. I've probably be using it for a couple years, and I still like it as much as I liked it yesterday. I can realize how cooler it was before, but really, it's still a really good site with really good content.
I agree with the other replies in that I don't think the quality of Reddit has necessarily gone down, you just have to look in the right places. You probably can't get the deep discussions that you initially could, but on the other side of the coin you also can't get the vast amount of new content that you might've never come across.
You certainly do need to hide away from the top level stuff and find the sub-reddits which you can tolerate. For example, the sports reddits are awesome forums for me to visit, but the design and web design ones rarely grab my attention.
With a community of any size that can grow infinitely it is going to be tough to maintain quality. With that being said I created a site that tries something a bit different where you can only follow 150 people and the content you see are the links and posts those 150 people comment on.
This doesn't limit the amount of content you can see because the 150 people in your network will be following their own set of people and so forth so the good content should spread naturally throughout the site. In essence I guess you could think of it as a mix between HN and Twitter where you get to curate the content based on who you follow.
It's called Dunbargo if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://dunbargo.com
There are two restrictions that might not sit well with the HN crowd, but things I put in place to manage quality:
1. You have to connect to LinkedIn just so the site can get your real name.
2. The people you invite you are stuck with forever. This means you can't just toss around your invites without any thought, but instead have to consider if the person you are going to invite will actively do a good job contributing to your stream.
These guidelines make it so the site isn't for everybody, but then again I'm not trying to create a place for everybody.
I'm a week away from the reddit 8 year club, and I couldn't disagree more (about reddit—I haven't watched The Simpsons). I think reddit has navigated their massive popularity better than any other similar services. Subreddits are brilliant. Of course, individual subreddits go through the same transition when they get too big, but you just can't be sentimental. Unsubscribe from a subreddit if it annoys or disappoints you a few days in a row, and never look back. Once I did that (and, of course, unsubscribe from the vast majority of the default subs), reddit has been an amazing hub for all my widely varying hobbies and interests.
Reddit's low point was right before they separated out political posts into their own section (this was about seven years ago, before subreddits). The front page was full of "vote up if" self-posts and overly-hysterical articles about the upcoming elections. It's much better now that you can pick what kinds of articles you want to see.
If every single vote on reddit (both up or down) over ten years were to equal Uber's ~$40bn market cap, each of ~19bn votes would have to be worth over $2.
I also really enjoyed this post from Alexis re: their journey [1]--particularly this excerpt:
"I talk about this a lot in my book, but it was PG who invited us to apply to the first ever round of Y Combinator and ultimately Jessica Livingston who banged on the table to accept us into the program after PG and the other partners rejected us.
I often think about what would have happened if she hadn't demanded that we be part of the program. There'd be no reddit, that's for sure."
This doesn't get repeated quite often enough as it should, but jl is probably one of the kindest, most intelligent, and most perceptive partners at YC, and probably in the entire venture capital industry.
I've asked this repeatedly at reddit and have still yet to ever receive an answer and I think it goes to the core of many of the concerns the reddit community has over the new direction.
Why is /r/TwoXChromosomes the only default subreddit to allow political advocacy?
Not a single default would have accepted kn0thing's first post in todays reddit.
Reddit as a political soapbox died around the time of Occupy Wall Street. It's as neutered as Facebook now.
The front page algorithm is specifically tailored to normalize the appearance of subs precisely so this sort of thing doesn't happen. It's simply not true that the front page would get flooded with politics if you brought in a single default subreddit that allowed general advocacy (or just reddit rule parity like /r/reddit.com did).
Also what makes /r/TwoXChromosomes any different?
Can't you see how that seems a bit unfair to long term politically oriented users of reddit when kn0thing is making statements like this:
And ekjp is out doing interviews with avowed feminists and talking about safe spaces?
If reddit doesn't want to be a platform for political advocacy and activism just make that clear and be fair and even handed about it. Right now some groups are allowed to coordinate email campaigns while others are not and this favoritism has existed at high levels of reddit (whether due to mod cliques or admin influence) ever since the Ron Paul campaign.
The truth is that everyone posting to reddit is posting it with some measure of "YOU need to read this" and the state of default moderation leads to a torment for users who actually want to contribute in ways that powermods (and now admins) disagree with.
The new safe space rule is "Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them."
The way this is written implies that safety is not the only factor in harassment, but that continued actions to torment and demean users in a way that makes reasonable people conclude that reddit is not a platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation.
But the community team seems to only be using it to "ban behavior not ideas" by banning fresh subreddits that share any similarity with previously objectionable subs that were banned for harassing activity without warning, and without submitting any evidence to the community of the behavior so contemptible that it was worthy of disbanding a relatively large community without warning or any recourse whatsoever.
But to be clear, the banning of FPH did not trigger my outrage, I was stunned and appalled at Pao's statements wrt to Free Speech recently it's just a massive departure from the historical nature of the site and it's disingenuous to not acknowledge that to the community from whence you draw all power and profit.
Not only that, they should recognize that yes one use pattern of reddit was to get the word out of things you think other people ought to here. This attracts users that have something to say; and that attracts users who want something to read/hear etc...
Most people don't know this, but it was PG who gave Alexis and Steve the idea to make something like reddit, and also gave them the tagline "the front page of the internet".[0]
PG had vetoed their initial idea to create a food-delivery app and then called them back and asked them to come up with something new.
107 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadI noticed in the actual article, not the blogspam that the Y Combinator folks linked to, that double-dick-dude got more views than the President.
Contrary to popular belief Reddit is not some grass-roots operations.
Sure, they are off-leash now, and have been for years. And that may even be the long-term intent. But if someone owns you, they can always change the status quo.
Tell that to Myspace. A property as expensive as reddit has to have a clear road to profitability or it's going to get the axe. Conde Nast isn't running a charity.
I recently saw a front page post that was just a Taco Bell sign that was 20 years old. A fluff bullshit post with little discernable value. Now I don't suggest that the user paid to post it, that sort of stuff would be found out quickly, but it was up voted enough to get it into the hot\rising queue and by virtue of appearing there it made it to the front page.
We know that in the early days the admins/founders used fake accounts to simulate activity on the site and I not imagine that has changed. So they use these accounts to boost up votes and almost guarantee a front page position.
They are also happy to remove front page posts that advertisers don't like e.g sears
They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.
Of course they've must have cached thumbnails before but this seems like a giant expansion that must consume rather much resources... or maybe they did this before and just didn't expose the functionality, but it seems tied to their new mobile webpage
moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons 4chan is still around these days.
Maybe that changes for a few K a month?
As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your servers (that's why they call it reverse proxying), they see that they don't have a cached version of the file, or their cached version has expired, so the CDN sends a request to your server, copies the file, and then proceeds to serve that file from their cache for the next million user requests or until the cache is set to expire (usually 24 or so hours, more than long enough for the traffic hitting your image url to die down).
Basically, the CDN made it so your actual servers (and thus your host bandwidth bill) served one request. Not 1 million requests.
Now typically you will foot the bandwidth bill for the CDN as well, but Cloudflare has a tiered pricing structure that is well below the rest of the competition. See moot (owner of 4chan) talk about cost savings here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324
Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees.
Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.
Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the media embedded in the page.
From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests, but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case by case basis.
...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...
There used to be a domain for imgur like imgur.voxcdn.com to help people get around WebSense.
CloudFlare is not free, nowhere near it, if you're Imgur or 4chan. moot has emphasised this before. It's expensive.
Source where moot says cloudflare's low cost keeps 4chan running https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324.
Not sure this makes sense in context. They fucked up I concur but I don't think snafu fits the situation.
This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.
What do you think made people stick in those early days without much happening on the site?
Mostly word of mouth.
> Was it just google traffic?
Google was a good source of traffic, but I seem to recall it being only 10-20% of new users.
> What do you think made people stick in those early days without much happening on the site?
The community and content. Which is hopefully what gets them to stay now. :)
The first announcement was by Paul Graham to comp.lang.lisp. AFAICT on that first visit, the only active users were the two founders (spez and kn0thing), PG, and spez's girlfriend, along with their sockpuppets. It was pretty boring while it was voting-only, but they kept at it, and once they added comments they got a small but fairly active userbase. The initial users were very technical, usually early-adopter programmers, and it drew heavily out of the Lisp/PL-theory crowd. I think that Reddit's YC batchmates also brought along some users, eg. there were a bunch of Semantic Web folks that presumably knew Aaron Schwartz.
I had first heard about reddit in the summer of 2005 while holding my first ever job as a programmer doing python work, which I would consider as a "tech circle". I remember that I was a little bummed when the front page first got rid of technical-related content and forced me to go to programming.reddit.com instead. That and the fact that people like Paul Graham were still being judged based on their programming merit not on any crazy start-upy valuations certainly made reddit a very techie community in the beginning, at least from my point of view. And I almost forgot, many people were actually pretty upset when reddit switched from Lisp to Python (in December 2005, I even wrote on my blog about it), because python felt "less pure". Funny times.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=digg%2C%20reddit&cmp...
It could be that Digg "power users" moving to Reddit helped it gain even more traction.
I know that isn't entirely true, but yes, for the most part reddit's popularity in the press exploded afterwards because the press needed something new to write about.
http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_score_reddit....
http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_comments_redd...
Source: http://minimaxir.com/2014/12/reddit-statistics/
In fact, that was a main reason cited be people at the time as to why they liked reddit over other options -- because we didn't artificially inflate page views by forcing reloads.
Fortunately you had just turned up a bunch of new servers just days before.
We call that "capacity planning". ;)
Personally, I don't buy too deep into v4 causing Digg's death. It certainly helped, but stuff like seeing "mrbabyman" and a dozen other power users controlling all the content became tiresome well before v4. Reddit was a little refreshing as I could post in a subreddit and have my content get a fair shake at being seen. That's still true today. My blog and my old webcomic have both been at the top of /r/comics and /r/android. The traffic and exposure was very nice and I think the upvote process is mostly fair. With sites like Digg or Slashdot there's zero chance my stuff would have gotten any exposure.
And when it comes to uniques, my memory's pretty foggy, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Digg actually had more than we did at that point.
That said, you're absolutely correct that we were far from struggling, except in terms of getting approval from Conde Nast to buy more AWS power, or to hire, or to get any support whatsoever from their ad sales team.
[0] http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/08/28/kevin-rose-resp...
[1] https://github.com/drunken-economist/reddit-10-year-data/blo...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/d8d1f/dear_entire_mai...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9768040
My recollection was that when we visited them shortly after, we were shocked to learn just how much bigger we were. But we might both be right. It was a while ago.
What I remember Digg being shocked about when they invited us over for lunch was that they filled two huge floors and we filled... my Toyota Yaris.
Digg v4 forced me to take a deeper look at reddit and since then my life has gone downhill :)
I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs). Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social experiments. Some of them were one time events, like the Reddit Jet Blue Travels or naming a whale Mr. Splashy Pants or the Rally For Sanity (okay, we technically tagged along for that event, but I was the ones drawn to that pilgrimage). Most of them were short lived, like Soapier or The redditor zine. However, there were successful experiments like IAMA (we finally got the President in the end after making joke IAMA requests), Secret Santa, and shit, we even got Snoop Dogg as an honorary mod of /r/trees.
That was the thing with reddit, it was this general forum that various people showed up on who wanted to try new things or learn something new. Sometimes they took it too far and sometimes they had real life effects. Whatever redditors tried, it was something that broke the regular order of things. Hidden away in the subreddits, I can still see these attempts at trying something new. Try Paleo, donate a pizza, ask a scientist or historian for detailed answers, try not to jack off, meetup with like-minded people, try to be more productive with GTD, try to have this obscure politician win an election, or watch these obscure movies on netflix.
Now the site has gotten so big, so many stuff has been done on there, I'm likely just skimming the surface here.
Anyways, Jedberg, Raldi, if you're still on this thread, thanks for your early contributions to that site. It has brought me fond memories and even a few friends...who I can assure you are not the steretypical reddit weirdos. For reals!
Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can assimilate it.
To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/programming remains fairly lively, but it's still a weak substitute for what it could be given proper community oversight.
The defaults are garbage, of course, but so would be literally any other community that size, so I don't really think it should reflect significantly on the nature of Reddit. They really need to start onboarding with "What are 5 things you're interested in?" instead of the defaults, though, or else the average first-time user will have no idea that this variety in community quality exists.
I think this is the key - Eternal September doesn't generally impact Reddit as a whole (except for the default or frontpage), but rather it impacts each individual subreddit. However, each subreddit this happens to then goes and makes a new, separate subreddit to essentially start again.
There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts, power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.
Honestly, I'm enjoying the website more today now than I was a few years ago.
Which, I suppose, is the same thing the people say about The Simpsons.
Personally I'm pretty happy there's less of the narwhalbacon joke stuff that used to be rampant in the comments years ago. I think the noise:signal ratio is about the same as I can ever remember it being, but at least I can now stand the noise.
To this day I still don't tell people I visit reddit because I don't want to be associated with or labeled as a "redditor" despite the fact that I find the site to be a valuable source of content. There's a strong faction of the core user base that I just can't relate to.
You certainly do need to hide away from the top level stuff and find the sub-reddits which you can tolerate. For example, the sports reddits are awesome forums for me to visit, but the design and web design ones rarely grab my attention.
With a community of any size that can grow infinitely it is going to be tough to maintain quality. With that being said I created a site that tries something a bit different where you can only follow 150 people and the content you see are the links and posts those 150 people comment on.
This doesn't limit the amount of content you can see because the 150 people in your network will be following their own set of people and so forth so the good content should spread naturally throughout the site. In essence I guess you could think of it as a mix between HN and Twitter where you get to curate the content based on who you follow.
It's called Dunbargo if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://dunbargo.com
There are two restrictions that might not sit well with the HN crowd, but things I put in place to manage quality:
1. You have to connect to LinkedIn just so the site can get your real name. 2. The people you invite you are stuck with forever. This means you can't just toss around your invites without any thought, but instead have to consider if the person you are going to invite will actively do a good job contributing to your stream.
These guidelines make it so the site isn't for everybody, but then again I'm not trying to create a place for everybody.
What happens when people stop using the site? You're stuck without content... and then you leave the site?
I also really enjoyed this post from Alexis re: their journey [1]--particularly this excerpt:
"I talk about this a lot in my book, but it was PG who invited us to apply to the first ever round of Y Combinator and ultimately Jessica Livingston who banged on the table to accept us into the program after PG and the other partners rejected us.
I often think about what would have happened if she hadn't demanded that we be part of the program. There'd be no reddit, that's for sure."
This doesn't get repeated quite often enough as it should, but jl is probably one of the kindest, most intelligent, and most perceptive partners at YC, and probably in the entire venture capital industry.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/alexis.ohanian/posts/10102187402893...
Why is /r/TwoXChromosomes the only default subreddit to allow political advocacy?
Not a single default would have accepted kn0thing's first post in todays reddit.
Reddit as a political soapbox died around the time of Occupy Wall Street. It's as neutered as Facebook now.
And so you get a front page full of angry crap nobody wants to read but everyone thinks everyone else needs to see.
It doesn't make for a pleasant user experience.
Also what makes /r/TwoXChromosomes any different?
Can't you see how that seems a bit unfair to long term politically oriented users of reddit when kn0thing is making statements like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/35ym8t/promote_ideas_...
And ekjp is out doing interviews with avowed feminists and talking about safe spaces?
If reddit doesn't want to be a platform for political advocacy and activism just make that clear and be fair and even handed about it. Right now some groups are allowed to coordinate email campaigns while others are not and this favoritism has existed at high levels of reddit (whether due to mod cliques or admin influence) ever since the Ron Paul campaign.
The truth is that everyone posting to reddit is posting it with some measure of "YOU need to read this" and the state of default moderation leads to a torment for users who actually want to contribute in ways that powermods (and now admins) disagree with.
The new safe space rule is "Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them."
The way this is written implies that safety is not the only factor in harassment, but that continued actions to torment and demean users in a way that makes reasonable people conclude that reddit is not a platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/36iduv/what_is_the_ap...
But the community team seems to only be using it to "ban behavior not ideas" by banning fresh subreddits that share any similarity with previously objectionable subs that were banned for harassing activity without warning, and without submitting any evidence to the community of the behavior so contemptible that it was worthy of disbanding a relatively large community without warning or any recourse whatsoever.
But to be clear, the banning of FPH did not trigger my outrage, I was stunned and appalled at Pao's statements wrt to Free Speech recently it's just a massive departure from the historical nature of the site and it's disingenuous to not acknowledge that to the community from whence you draw all power and profit.
Parent comment is very much right, Reddit got disappointingly neutered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
This too can drive growth. If the community gets the impression that they don't drive the content then reddit loses all the magic.
The truth is, the users haven't driven the content of the front-page since the fall of /r/reddit.com following Occupy Wall Street.
PG had vetoed their initial idea to create a food-delivery app and then called them back and asked them to come up with something new.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po
- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3auk69/happy_10th_bir...
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit