Reddit

Reddit

Screenshot Reddit front page on July 23, 2010 Reddit front page on July 23, 2010
Type of site	News aggregation, General discussion & advice forum.
Owner	Advance Publications via Condé Nast Publications
Created by	Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
URL	www.reddit.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Optional

Reddit (stylized as reddit, pronounced /ˈrɛdɪt/ "red it") is a social news website, owned by Condé Nast Digital, a subsidiary of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Users (also called redditors) can browse and have the option to submit links to content on the Internet or submit "self" posts that contain original, user-submitted text. Other users may then vote the posted links "up" or "down" with the most successful links gaining prominence by reaching the front page. In addition, users can comment on the posted links and reply to other commentators consequently forming an online community. Reddit users may create their own topical sections, called subreddits, for which to submit their links and to comment.

Overview

Mister Splashy Pants logo used on November 27, 2007

The site has discussion areas in which users may discuss submissions and vote for or against other people's comments. When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default, although a reader can display it by clicking an additional link or by changing the preferences. The default preferences cut-off comments whose value is -4 or less, meaning they had received at least five more negative votes than they did positive votes. The default comment sorting is set in such a way that so-called 'best' comments are displayed on top (defined by reddit's algorithm as having a better positive to negative ratio but still influenced by the amount of total votes), however the user can change that according to his preference. The appearance of submissions on the front page is determined by the age of the submission, positive to negative feedback ratio and the total vote count.

Reddits

Reddit includes topical sections called "reddits" (or, alternatively, "subreddits") which focus on specific topics, including "pics", "funny", "politics", "worldnews", "atheism", "programming", "travel", "food", "science" or the all-encompassing "reddit". Each section focuses on user-generated content that is relevant to each reddit. There are hundreds of reddits and users are encouraged to create their own. Submissions that are voted up receive prominence by being displayed on the front page of the specific reddit. Those submissions receiving a high rate of votes are then displayed on the main front page of Reddit. Users may also subscribe and unsubscribe to various reddit sections allowing them to choose which links from which reddit is displayed on their personal front page.

Reddit name	Subscribers	Age
pics	426,431	2 years
reddit.com	415,175	4 years
funny	427,401	2 years
politics	360,412	3 years
AskReddit	323,967	2 years
WTF	415,886	2 years
gaming	296,004	3 years
science	413,758	3 years
worldnews	335,797	2 years
programming	267,776	4 years

As of 26 November 2010 19:07 EDT

Karma system

Reddit.com employs a moderation-based "karma" reward system for users who make submissions and comment on stories. Users gain one point of link karma when another user votes up their submission and lose a point when a user votes down their submission. Individual comments may also be voted up or down by other users and result in a user's comment karma. Users stop losing karma after their submission reaches 0. This is not the case for comments.

Karma points are also not gained from votes for direct submissions of Reddit-hosted posts to reddits (also known as "self" posts, usually indicated by "self.(name of sub-reddit)" listed next to the name of the post); this was implemented by the administrators to counteract against "karma-whoring".

The site also fosters discussion and a sense of community by notifying users of replies to with an "orangered" envelope. The site administrators are also active users replying directly to users, submitting their own submissions and commenting on stories. They also host video interviews with questions submitted by the community. The community have also been known to socialize at local parks and bars around the world.

Logo

The Reddit logo changes for various holidays and pays homage to geek culture in general. It often changes in response to major discussion subjects within the site or major news stories. Reddits exist for the purpose of designing such logos for both the main site and for new reddits, usually featuring the Reddit "alien" mascot that has been called "Snoo", the name that the creators of Reddit reportly wanted to originally give to the site itself (but couldn't because the name was already owned).

History

Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia. It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz in 2005. Aaron Swartz joined in late January 2006 as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami. The combined company was known as "not a bug." Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired "not a bug" on October 31, 2006.

On June 18, 2008, Reddit became an open source project. With the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available on another website dubbed "Fixxit."

Reddit was named by Ohanian while browsing the University of Virginia's Alderman Library.

In January 2010, Reddit users raised over $185,000 for the victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

In July 2010 Reddit implemented Reddit Gold, offering new features for a price of $3.99/month or $29.99/year.

In July 2010 Reddit expanded their team, hiring Jeff Sandberg. Later that summer, reddit employee Mike "Raldi" Schiraldi got pregnant from a lion.

In August 2010, Ben Huh, owner of the popular comedy photoblog I Can Has Cheezburger and its spinoffs, made a public offer to acquire Reddit, believing that the site would deserve the benefit of more resources and decreased corporate influence he would bring to the site in the midst of conflicts between operators and Condé Nast.

The 'Restoring Truthiness' Campaign

In September 2010, Reddit users started a movement to persuade Stephen Colbert to have a rally in Washington DC. The movement was started by user mrsammercer, in a post where he describes waking up from a dream in which Stephen Colbert holds a satirical rally in D.C.

He writes, "This would be the high water mark of American satire. Half a million people pretending to suspend all rational thought in unison. Perfect harmony. It'll feel like San Francisco in the late 60s, only we won't be able to get any acid."

The idea resonated with the Reddit community, who quickly sprung into action creating webpages and Facebook groups to organize the call, as well as contacting producers for the show. Stephen acknowledged the building momentum on his show, saying that only a sign from God, in the form of a goose, could decide if he should hold a rally. The organized supporters of the rally quickly sent live and stuffed animal geese to the Colbert Report studio, by the hundreds.

In order to show how serious and potentially influential the Reddit community is, a donation drive for DonorsChoose.org was called into action by a Reddit moderator. Colbert sits on the Board of Directors for this particular charity. Reddit managed to raise more than $100,000 in 24 hours, $250,000 over 3 days, and over $500,000 by the rally date to help teachers across United States buy supplies for their classrooms.

On September 13, 2010, Jon Stewart announced on The Daily Show the "Rally to Restore Sanity", to be held on October 30, 2010. In the following episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert announced a "March to Keep Fear Alive" counter-rally to be held on the same day at the same location, the National Mall. On October 14, 2010, Colbert appeared as a surprise guest on The Daily Show, and the two announced they were combining their two rallies into one: The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

After the rally on October 30, during a press conference, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian asked, "What role did the Internet campaign play in convincing you to hold this rally?" Stewart and Colbert responded by saying that, though it was a very nice gesture, the two had already thought of the idea prior and the deposit on using the National Mall was already paid during the summer, so it acted mostly as a "validation of what we were thinking about attempting."

Awards

Reddit received the 2008 Open Web Award.

In May 2010, Blurb is named in Lead411's "2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies” list.

Technology

Python backend

Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in 2005. The reasons given for the switch were faster performance, wider access to code libraries, and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework that former Reddit employee Aaron Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project.

Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework. The site was hosted on several Linux servers running lighttpd, HaProxy, and paster; however, as of November 2009, Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services. In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery.

Mobile web

On June 7, 2010 Reddit staff launched a revamped mobile site located at i.reddit.com and m.reddit.com, replacing a previous iteration. The new site features rewritten CSS, a new color scheme, and a multitude of improvements.

iPhone

On February 18, 2009, Reddit released an iPhone Application called iReddit for $1.99, which allows users to more easily navigate the site while using the iPhone. There were also several other Reddit iPhone Applications available prior to the official application's release date. The first unofficial application was named "Satellite", which was released in November 2008. Satellite originally cost $4.99 but its price was later reduced to just $.99 after the release of the official Reddit application. The unofficial second application, released in December 2008 was called "Open Source Reddit", differing from Satellite by being free of charge. As of June 17, 2010, iReddit is available free of charge and had joined Open Source Reddit by making its source available for community updates on GitHub.

Android

There are several unofficial applications in the Android Market that use the Reddit API, including Reddit is Fun and Andreddit.

Notable Community contributions

• Reddit user Alan Schaaf created the popular free image hosting site Imgur.
• Graphic artist Mike Mitchell created the "I'm with Coco" poster, which has subsequently been adopted by Conan O'Brien for his The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour.

See also

• Diigo
• Delicious
• Digg
• Fark
• Imgur
• StumbleUpon
• Slashdot
• Social bookmarking
• Web 2.0

External links

• Reddit
• Fixxit (Reddit's code repository)
• Reddit's job board

Reddit clones

• proddit, in Romanian
• culter in Spanish