Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream

http://www.wired.com/design/2014/01/the-gentrification-of-reddit-in-a-few-great-graphs/

by danielhonigman • 13 years ago

115 70 13 years ago

VMG• 13 years ago

Original post with HD graphics: http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...

stusmall• 13 years ago

He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content.

Its my personal opinion that this has really hurt the depth of content. Its still a fun site, just very different then when I first went there ~6 years ago.

EDIT: Not to say RES isn't a great project and super useful. I use it and really appreciate it. Its just interesting how ease of use can shape the content and culture of an online community.

bigtech• 13 years ago

If I remember correctly, which is doubtful, picture posts became more popular, and while Reddit has the ability to shape the types of content that make it to the front page, they chose not to as this seems to express the will of the users.

heyheyhey• 13 years ago

I think reddit being picture heavy is just a cause of its exploding popularity. Ever follow a subreddit from infancy to infamy? You'll see as it grows, there will be more and more posts of just pictures/memes, which in turn will cause users to complain, mods to step in to filter these out, more subreddits dedicated solely to memes about this topic, etc.

While I do think RES is awesome, most of my non-tech friends who browse Reddit (usually on their phone) haven't even heard of RES.

officemonkey2• 13 years ago

The other big boost to images taking over was the popularity of imgur. Other picture hosting sites were so poor that I think it actually reduced the amount of picture content prior to 2009.

KVFinn2• 13 years ago

He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content.

Nah, nothing to do with RES, that's just how things tend to evolve without strict moderation. The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it's easy to consume and upvote.

http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...

joejohnson• 13 years ago

Aw, the data is a year old. I wonder how much more of the site has transformed into video/picture content.

minimaxir• 13 years ago

I recently did an analysis using Reddit data between 7/22/13 and 9/26/13. 1 in 3 links go to Imgur or YouTube.

http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/

ExpiredLink• 13 years ago

The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions was probably inevitable.

thenmar• 13 years ago

It does seem to be the blind leading the blind much more than in other forums.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

This is probably related to SO and the later rise of HN in that area as well.

Kiro• 13 years ago

I just had a look and the submissions were very similar to the front page on HN. Are you exaggerating or do you think the quality has gone down here as well?

code_duck• 13 years ago

I think that actually, most of the submissions there come from the front page of HN.

sehr• 13 years ago

The submissions are nearly identical on any given day. The discussions? Not so much.

Not saying HN comment threads are the pinnacle of discourse, but they are an order of magnitude better than proggit's.

oinksoft• 13 years ago

Before Hacker News was popular, you tended to be able to go to proggit for breaking news and large discussions. Being less popular, HN had smaller discussions and stories took longer to rotate out. There was much more focus on startups and California things, much less on infosec.

Proggit now seems to have been reduced to an HN mirror, but HN is something else too.

troebr• 13 years ago

I used to read r/programming a lot, but eventually ended up reading hacker news for this kind of news. I would not be surprised if you could match r/programming decline in popularity with a rise in popularity of HN.

corresation3• 13 years ago

Those who only take a cursory glance will assume that Reddit started as a porn site, with nsfw dominating. This is of course contrary to how most of us remember it.

If you delve deeper, it is actually that Reddit started entirely without subs, and happened to mostly be programming related, with a smattering of politics.

nsfw was created because, much like with the TLD debate on the same topic, it was a content category that people wanted to separate. As the "subless" Reddit started to get noisy with mainstream topics, that's when people started fracturing off to /r/programming.

at-fates-hands2• 13 years ago

A few years ago, I heard the same thing, then went and checked out the archive and it was about the furthest thing from the truth.

Screenshot from 2005 of the home page: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...

corresation3• 13 years ago

EDIT: Apologies, however I misunderstood at-fates-hands's point of contention, however leave this post just for the neat archive.org links.

What is the "furthest thing from the truth"?

While you selectively chose a generalist front page, how about-

https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com...?

A Ruby post up at number 1. Heck, almost all of the front page is exactly the sort of material you would find on HN.

Another 2005 day -

https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com...?

Another day with four LISP front-pagers - https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com...?

Every post wasn't always about programming specifically, but it was a site primarily populated by programmers and other IT professionals, which is how what would be fringe material topped the front page. But there was the other stuff, just as there is on HN.

Just to make an aside about something I found interesting on the archived reddit page - the header "reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or submit your own!". The premise was that Reddit would use clustering and other intelligent logic to individualize itself to the viewer. They abandoned that and went the "subscribe to subs you like" notion.

fragmede3• 13 years ago

Still, the graph shows the site’s beginnings in the primordial muck of porn and programming. The r/NSFW subreddit was one of the first, Olson explains (though he notes that the site was never 100 percent NSFW; his graph leaves out /r/reddit.com for purposes of legibility.)

FTA

timcederman2• 13 years ago

Did the graph get updated? The one I'm looking at shows nsfw peaking at 5%, but only ever being a small fraction of the total content.

corresation3• 13 years ago

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/design/2014/01/reddit1.jpg

That's the current graph, seemingly showing nsfw as 100% of Reddit content at the beginning of 2006.

gdulli2• 13 years ago

What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes, images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left.

mcantelon• 13 years ago

Calling one of the most successful sites on the Internet a "missed opportunity" is a bit odd. Whether you want junk or you want quality, it's there (dig into the subreddits).

officemonkey2• 13 years ago

I wish there was a better way to discover subreddits I might like.

If Reddit did to subreddits what Pandora and Netflix did to music and movies (analyze and recommend,) it would pay off for them.

stbtrax• 13 years ago

In my experience, the problem with subreddits is that they are either too well trafficked, in which case it eventually devolves back into puns and memes, or it's way too sparse and there's no content.

TrainedMonkey• 13 years ago

I think you are missing the point. Meme/image site is precisely what got reddit so big in the first place. Number of users allowed for a striking amount of highly sophisticated communities to develop (as science, workouts, etc.).

gdulli2• 13 years ago

In practice, the mainstreaming of a site brings down the quality globally as the memes and spam bleed into other topics.

fragmede3• 13 years ago

Arguably, if it hadn't been turned into a meme/image site, it would have been closed, which is not interesting at all.

sentenza• 13 years ago

Wow. Reddit is that young? It feels as if it has been around forever.

I'm not so sure about the image overload thing. Maybe that is just a symptom of another problem. IMO, the standard settings of the main page should be "fixed". It would be nice if you saw posts from a dozen or so _random_ subreddits as a standard setting, instead of the current colorful goo mixed from the big catchall subreddits.

oceanplexian2• 13 years ago

Reddit is very young. It feels like yesterday that we were still using Digg.

zck• 13 years ago

It's interesting that /r/politics got a huge bump (looks to me to be about 75% increase in size) around the 2008 U.S. presidential election, but had no noticeable difference in 2012.

danielhonigman2• 13 years ago

Will be interesting to see what happens in 2016, with Obama having reached his two-term limit. Plus, I also think Obama was focusing on more "mainstream" channels like FB, Twitter, etc.

natural219• 13 years ago

This seem to be purely a function of volume. By 2012 there were all sorts of other subreddits that people frequented.

danielhonigman2• 13 years ago

Good point

bhaumik• 13 years ago

In 2012, Obama's AMA received 5.6 million views (1.6 m unique) [1]

"The site averaged over three billion pageviews each month in 2012, which is a 50% increase from the two billion the site reported for the month of December in 2011."

[1] http://www.slashgear.com/reddit-saw-37-billion-pageviews-in-...

bernardom• 13 years ago

Good lord, what happened in mid 2009?! The reddit.com blue area spikes up for a month.

Edit: the original blogpost by Randy Olson says he doesn't know either.

fragmede3• 13 years ago

US schools let out for summer vacation

evacuationdrill2• 13 years ago

That was the Digg exodus. I was a Digg user, and I switched around that time. It had started to suck really bad, to where people like myself were willing to give it a fair shot, only to discover that the discussions were generally higher-quality. That's also why I'm here, from a discussion on Reddit for other sites. But I still find that the smaller subs scratch that itch, too.

raldi• 13 years ago

You're off by a year. Digg v4 was the end of summer 2010.

fragsworth• 13 years ago

Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the crap on the bottom.

The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very difficult to see.

Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant.

Bill_Dimm• 13 years ago

Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time in them, which would be interesting and relevant.

I came here to say that (although your other points are good, too). The title of the article is "Fascinating Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream" but then they normalize away all of the growth info and make it completely impossible to see how traffic growth is related to anything they are displaying.

perlpimp• 13 years ago

4chan conjecture: all forums evolve to approximate 4chan or they die by the death of long tail.

imo

TelmoMenezes• 13 years ago

I think all forums evolve towards decaffeination, including 4chan. People like to give 4chan as an example of low quality, but I think 4chan is actually in the top 1% of quality due to being an out-of-control creative machine. The 4chan-as-low-quality cliché goes well with all the other re-re-redigested morsels of tedium that 99% of content consist of.

martininmelb• 13 years ago

Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more diversified as it became more popular".

Widdershin• 13 years ago

That is far too positive. Please try and be more negative in future, it challenges my worldview less.

indlebe2• 13 years ago

Endless summer ;)

dangrossman• 13 years ago

I think you meant "Eternal September". Endless summer is just a description of the weather in Miami.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

maxerickson• 13 years ago

I recently saw someone make a similar reference to the endless summer.

We are anyway moving towards the long October, where the number of new people using the (English) internet is roughly proportional to the number of new people.

indlebe2• 13 years ago

:) I was attempting a more politically correct version of: http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer

I heard about eternal september last year and figured that eternal summer was a play on it.

Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream

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