Happy 10th birthday to us

http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-celebrating.html

by CapitalistCartr • 11 years ago

279 104 11 years ago

redditblog.com

jasonlotito• 11 years ago

Actual link http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-...

coldpie• 11 years ago

Thanks. URL should be updated for this post to avoid blogspam.

VieElm• 11 years ago

Right why link to the TC article instead of the blog post? I don't understand it.

dang• 11 years ago

Ok, url changed from http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/reddit-turns-ten-years-old-....

eueueu• 11 years ago

Is Reddit still run to be profitable? It always seems like it fits more with a wikipedia type model of donations etc.

sergiotapia• 11 years ago

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.

minimaxir5• 11 years ago

It's been operationally independent since 2011: http://www.redditblog.com/2011/09/independence.html

aspir• 11 years ago

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.

meritt2• 11 years ago

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.

ChrisArchitect5• 11 years ago

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?!

Adirael• 11 years ago

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.

mhomde• 11 years ago

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

billmalarky5• 11 years ago

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.

minimaxir5• 11 years ago

Here's a GitHub repository released by Reddit of all the relevant Reddit metrics (uniques, page views, submissions etc.), by month: https://github.com/drunken-economist/reddit-10-year-data

realusername• 11 years ago

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).

ChrisArchitect5• 11 years ago

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

celticninja3• 11 years ago

Snafu'd = situation normal all fucked up.

Not sure this makes sense in context. They fucked up I concur but I don't think snafu fits the situation.

ChrisArchitect5• 11 years ago

heh yeah ok sorry - changed to 'botched design execution'

jedberg10• 11 years ago

Reddit, who was struggling at the time.

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.

Someone1234• 11 years ago

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.

Pxtl• 11 years ago

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?

hashberry• 11 years ago

I think people have this viewpoint because Reddit's popularity exploded after Digg v4 (August 2010):

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.

minimaxir5• 11 years ago

Traffic didn't change much, but user behavior definitely did:

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/

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

This is what I recall as well.

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.

raldi5• 11 years ago

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.

[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

__z• 11 years ago

Hardly. Before the v4 disaster almost everything posted on Digg's front page had a complaint saying "This was posted on Reddit yesterday."

gukov• 11 years ago

It was Digg v2 for me. I'm a redditor for over nine years.

conradfr• 11 years 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 :)

randall• 11 years ago

Blogspam?

bduerst• 11 years ago

Probably - duplicate from actual reddit article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565

ilovecomputers2• 11 years ago

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!

astrodust• 11 years ago

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.

ilovecomputers2• 11 years ago

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.

TTPrograms• 11 years ago

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.

alogray• 11 years ago

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.

ravishi• 11 years ago

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.

MrAlmostWrong• 11 years ago

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.

baddox• 11 years ago

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.

panic• 11 years ago

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.

sneak• 11 years ago

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.

HelloThereHuman• 11 years ago

Right, is there a point to this or is it just a very out of context thought experiment?

exacube• 11 years ago

If my fingers were to equal Google's $375B market cap, each of my finger is worth $37.5B.

thomson• 11 years ago

Happy Birthday Reddit!

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...

go1dfish4• 11 years ago

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.

raldi5• 11 years ago

Most political subreddits don't garner upvotes on the basis of "I'm glad I was shown this" but rather, "YOU need to read this".

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.

go1dfish4• 11 years ago

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:

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.

odiroot• 11 years ago

Just because you (and the rest of the staff) don't want to read it doesn't mean the community doesn't.

Parent comment is very much right, Reddit got disappointingly neutered.

vshan• 11 years ago

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po

limeyx• 11 years ago

Food delivery app idea looking pretty OK about now :)

avinassh• 11 years ago

Makes me sad that Admins did not mention Aaron Swartz[0]

- https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

go1dfish4• 11 years ago

Same here, and the community noticed as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3auk69/happy_10th_bir...

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

Happy 10th birthday to us

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