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reddit blog
one year down...
This past Saturday, June 24th, marked the one year anniversary of reddit.
Frankly, we're a little surprised to still be here, let alone doing this well. But we're very grateful.
Like so much over this past year, the timing couldn't have been better. It seems like everywhere we read about a competitor, someone is speaking up for the site run by three guys without VC funding from an apartment three thousand miles from the Valley. Chris, you don't count as a full person until you either quit grad school or get your PhD.
Reddit's fantastic growth hasn't come from a PR firm or from advertising (not counting paulgraham.com) -- you the users have spreddit (sorry, I couldn't help myself) across the globe (really, our FM survey data shows that roughly 50% of you are not living in the USA, very cool).
Basically, this seemed like a good excuse to thank you all. Let's face it, no one would visit this site if it weren't for the community. We brag about you... well, maybe not all of you ;-) but most of you. Furthermore, you tell us when we've screwed up, how we can improve reddit, and even when we've occasionally done something right. We know how lucky we are to be doing this, so we're trying to deserve it.
This also seemed like a good time to display the original version of our alien mascot (check today's reddit logo). There were a few more incarnations that I'm grudgingly going to show over the next couple of days. I know they're a bit rough, but just so you know, I can hear you laughing.
Anyway, thanks.
We're far from done, so hopefully we'll get to thank you again in another year.
In other news, we've been very busy lately keeping up with growth. The volume of spam has increased dramatically lately. Thank you to everyone who reports spam links; it's very helpful. We have a couple tricks up our sleeve that we'll deploy soon to help combat this problem. As always, we prefer solutions that affect our well-behaved users as little as possible.
We made an addition to the "report" tab for each link tonight. In addition to reporting a link as spam, and the submitter as a spammer, you may now report the domain as a spam domain in general.
You know that feeling you get in the bottom of your stomach once you've read everything there is to read on reddit? No? Yeah, me neither.
Um, anyway, I've been wishing there was a place with the clean, easy interface of reddit that let me subscribe to read the latest updates on my favorite websites. So I went and built it. Introducing feeds.reddit.com.
In response to the discussion over the top story on reddit's front-page at the moment, we've made the hot page no longer count down votes. Down-votes still influence your recommendations, which, by the way, are in for a major overhaul soon, but the hotness algorithm is only going to pay attention to the up votes for the time being.
In addition, where the score used to be displayed as "points," it's now displayed as "ups." There are a few glitches still (when you vote it says "points" still, for instance), but this is a potentially temporary change.
One change that we should see immediately is that the stories that are currently controversial, but formerly had a score near 0, are now bubbling up on the hot page.
We're not sure the exact ramifications of this change, but we're going to give it a couple days to see how it works.
We added a new feature today to notify you when one of your comments has been replied to. You should receive a message in your inbox stating that there is a new reply to one of your comments.
There will be a 'context' link below the message to take you to the comment thread.
You've likely already noticed the addition of the mail icon beside your username now. Private messaging has been requested quite a bit lately and after hearing it suggested by a number of the redditors we spoke with at Startup School, we knew we had push it to the top of the todo list -- let us know what you think.
We also snuck in a new sort option, comments, a little while back, so if you're looking for some hearty discussion, this'll show you where all the chatter is.
more shirts, new shirts, and even new models (sorta)
20 April 2006
We didn't expect the great response from the last shirt sale, but we've since ordered a slew of new shirts. By request, we also picked up some 2XLs and Women's T's (we were excited to learn that women apparently like reddit, too). Our printer decided that the shirts would be better off with a transparent alien in this new batch, so only the Larges still have the original alien in white. Now, back to geek stuff...
We added a new tab to day on the info pages for reporting spam, and for reporting spammers. This should allow us to keep track of the bad people.
We also added a quick tab for details about a particular submission. There's not much there yet, but you can view the number of up vs. number of down votes here as well.
We added a new 'browse' tab today. On this tab, in addition to being able to restrict articles to a particular time period, you may also sort by any of the usual sort options, including the brand new 'controversy' sort. Controversy is determined by the number of votes a link has received while keeping the lowest score possible. The natural statistic to show here would be the actual number of up/down votes in addition to the total score. Fret not, we'll add that soon.
help yourself (and if you're feeling generous, reddit, too)
4 April 2006
It's long overdue, but reddit now has a updated help section. Not only is it more thorough, it's also a wiki (and not just any wiki), so please feel free to improve upon it. One section in particular, reddiquette, has been intentionally left blank since it's you, the users, who should be deciding what it should be.
Also, we're selling our own reddit shirts now... even the penguin bought one.
On April 29th Y Combinator will be hosting the 2006 edition of Startup School. We attended the last one, and we'll be attending this one as well. The first Startup School was fantastic, and judging from the speaker list, this one should prove to be awesome as well.
We changed the layout on the comments page today to make a place for 'related' links. Soon we're going to add another tab in this area for other additional information about particular links.
We're trying some new ways of showing links that are related to other links. While it's not quite there yet, you can play with it by going to an article's comment page and changing the url from 'info' to 'related'.
We've added some new sorting options to most of the listing pages tonight. In particular, search results can be sorted by hot/new/top now in addtion to the previous "rank" sorting.
The recommendation page can also be sorted by hot/new/top in addtion to the "relevancy" ranking of before.
The reddit blog is now powered by infogami. As you can see, we haven't moved over all the old blog entries yet, but we'll get them soon enough. During the meantime, you may view the old blog here.
In addition to the blog using infogami, so is the help section. In the help section, however, we're going to use the new permission system to allow reddit users to make changes to the help pages themselves. Since reddit is nothing without you, our users, and you developed the reddiquette, you have control over the help pages now as well. This is pretty exciting, I hope it works out well.
We also added a link to the rising page to the menu-bar. The rising page isn't finished yet, but it's working well enough to make public. The basic goal is to give sites that have only a couple of votes a few more chances to make it onto the front page. We'll continue to refine it as we go as usual.
