 | |
| URL | reddit.com |
|---|---|
| Slogan | The front page of the internet[1] |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | News aggregation, general discussion and advice forum |
| Registration | Optional to browse; required to participate |
| Availablelanguage(s) | English, Esperanto, Japanese, French, Italian, German, Spanish[2] |
| Content license | Non-free[3] |
| Owner | Advance Publications |
| Created by | Steve Huffman Alexis Ohanian |
| Launched | 2005 |
| Alexa rank |  112 (November 2011)[4] |
| Current status | Active |
reddit (pronounced /ˈrɛdɪt/)[5] is a social news website where the registered users submit content, which could either be links or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.
Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. In September 2011, Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications.
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Overview
Registered users (also referred to as redditors) may subscribe to individual reddits — communities created around specific areas of interest — to customize the content that appears on their front page, or subscribe to no individual reddits and have a general front page displayed.[6][7][8][9] Front page rank, for both the general front page and for individual reddits, is determined by the age of the submission, positive ("upvoted") to negative ("downvoted") feedback ratio and the total vote count.[10] Dozens of submissions cycle through these front pages daily.
Users submit content via links or with "self" posts that contain user-generated text. Other users may then vote the post "up" or "down," with the most successful posts gaining prominence by reaching the site's front page or the front page of individual reddits, through the ranking process described above. Users may also comment on the posted links or "self" posts and reply to other commentators, much like an online forum or discussion group. Unlike typical forums, however, comments can also be "upvoted" or "downvoted" by other users. Comment votes do not affect the main article's rank, but when the "comments" link is clicked from a front page, only the most popular comments are shown. The user must click an additional link or change preferences to see all comments.
As of June 2011, commentary on the site is particularly active, often running into the hundreds on some submissions. Popular comments have generated many memes within the Reddit community[11].
Reddits
Any registered user may create a reddit, although a link to do so does not appear on the user's homepage until after thirty days.[12] There are over 67,000 reddits to peruse, and popular examples include, but are not limited to:
Users may customize what is shown on their personal front page by subscribing to individual reddits, or they may see a general front page for the entire site by subscribing to no individual reddits. The site's general front page is also accessible via a link to "all" at the top of the individual user's customized front page.
Reddit Meetups
The Reddit community has been known to socialize at local parks and bars around the world.[13]
History
Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia.[7] It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe in 2005. Aaron Swartz joined in late January 2006 as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami.[14] Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006.[15] Shortly thereafter, Swartz was fired.[16]
Open source
On June 18, 2008, Reddit became an open source project.[17] With the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available on Github.[18]
Growth
By the end of 2008, the team had grown to include Erik Martin, Jeremy Edberg,[19] David King,[20] and Mike Schiraldi.[21] In 2009, Huffman and Ohanian moved on to form Hipmunk, recruiting Slowe shortly thereafter.[22]
Reddit Gold
In July 2010, facing severe underfunding despite explosive traffic growth, Reddit introduced Reddit Gold, offering new features for a price ofUS$3.99/month or US$29.99/year.[23] The revenue and attention got them approval to buy more servers and employ more people.
Independence
On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, now operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications.[24]
Demographics
According to Google DoubleClick Ad Planner's estimate, the median U.S. Reddit user is male, 35-44 years of age, has some college education, and is making a middle-range income of $25,000 - $49,000 USD. The analysis also shows that the top audience interests of the site are development tools, scripting languages, and C and C++, suggesting a computer savvy demographic and culture.[25]
"Restoring Truthiness" Campaign
In September 2010, Reddit users started a movement to persuade Stephen Colbert to have a rally in Washington DC.[26] 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.[27]
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, which launched a campaign to bring the event to life. Over $500,000 was raised for charity to gain the attention of Colbert. The campaign was mentioned on-air several times, and when the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was held in Washington, D.C. on October 30th, 2010, thousands of redditors made the journey.[28]
During a post-rally press conference, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian asked, "What role did the Internet campaign play in convincing you to hold this rally?" Jon Stewart 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."[29] In a message to the reddit community, Colbert later added, "I have no doubt that your efforts to organize and the joy you clearly brought to your part of the story contributed greatly to the turnout and success."[30]
Technology
Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in 2005.[31] 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 employeeAaron Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project.[32]
Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework.[33] As of November 2009, Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services.[34]
Reddit uses PostgreSQL as primary datastore and slowly moving to Apache Cassandra, a column oriented datastore. It uses RabbitMQ for offline processing, HAProxy for load balancing and memcached for caching. In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery.[35]
Mobile web
On June 7, 2010, Reddit staff launched a revamped mobile interface featuring rewritten CSS, a new color scheme, and a multitude of improvements.[36]
Client interface applications
There are several unofficial applications that use the Reddit API, including reddit is fun,[37] Andreddit,[38] F5, BaconReader,[39] and an Android tablet specific application called Reddita.[40]
Search
On July 21, 2010, Reddit out-sourced the reddit search engine to Flaptor, who used its search product IndexTank.[41]
Culture
Reddit is known for its various site-wide charity campaigns which have included
- In early December of 2010, the members of the Christianity subreddit and the Atheism subreddit came together to cross-promote[42]fundraising drives for World Vision's Clean Water Fund and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), respectively. Later, the Islam subreddit joined in, raising money for Islamic Relief. In less than a week, the three communities (as well as the reddit community at-large) raised over $45,000 for charity.[43]
- In early October 2010, a story was posted on Reddit about a seven-year-old girl, Kathleen Edwards, who was in the advanced stages ofHuntington’s disease. The girl's neighbors were taunting her and her family. Redditors banded together and gave the girl a shopping spree.[44][45]
- Reddit started the largest Secret Santa program in the world, which is still in operation to date. For the 2010 Holiday season, 92 countries were involved in the Secret Santa program. There were 17,543 participants, and $662,907.60 was collectively spent on gift purchases and shipping costs. [46][47][48]
- Members from reddit donated nearly $575,000 to DonorsChoose in support of Stephen Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive. The donation spree broke previous records for the most money donated to a single cause by the reddit community and resulted in an interview with Colbert on reddit.[49]
- Reddit users donated $185,356.70 to Direct Relief International for Haiti after the earthquake devastated the island in January 2010.[50]
The website has a strong culture of free speech and very few rules about the types of content that may be posted; it only prohibits posting of personal information. This has led to the creation of several subreddits that have been perceived as extremely offensive, including forums dedicated to jailbait and pictures of dead bodies.[51] There are also subforums that have been perceived as sexist.[citation needed][who?]
Awards
In May 2010, Reddit was named in Lead411's "2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies" list.[52]
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