Reddit Blog

I'd love to hear the backstory on that! Any other reddit anecdotes I can share for you? I shared a few on my blog (http://reddit.blogspot.com) during the startup, but we lucked into Chris because he went back to his PHD after doing YC that first summer and had 2 spare bedrooms, which Steve & I promptly moved into when summer ended and PG talked us out of moving back to Virginia. Chris generally just made us feel guilty for ever needing to sleep (since he was helping us part-time and PHD-ing at Harvard the rest of the time -- oh, and he met & dated his future wife then, too!)

" Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here's the thing: corporations aren't run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit's revenue isn't great. " http://blog.reddit.com/

For interesting related reading, see this article on Hacker News's and Reddit's ranking algorithms: http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588 It links to this excellent read as well: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html

I think Randall Munroe did a pretty great job with reddit's 'best' comment ranking[1]. Hopefully youtube will be using something similar. 1: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html

Reddit, the website, enabled the labeling of the victim. They apologized for it too[1]; they wouldn't have done so if they didn't recognize some kind of moral responsibility for what happened. While no one should imply that every reddit user is responsible, a thought should be spared as to whether or not false accusations and mob hunts must be a fundamental part of social news. If so, it is worth spending the time asking ourselves how we can avoid it in the future; and if they are unavoidable, how we can limit the damage they cause (or, in the extreme case, if we even want to encourage the continued existence of social news sites like Reddit if the effects are judged too extreme). [1]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/04/reflections-on-recent-boston-crisis.htm…

I don't have data to back me up other than an anecdotal 'I seem to notice', but doesn't reddit often become unusable during exceptional usage spikes? the Obama AMA comes to mind. if you look at their numbers[1] for 2012, it's plausible that they are simply overwhelmed during these bursts and they've judged it worthwhile to let these aberrations play out. for many operations.. moving your availability from, say, 99.9% to 99.99% is simply not worth the cost. uptime is hard; GitHub has only maintained 99.96% for the past month[2][3] (and, IMO, they're actively trying to improve it) [1]: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of-2012.html [2]: https://status.github.com/graphs/past_month [3]: http://cl.ly/image/0O2S0L3O0l3J edit: clean up links edit2: learning \n

>is this really that big of a problem? (My 2nd reply) Yes apparently it is, I feel fairly sure now. Search this page for "Search engines have to solve this problem". — They have the same problem, and "have" to solve it. So I think it does matter fairly much. (Much enough to be worth solving :-)) And read this article from Reddit: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html… It's about an even worse version of the problem, when one uses a naive (but prevalent!) approach to comment sorting. Anyway it exemplifies how comments posted later on has no chance to reach the top of the page, no matter how useful/interesting they are.

I think their top ten posts of the year capture the essence of Reddit fairly well: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of-2012.html Celebrity interviews, a lot of pointless crap, some navel-gazing, and one mildly interesting thing about a videogame. The celebrity AMAs are a new thing and a pretty big deal. Obama on Reddit was very similar to Clinton going on MTV and taking audience questions. And like MTV, like so many user-driven websites of the past, I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit quickly fades out of cultural relevance when the next thing comes along.

Original post: http://blog.reddit.com/2012/12/top-posts-of-year-and-best-of-2012.html…

ketralnis will likely remember this better, but by my recollection we switched to cassandra after we hit the limit of what we could do with memcachedb: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/01/why-did-we-take-reddit-down-for-71.html We were already using memcachedb as a persistent keystore, "caching" precomputed listings and comment threads. When it started becoming more trouble than it was worth to maintain, we decided to try cassandra as a beefier replacement.

(I'm not the poster, but you can find the times of reddit links by mousing over the timestamp.) * Found this on my windshield today. Good people rule. - Mon Jul 2 19:50:42 2012 UTC * 15 years ago my mom made me take "glamour shots". She sent me this today. - Wed Sep 12 12:18:08 2012 UTC * Photographer snuck this gem into my cousins wedding album. - Fri Sep 14 00:41:23 2012 UTC * My friend won't approach cliff edges because he says the risk isn't worth it. This is how he looks over, every time. - Thu Sep 27 00:03:55 2012 UTC The best times to post are given here: http://blog.reddit.com/2011/07/nerd-talk-tale-of-life-of-link-on.html

If a comment has one upvote and zero downvotes, it has a 100% upvote rate, but since there's not very much data, the system will keep it near the bottom. But if it has 10 upvotes and only 1 downvote, the system might have enough confidence to place it above something with 40 upvotes and 20 downvotes -- figuring that by the time it's also gotten 40 upvotes, it's almost certain it will have fewer than 20 downvotes. And the best part is that if it's wrong (which it is 5% of the time), it will quickly get more data, since the comment with less data is near the top -- and when it gets that data, it will quickly correct the comment's position. The bottom line is that this system means good comments will jump quickly to the top and stay there, and bad comments will hover near the bottom. [1] http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html

>I would be very interested to know what he thinks about computer games See Stallman's Reddit AMA (#7): http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html Essentially, he thinks that the production quality associated with studio games is not worth the sacrifice in user freedom. Your point about games being much like film is an interesting one. Elsewhere in the AMA, he says that he doesn't consider proprietary software that controls, eg, a microwave, to be unethical as it's functionally indistinct from hardware. Now, with some games (cough BF3) being functionally indistinct from movies, it would be interesting to know whether he believes those, too, are unethical. My guess is yes, as there are many things like DRM and data collection going on behind the scenes that the FSF is opposed to.

In addition to adding new features (many of which are available as previews for Reddit Gold subscribers), the degree to which Reddit must scale means that they can't simply spin up a dozen new servers and call it a day. Due to issues they've encountered on Amazon's infrastructure (http://blog.reddit.com/2011/03/why-reddit-was-down-for-6-of-last-24.ht… they do indeed require engineering hours to design and implement more robust and scalable approaches to providing their service.

For what it's worth, a year or so ago Reddit tried a statistical solution to the same problem: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html Not sure how effective it was.

Have you considered Reddit's 'best' ranking for comments? http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html """ Most of the time, you won't notice that there's anything obviously different (it doesn't affect threading or anything -- don't worry!), but it should improve the quality of the top comments immensely. """

He talked a little bit about Android and iPhone in his interview for Reddit recently. If you haven't seen it yet, it is worth a read. http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html

As for reddit's size compared to digg here's the infographic: http://i.imgur.com/jiHka.png you can google around and find other sites that go into greater detail on this. And they currently have 5 engineers (believe this is their entire staff), this post is them pleading for extra funding for the fifth engineer: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html

It's funny, still hard for me to think of Reddit as not a start-up, but I guess I'm running at least two years behind - http://blog.reddit.com/2009/11/moving-to-cloud.html - :) Appreciate your response - hope you guys find somebody great and certainly HN is the right place to start.

reddit also tried to solve this same problem with their "best" ordering: http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html

How would the HN community react if any of the ideas suggested in this thread were implemented by PG? Non-redditors need to understand the overwhelming revolt against any sort of advertisement in the reddit community. Yishan Wong (CEO) had to respond to one of the "top" comments when this article was posted in r/technology[1]. While reddit "fans" will support the company through "Reddit Gold"[2], advertisements in the form of "sponsored links" or "feed ads" doesn't seem to work under the beloved format [ex: 3]. If you're interested in learning about Condé Nast and other investors , I found a "myth busters" blog post [4]. [1]http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1tvfze/reddit_is_going_for… [2]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/10/thanks-for-gold.html [3]http://www.reddit.com/comments/1o6f63/now_you_can_fly_historys_greates… [4]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html

>There is an optimal tradeoff somehow. You are basically talking about Bandit Algorithms, which are a family of techniques to solve the problem of trading of exploration ('discovering new good content') and exploitation ('just promoting what has already proven itself'). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit There are several bayesian approaches to bandit problems, which calculate the the uncertainty in a bayesian way, and then use this uncertainty to make the tradeoff between explore and exploit (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_sampling). So that's a well understood problem. For my money, the 'correct' way to solve the HN problem is as a bandit arm for each article, which you use to decide how much to display low vote articles. I think this bandit process should be run on top of a bayesian model that features not just the estimated quality of the article from its votes, but also a prior which it gets from the submitter's 'quality' (which is updated depending on how their articles do - this would also serve as a brake on spammers). Then you just need a heuristic to age out articles over time. I'm sure PG knows enough ML/stats people to do this sort of thing properly; the fact that its not done means admins are probably happy enough with the status quo. It's also worth looking at this article by the author of XKCD on voting on reddit, for an easy discussion of simple bayesian…

"But people in the fields of computer vision, artificial intelligence, machine learning, concurrent data-structures and others – very smart, very forward thinking people – would pick Java or C/C++ nine times out of ten, and not only because these languages are better suited to their task performance-wise, but because they have other, more important things to think about. If your challenge is not translating a business model into code, but solving a real algorithmic or technical problem, then the programming language really doesn't matter, and you're better off sticking with the one(s) you know best." This is so true. They often use something like MATLAB or R, but that doesn't affect your essential point, which is a great one and worth thinking about. How much of what you encode is original/cutting edge thought vs routine (CRUD apps) say. That said, that particular blade cuts both ways. There is nothing (other than inertia) stopping the "one(language) you know best" being something reasonably advanced, with decent, if not ubiquitous libraries and tooling, like Scala or Clojure or OCaml, or even Common Lisp. Why would you want to use an 'inferior' language if you know a better one? So in the end this argument may just devolve to "Most engineers in charge of implementing systems are more comfortable with Java/C++ than Clojure/OCaml". Something of medium complexity, between the basic CRUD web app and pioneering projects like Watson, like the (Twitter)Storm library for…

> Soon after launch reddit had performance issues and was rewritten in Python. The reason was explained here: http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html I quote: Emacs and SLIME are a killer combination, but I develop on a Mac, and reddit.com is a FreeBSD box. On my Mac, my choices of threaded Lisp implementations was limited to OpenMCL, and in FreeBSD it's CMUCL. Because of the low-level socket and threading code we had to write, reddit would not run on my Mac, and I was always tethered to our FreeBSD development server. Not being able to program offline is a pain. If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand. Back in 2005 Common Lisp had a fragmentation problem: not all libraries would work on all implementation/os pairs and not all implementations would work on all operating systems (in fact iirc no open source implementation would work on windows, freebsd, linux and mac)

"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”" I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after the acquisition? Didn't Reddit struggle to pay for basic infrastructure stuff due to their new parent company's skepticism about its viability and perception of its value? http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html And it was a long while until it got spun out. (http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/) Not that there's anything crazy in any of this. Just that the NYT story paints it like right away they 1) knew Reddit's worth and 2) knew to have a hands-off approach. I'm far from a Reddit power user, happy to hear other perspectives.

Yes: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/experts-misunderestimate-our-traffic.ht…

Execution matters and when you're the official crowdfunding platform for reddit , I'm sure that helps. http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/new-fundraising-options-designed-just.h…

I don't think that timeline is accurate. For one thing, Gold wasn't launched until 2010[1], not 2006, which is a huge difference. Additionally, while Alexis did move on to also doing other things, he never really left reddit. He's still on the board, for instance. 1: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html

Reddit gold began in July 2010: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html 4chan passes are pretty recent.

Here, I did your own research for you: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-soci… > Most addicted city (over 100k visits total) > Eglin Air Force Base, FL http://blog.reddit.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.…