Reddit Blog

You do realise that TWO THOUSAND YEARS worth of server time just from six (of about 138,000 active subreddits) pays for more than just a handful of employees? And this is before ad sales. Hell, when it comes to ad sales... They hit > $100 mil this QUARTER. https://redditblog.com/2021/08/12/reddit-secures-funding-to-continue-g… Reddit is a 9 figure company. Soon to be 11 figures. > We will raise up to $700 million in Series F funding, led by Fidelity Management and Research Company LLC. and including other existing investors, at a post-money valuation of over $10 billion. They're not hurting.

it's not perfect, but better than everything else. More detail here: https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/ I love how it's related to the likelihood that the sun will rise again tomorrow (now that we have observed the behavior a few times)

> The comments that get the most votes are the ones that have been present the longest, which incentivizes early and fast, "shoot from the hip" commenting so your comments get into the flow early where people can see and vote on them. Reddit's default "best" sorting algorithm is designed to mitigate that effect [1]. It does a good job of not biasing old comments in terms of sort order, but it doesn't help the related problem that older comments tend to accumulate the most replies so newer stuff can still get drowned out in terms of quantity of other content. [1]: https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/

Reddit's "best" filter isn't their "top" filter and does exactly what the parent says, explanation[0] ; it does this by default unless the sub moderators choose to default to a different view. 0: https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/

Pretty interesting, thanks! Comparing it to the data from 2017 [1] it looks like a ~30% increase in the number of comments (from 900 million to 1.2 billion), while unfortunately the number of votes/upvotes provided for the two periods is not consistent: they mentioned 12 billion upvotes for 2017 and 27 billion votes (which presumably included downvotes) for 2018. All in all not bad, let's see what 2019 will bring to them. [1] https://redditblog.com/2017/12/19/the-best-of-reddit-in-2017/

and yet. pg has been cheerleading for lisp since 2002 or so, and almost nobody has followed in his footsteps. the reddit guys believed him, tried it, and wound up doing a complete rewrite in python. https://redditblog.com/2005/12/05/on-lisp/ so i'd have to say that the prevailing evidence says, to me, that pg's advice pretty much doesn't work, in the average case.

Reddit did a great job when they created a new ranking algorithm. They marketed as "best"[1] and they have an informational post for nontechnical people but in the post they linked to the technical explanation[2]. [1]https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/ [2] http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html

It does sound like the best option available. Is anyone out there aware of a solution that currently exists (and is available to people like you and I?). Reddit has made it easy to embed comments on a site since last year: https://redditblog.com/2015/03/23/announcing-embeddable-comment-thread…

they will do nothing, because they are not journalists. "The newsletter has hundreds of thousands of subscribers that wake up each Sunday to enjoy a curated digest in their inbox. Last month, we started posting original content directly to r/upvoted, including an interview with the guy handing out his resume at Busch Stadium. The subreddit amassed its highest traffic with over 700,000 unique visitors. With Upvoted, editorial, original video, podcasts, and graphic art have a place to thrive and tell Reddit’s tales in the most creative ways possible." -- http://www.redditblog.com/2015/10/introducing-upvoted-redditorial.html it is nothing more than a pretty RSS feed with a little curation and images, linking to all the lies that are business as usual on reddit.

I'm surprised Farhad (who's one of the best tech reporters) forgot to mention Reddit Notes (http://www.redditblog.com/2014/12/announcing-reddit-notes.html) and RedditMade (http://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/2knh96/announcing_redditmade_… both of which were proposals to monetize using the very same mechanisms (giving back to the community / crowdsourcing merchandise) suggested in the article. Both failed due to bad management, unsurprisingly.

Note: The author of this piece wrote the original analysis (http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html) that directly led to my advocating for reddit's "best" comment sort, including to xkcd's Randall Munroe, who managed to finally convince the rest of Team Reddit to make the change (http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.h… So when the author says, "I realize that proposing any change to how Reddit works is one of the Internet's most dangerous games," he should be informed that it's actually a game he's won before.

For posts, I'm not sure what the algorithm is (I think it's deliberately more complicated, and has to take into account time of posting?), but after this article [the op] was written, reddit implemented the method for comments, as explained by Randall Munroe: http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.h… You only get this ranking method if you sort the comments by 'best' though

Great post on that when Steve made the switch. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html

See also: Reddit's "best" ranking for comments: http://www.redditblog.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.h…

This is way less of a problem than you'd think, as long as the default "best" sort is used. Also, I don't think age is taken in to account on reddit, are you thinking of this site instead? https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/ As someone who browses both reddit and hacker news (obviously), I'm regularly frustrated by the way this site hijacks your attention to ask you to judge some recent comment, rather than showing you the ones worth reading at the top. It's still never going to get enough votes to keep that position, and it makes more sense to ask people who've scrolled to the bottom to judge comments with few votes, once they've already read the current frontrunners. When you see big subs with old comments with a lot of votes at the top on reddit, it's probably because there's nothing else worth showing towards the bottom. I scroll further than I probably should, and the more the subreddit appears to have the early-replier problem, the less I care how those comments are ordered.

>The point is, a language’s popularity should not determine its usefulness. [...] More importantly, we need to stop treating them as fads, religions, or special memberships to the cool kids clubs. I think a lot of debate about "popularity" boils down to 2 different meanings of "popular". The folks defending a language that's losing "popularity" are thinking of "popular" like a high-school prom queen type of popularity. E.g. Maybe the language is no longer the prettiest girl at the dance but I don't care and nothing you can say will change my mind! But as I tried to explain in my previous message about ColdFusion popularity[1], others are using the word "popular" as an imprecise proxy for up-to-date-language-I-can-easily-get-a-job-in. E.g. Is this language widely used enough where I can tap a vast community's help to solve problems? In this 2nd meaning, "popularity" does indeed determine its usefulness. An example is Python being "more popular" than Lisp. Again, don't think of "prom queen popular" to trigger defensive essays; instead think of "ecosystem popular". Here's an excerpt[2] from Steve Huffman about migrating Reddit from Lisp to Python: >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…

Email is decentralized (well, it can be, these days most people use one of the big providers but it's still compatible with 3rd party servers). IRC is also sort-of decentralized and works through a federation of servers. And I wasn't talking about bitcoin specifically either, I'm just doubtful that you could have: - A completely untrusted distributed "blockchain" style DB - Which would be fast and scale well enough to enable instant-messaging-style applications - While being almost completely free to use Currently Bitcoin can process a few thousand transactions per block, every 10 minutes. In 2015 reddit averaged about 2 million comments every day: https://redditblog.com/2015/12/31/reddit-in-2015/ Of course you may say that you don't want to create reddit, just a small chat with friends but it doesn't matter: your blockchain is only as secure as its worth so if you want trust-less security your only solution is to plug yourself on an existing blockchain OMNI-style. Then if you want your messages to end up on the chain you need to pay more than the competition.

It could be anything in the top 20, really [0]. The problem is that devs have an impulse to do something experimental and cool, since they have to work with workhorse languages all day at their day jobs. The myth that they tell themselves is that $REVOLUTIONARY_FEATURE_Y will greatly improve their productivity, but the fact of the matter is usually that no matter how revolutionary the features, it's hard to overcome the benefits that come from an active ecosystem of well-tested and widely used libraries. Even if productivity is improved 20x by the revolutionary feature, a library that has 10 man-years of effort in it will take you 6 months to implement. Rinse and repeat. This is not to mention the availability of online references and established conventions/best practices, the impact of hitting esoteric errors, and so on. A good example of this is probably reddit. Originally written in Lisp, they eventually gave up and compromised down to Python due to improved tooling and library availability. [1] [0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ [1] https://redditblog.com/2005/12/05/on-lisp/

> Similarly perilous is the fact that code changes very quickly. Android development practices, as an example, have changed drastically over the last few years, but the popular Stack Overflow solutions are still from 2013, meaning that budding developers might be learning through outdated solutions. I'm a community-elected moderator on Stack Overflow, and I think this is the biggest problem - outdated answers. Stack Overflow was founded in 2008, now about 8 years ago. New and better answers that may be much better than sloppy 8 year old answer can take years to rise up to compete with the ranking of those answers, as the the default sorting mechanism is by net up/down votes. I'd like that addressed, in a way that minimizes disruption. Accepted answers should be allowed to float in the rankings instead of being pinned at the top after a number of years. And there should be an optional "hotness" sort that primarily considers recent votes (say in the past year). Until they do address it, the new, great answers will remain buried. Others like to suggest Reddit's sorting method ( https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/ ), but that doesn't consider recency (my main concern) - and makes sense for them because voting is frozen after a period of time, whereas we can still vote on 8 year old questions on Stack Overflow - so revenge-downvoting (which, while verboten, can slip through the cracks) would have an outsized effect.

http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html > 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. > We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. In most cases, the Lisp code translated very easily into Python. Lots of people have written web applications in Python, and there's plenty of code from which to learn. It's been fun so far, so we'll see where it takes us. > Regardless of Python, reddit was begging for a rewrite. Whether it was the best decision to do it all at once is up for debate, but I'm very pleased at the way it turned out.

Many of the benefits of Lisps that you talk about here seem to be refuted by writeups I've read where large groups switched from a Lisp to something else...often because it was hard to work with, slower to write and harder to maintain. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit Over at reddit.com, we rewrote the site from Lisp to Python in the past week. It was pretty much done in one weekend. (Disclosure: We used my web.py library.) The others knew Lisp (they wrote their whole site in it) and they knew Python (they rewrote their whole site in it) and yet they decided liked Python better for this project. The Python version had less code that ran faster and was far easier to read and maintain. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html 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. ... We were already familiar with Python. It's fast, development in Python is fast, and the code is clear. ... The entire task took less than a week, with 80% of the code written in a single weekend. I know of several other large corporate projects over the years that made similar switches for…

I don't see this as hacker-worthy -- it's mostly subreddit drama and reddit has banned people and subreddits which caused them bad PR before. My opinion aside, here's the rough timeline of the events based on reddit posts: * the reddit blog post [1]; it has a timestamp of 2014/09/07 00:39 UTC. * which claims "approximately the same time, activity in that subreddit starting violating other rules we have which do trigger a ban"; * the actual time of the subreddit ban (based on [2], it happened more than 5 hours ago, so before 2014/09/07 02:16 UTC * the explanation of the bans [3], which (based on the time stamp) was posted 15 minutes ago, so around 2014/09/07 07:49 UTC. and here's the paragraph explaining the bans, also from [3]: > It became obvious that we were either going to have to watch these subreddits constantly, or shut them down. We chose the latter. It's obviously not going to solve the problem entirely, but it will at least mitigate the constant issues we were facing. This was an extreme circumstance, and we used the best judgement we could in response. The lesson here is probably "declaring support for specific subreddits while imposing new rules on them will never work, as the contributors to those subreddits will inevitably rebel". [1]: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own… [2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2foqu1/reddit_bans_all_fappening… [3]:…

And they do this while putting out a doublespeak public statement saying they don't do things like banning subreddits (but reserve the right to), and were not legally required to in this case. Read it here: http://www.redditblog.com/2014/09/every-man-is-responsible-for-his-own… Here's the comments from their blog post: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2foivo/every_man_is_responsible_… The admins are getting called out in nearly every top-level comment for folding to media attention and celebrity lawyers, when other objectively worse subreddits are actually granted the "hands-off" approach the site claims to use. Presumably because the victims can't afford legal teams or make headlines like celebrities can when their privacy is violated. The leaks were despicable and I understand any business taking steps to avoid involvement in their distribution, but you can't expect a user-base like reddits to tolerate the administration saying one thing and doing the exact opposite in certain cases where there's bad press involved. Edit: Here's a follow-up post from the sysadmin alienth in response to the backlash from their decision: http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/2fpdax/time_to_talk/

Articles, thumbnails, comments, votes, awards, users, I'm sure it all adds up considering the dynamic nature of what each user sees. And they do do a lot of caching to make it work: https://redditblog.com/2017/1/17/caching-at-reddit/

From 2012 compared to now? Yes, even 2018 to 2019 was 30% increase in active users https://redditblog.com/2019/12/04/reddits-2019-year-in-review/. According to this https://backlinko.com/reddit-users they have 10x their active users from 2012 to 2019. And then there are wallstreetbets and bunch of other subreddits that it spawned.

Ironically, considering the amount of sentiment being displayed here, Ken M is quoted as saying "I was appalled by the Yahoo comment section. It was such a toxic, shitty space." in this interview: https://redditblog.com/2015/10/03/ken-m-interview-internet-troll/

Much better image, https://images.app.goo.gl/pjkfvsMYL9hCeHUv6 Snail goats appear to be a thing, I guess it's the similarity between the spiral horns and spiral shell: https://redditblog.com/2015/11/25/the-marginalized-art-of-snail-fighti…

Original blog post announcing this: https://redditblog.com/2020/10/27/evolving-reddits-workforce/

Other than SF, Reddit now has operations/offices in NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Dublin (Ireland), and London (UK) (as of last month: https://redditblog.com/2020/09/28/reddit-launches-london-operation-wit… It's a bit of a mess, but you can see most of these inside the "Location" dropdown on their jobs page: https://www.redditinc.com/careers#job-info

Absolutely. HN user 'EvanMiller had a lot to say about this, 11 years ago. His tl;dr is that the ranking score should be "the Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter." I believe HN's ranking system is extremely creative and works great for the main page and day-to-day use (my understanding is that it additionally makes use of time-decay terms for comments and stories). Like you said, it's really just historical search (i.e. algolia) that seems broken. https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15709405 https://www.evanmiller.org/bayesian-average-ratings.html https://www.evanmiller.org/ranking-items-with-star-ratings.html https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system/