

Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews - raldi
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html

======
giberson
I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to
avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com
(the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random
assortment of stuff I didn't care about.

Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like
r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/<things I actually care about>. Now I'm
hooked--I visit the sub reddits multiple times every day. I no longer
subscribe to the main reddit feed.

So, for things in store for 2012, you absolutely must focus on "help new users
better understand the way reddit works".

In addition, if I were in charge of reddit for a day, I'd get rid of the
reddit main page aggregation and instead replace it with a word cloud and the
heading "Pick a topic that interests you to visit that sub-reddit for
_valuable_ discussion and content". Because, on the whole, the main reddit
feed devalues the entire site with slop.

edit: removed misleading line.

~~~
ugh
One huge problem, though, is that shit (specifically racism, sexism,
homophobia, transphobia, fat shaming, ableism – oh, I guess that list really
isn’t all that specific) tends to crop up everywhere. It’s a very reddity kind
of shit.

Encountering blatant (and highly visible because upvoted) sexism (for example)
in such harmless sounding subreddits as /r/soccer or /r/minecraft really kills
all my fun. There are a few nicely moderated places, though, so not all hope
is lost (and /r/soccer is at least usually devoid of shit).

~~~
rimantas
I think politcorrectness is the ultimate kind of bigotry of them all. Just
like kids growing up in sterile environments start to have all kinds of
allergies PC is already starting to show similar effects. Sterility screws up
the immune system of our body, PC screws up immune system of our minds. The
worst part is it does not help to fight those issues, on the contrary — it
just discourages even think about those issues. And there is huge difference
between joking about some particular subset of humanity and actually disliking
that subset. Then there are people who just get "offended" by everything —
those should really get their heads examined. They most likely don't even know
why something offends them. Just because it is "offensive". Why is it
offensive? Who knows. Some picture of naked tits offends you? Really? What
absolutely amazes me, that showing people being killed, heads exploding, limbs
ripped off is ok and not harmful. But god forbid someones dick will be visible
for a fraction of the second—that's a major scandal. Don't you think it is
weird, that depiction of people killing people is wildly advertised and easily
accessible, while depiction of people making love is almost (and in some
places truly) outlawed?

~~~
synth
Well, if you subscribe to a solipsist, intent-is-everything idea of morality,
then it makes sense to believe that the mere act of saying that women are
hysterical bitches who need to get back in the kitchen, doesn't make you a
misogynist. But that isn't the point.

Entertain this notion; words mean things, whether you like it or not. Your
conscious state of mind is completely irrelevant to anyone but yourself. When
people roll their eyes at your unfunny racist jokes, it's not necessarily
because they think you're racist; it's because you're saying racist things.

So, why is it offensive to say black people are criminals who love KFC and
watermelons? Well, maybe you should ask a black person, because you certainly
wouldn't know. But be sure to use "offensive" in scare-quotes to hammer home
the point that you Just-Don't-Get-What-The-Fuss-Is-All-About. Remember also to
point out that most people are too stupid/crazy to understand why AIDS jokes
which may include a synonym of the word "faggot", can be offensive to
homosexuals. Because hey, it's just a word after all. There couldn't possibly
be any societal, cultural, or historical contexts behind words, right?

And then you blab on about sexual taboos like it has any real bearing on
anything. But really what could anyone expect from someone who thinks that the
attempt to use more inclusive language in public discourse amounts to "the
ultimate kind of bigotry of them all".

------
marvin
I love the reddit community, and I've been an active member for almost 6 years
now. Congratulations to the reddit team for building a huge, diverse and
successful community. However, I think that this latest stage of growth brings
a lot of problems. The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot
more hostile during the last 1.5 years. It's what someone said about
groupthink - downvoting or posting a quick, hostile reply to something you
disagree with is much easier than actually articulating why you disagree.
There is a lot of hating and lots of personal attacks instead of honest
discussion.

I've been thinking about this for a bit. As an outsider it seems a lot like an
up-scaled version of American society. Reddit used to be a relatively
homogenuous group of people, but is now _very_ heterogenous, in the same way
the US is. The problem is that reddit doesn't have the custom of politely
avoiding contentious topics in the public space. So you end up getting mens'
rights activists and militant feminists yelling at each other, Christians and
atheists, racists and minorities etc.

I think this problem is only going to keep growing. Reddit has survived a long
time, but this is a fundamental issue which is more about keeping an open mind
and being tolerant of differences of opinion. It has more to do with societal
conditioning than technology. It's a great example of what happens when you
put radically different people within shouting distance of each other without
traditional common courtesy to moderate things.

Like I said, I've been on Reddit for almost 6 years, but things are getting
pretty bad. Almost every single time something that is considered
controversial by any group is posted, there are multiple aggressive
comments...which are upvoted if they are formulated in a sufficiently
assertive way. The community is moving away from rational discourse, to a more
traditional extroverts-first system where being loud and assuming that your
opponent is wrong gets more recognition.

~~~
swombat
_The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during
the last 1.5 years._

On the contrary, I think the groupthink was much more obvious before they
started policing the subreddits more closely in the last year. It used to be
that /r/business was the most anti-business place on the web - any post that
was positive about business would get instantly downvoted to oblivion, in
favour of posts decrying how businesses were exploiting individuals and the
government in various ways.

Then they split it up into multiple sub-sub-reddits, and now /business is
actually a sensible place to read stuff about business.

------
raldi
To put that in perspective, Flickr is at 1.5B. LinkedIn, 2.7B.

Edit: I'd like to go on record with a bet that by the end of the year, reddit
will get more traffic than LinkedIn (which currently has a market cap in
excess of $6,000,000,000).

Anyone want to bet against me?

[https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiC...](https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiCqWFxzxR)

~~~
jonknee
LinkedIn's audience/traffic is far more valuable though, so I'm not sure why
you added the bit about their market cap. Reddit users by and large are there
for entertainment and don't click on ads. LinkedIn's users are there for work
and by and large _are_ the ads.

~~~
nostromo
I don't think reddit is really trying so hard to monitize. (And given the
nature of their user base, maybe it's the smartest thing to do.)

The banner ad unit on the right of reddit is almost never running a real ad.
It's always an ad for a subreddit or a pretty picture. That one single spot at
$1 cpm at 2b pageviews could net reddit $2mm a month. That's a lot of money to
be left on the table.

~~~
jonknee
$1CPM for the whole page (all the spots) would be very tough for a social news
site, doubly so for one with porn and triply so for one with porn and reddit's
demographic.

To put that in perspective, if Facebook were to get $1CPM they would be
bringing in over $1B a month from just advertising. Facebook's revenue is
about a third of that and doesn't all come from advertising (Facebook Credits
and what not). It's even more bleak considering that Facebook has the ability
to target advertising much better than reddit.

They can certainly make a bundle of cash, but it's a tough nut to crack.

~~~
redthrowaway
>Facebook has the ability to target advertising much better than reddit.

I'm not sure I buy that. Reddit knows your interests due to your subreddit
subscriptions, and if they wanted to scrape your comments they could easily
find out a whole lot more. The fact that they don't is likely due more to
their limited engineering team and a general distaste for that kind of
invasiveness than due to its inherent difficulty.

~~~
andypants
...While on facebook, users willingly and explicitly define their interests,
dislikes, personal information, etc.

Facebook doesn't need to 'extract' that information based on browsing
information (although it probably could, given the number of sites that share
information or use the fb api, and the links that users share with each other)
and user posts (statuses, wall posts, notes).

Facebook has far more information available than reddit, so yes, it should be
able to target ads much better.

------
Adaptive
Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one
I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was
relatively hands off mgmt.

I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back
and not screw it up.

~~~
astrodust
If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up.

Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's
attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from
disaster.

~~~
Adaptive
Yeah, I wasn't referring to the quality problem (I'm in full agreement with
you on that). I think they are in a better position that Digg at the Digg-bar
point (even with low qual participation, engagement still seems deeper than
Digg at that time), but the quality is decidedly Eternal September (lower,
really).

This is a movie plot. Seriously. Condé Nast is the government. They are
largely incompetent and mostly concerned about political infighting and palace
intrigues.

The reddit team is the hodge podge group of geeks that happened to be (insert
constrained environment here):

* on a cruise ship with the worlds top nuclear scientists (and a bomb!)

* touring an underground viral research facility on a school outing during which there is a "containment breach!"

* orbiting earth in an experimental space plane they built in their barn when the entire GPS sat system FAILS!

The government (condé nast) can do nothing to assist them other than sit
uncomfortably on the edge of their chairs, wrinkling their expensive suits,
waiting to see if our intrepid developers succeed.

Unlike a Hollywood production, however, we don't know if this plot has a happy
ending. I'm rooting for our plucky team, but the clock is ticking.

Tick.

Tock.

(I'll leave the rest of you to imagine the movie poster)

~~~
astrodust
If you don't weed out your counter-productive citizens you end up with Digg.
If you do, if you keep it tight, you might be lucky enough to have a
metafilter.com which after a decade is still an amazing place.

Strangely, Something Awful is actually a great model for a community. A great
case-study in how to keep a community from imploding.

~~~
flomo
Hah really? Something Awful is site where everyone rehashes five-year-old in-
jokes, has a weird cult-like mentality towards the rest of the internet, and
makes money by repeatedly banning a small number of people over and over
again. I'm a member there, and the place is clearly dying out.

------
iamandrus
Reddit's growth has been amazing. It gets a lot of hate because of users
reposting content without giving credit, but it really is an amazing site. I
used to search Google endlessly for sites to get, for example, help on video
games or services for video games, but now I think, "Well, I'll just check out
their subreddit and see if anyone else has this problem." It's great for news
and breaking stories. Sometimes I see it on reddit before I even see it
breaking on Twitter.

I think Conde Nast did a good job as well in not fucking it up for the site.
They let the owners do their own thing and let the site grow (an action I
really wish other large companies would take when acquiring startups) instead
of forcing them to put annoying ads all over or other stupid things.

However, I wish reddit would make it easier for users to find features and
generally understand the site. I'm still finding useful features that have
been hidden in the software.

I thank the reddit staff for their amazing work and hope that they keep it up.
:)

------
danso
Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite
part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites:

Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic:

We don't get traffic through ads.

We don’t participate in any traffic trading.

We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget
their password).

We don’t harass users to sign up.

We don’t harass users to invite their friends.

We don’t pester you to download our app.

We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks.

We don't know anything about SEO.

We don't integrate with Facebook.

We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.

~~~
rudiger
Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 _billion_ monthly page
views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years
ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives
today.

~~~
__alexs
The alternatives often seem to come in the form of communities splintering.
e.g. /r/gaming, /r/gamingnews /r/games, /r/truegaming etc. The expansion and
decline in quality (i.e. rage comic spam) is usually followed quite rapidly by
new sub-reddits being created and communities forming with stricter areas of
moderation.

~~~
acgourley
Still that is a suboptimal divide, and leaves a discovery problem. Someone
will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.

~~~
ubernostrum
_Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways._

Doubtful. These are deep-seated patterns that have been playing out in online
communities for _decades_ , and every "oh we'll just build a new thing that
won't have that problem" attempt has... had the same problems.

For examples, and some interesting thoughts on the issue, start here:

<http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

~~~
derefr
Well, fundamentally, we've been designing online communities in the same
(flawed) manner for decades. This is basically the recipe for reversion to the
mean:

1\. Allow any user to add themselves into the community; and then,

2\. allow the course of discussion to be set by majority rule.

The site (or subreddit, or newsgroup, or whatever)'s focus and usefulness will
gradually disintegrate as people in secondary demographics join (e.g. for
programming, people interested in web design) and then _tertiary_ demographics
join who are only interested in things the _secondary_ demographics like, and
actually don't care about the original, _primary_ focus of the community at
all.

For examples of tertiary-demographic takeover, see Reddit's /r/music and
/r/movies. The primary demographic wanted media _discussion_ ; the secondary
demographic wanted to discuss specific pieces of media; and the tertiary
demographic just wanted links to new media they hadn't heard of. (Which—for
/r/music at least—when combined with the average new-Internet-user's set of
"music they've heard of", the way people have a more positive association with
music they've heard before, and the way democratic interest floats up the
_most_ agreeable items, the front page becomes basically "Reddit's Top-40
chart.")

Any community that avoids this will fundamentally have to avoid doing either
#1 or #2.

~~~
StavrosK
This sounds pretty easy to avoid by moderating to keep focus and prevent
drifting. "This subreddit is for media discussion _only_. Irrelevant links
will be banned."

~~~
ubernostrum
This hasn't worked for reddit. It hasn't worked for any other site that's
tried it.

Seriously, folks, read Clay Shirky. The man knows what he's talking about.

~~~
forwardslash
It has for r/askscience.

------
joshklein
Congrats to our local HN'er kn0thing and everybody else at Reddit. 2B is quite
an achievement.

Regarding below questions about the business side of Reddit, see the previous
conversation here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628>

------
rbranson
It would be really cool to see an architecture update post from them regarding
where they are now and where they want to go. Pretty please? :)

~~~
astrodust
It's still in shambles and probably serves as an example of how not to host
your site. Amazon is causing me all kinds of grief lately and their AWS
customer support is the worst in the industry, useless to the point of comedy.

------
leak
That's incredible. Congrats!! :)

Are we allowed to ask how/if they're making money?

~~~
fletchowns
I'm guessing they are making money (ads & reddit gold) since they have been
able to make a few hires recently.

Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone
downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst
offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful
discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Reddit is the new Digg. Groupthink on an epic scale, linkbait headlines, and
hordes of people that want to feel angry about things so they can at least
feel _something_. (Just like old media!) Now, there is some good content on
there, but there's way too much crap to wade through in order to find it.

~~~
prawn
Is there a way to create a customised frontdoor without having an account? I
remember reading something about chaining subreddits in a URL, but never gave
it a shot.

I'm also in the "embarrassed mentioning Reddit" camp, but I do like AskScience
and anything like that.

~~~
metellus
You can do exactly what you described by chaining subreddits in the url. Just
go to reddit.com/r/sub1+sub2+sub3...

That being said, making an account is suprisingly easy and has its benefits.

------
revorad
The most surprising figure to me is that 65% traffic is from the United
States. I think for a lot of the biggest sites, that number is much lower and
going down.

------
psawaya
I admit that it's hard to measure this in an absolute way (and I agree
pageviews is a flawed metric), but I submit that in two years, reddit will be
as popular as Twitter is now.

------
rmc
I sorta wish the title added the (YCXX) tag (which was YC05 IIRC ?)

------
andrewhillman
I guess this answers my question to how badly reddit crushed digg.

~~~
ch0wn
Here is another nice view of that: [http://gs.statcounter.com/#digg_vs_reddit-
ww-monthly-200905-...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#digg_vs_reddit-ww-
monthly-200905-201112)

------
ngokevin
Could this have something to do with the quality being halved?

------
kaonashi
No wonder the comment section now competes with YouTube for most inane on the
net.

------
xxiao
was getting tired of digg in the past, esp when its boss sometimes was shown
as the headline there for no reason... nice to see reddit is making it.

------
jebblue
One of their sub sites uses the "f" bomb, not a very professional way to
operate a company.

~~~
zerostar07
One? I suppose you are aware of /r/gonewild _for starters_

~~~
icebraining
gonewild?

r/teen_girls

r/picsofdeadkids (yes, it's what it advertises)

r/DeadPeople

r/rape

r/incest

Basically, everything moderated by violentacrez:
<http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/violentacrez>

