
Reddit Hits 1.2B Monthly Pageviews, More Than Doubles Its Engineering Staff - kacy
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/reddit-hits-1-2b-monthly-pageviews-more-than-doubles-its-engineering-staff/
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staunch
Non-blog spam: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2658592>

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dstein
I wonder what the guys who founded and sold Reddit must be thinking of the
site's continued success. Ever since Digg went down Reddit seems to have
completely taken over the social news category.

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vidar
I am pretty sure they are thrilled. They are doing great for themselves with
Hipmunk.

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kn0thing
I'm so thrilled for reddit! And yes, hipmunk has been going quite well :)
thanks.

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mitchty
I totally forgot who made that video on youtube that showed the creation
process of the hipmunk logo, but tell them to do more videos like it. I don't
have a design bone in my body but found it awesome to watch someone go through
the process.

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kn0thing
Thank you! Yes, that one was me. I asked our designer (he does all of our
infographics and random designwork for me) to do a few of his own and it was a
blast to watch a real artist at work: <http://www.youtube.com/thehipmunk#p/u>

(He's the other 2 "making of" videos not about the hotels logo)

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reinhardt
Lies, damned lies, and linkbaits.

Sensationalist title: "Reddit more than doubles its engineering staff!!1!"

Actual event: Reddit hires three new programmers.

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guywithabike
I think the point of the title is combining two pieces of interesting
information: A) Reddit has come a hell of a long way with a tiny engineering
team and, B) Reddit has hired 3 new engineers.

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citricsquid
This story is from 3 months ago, it's changed a lot since. As a user of
reddit, I suspect that the page views have risen even more.

edit: wait the URL just changed again, it was pointing to a story that was
listed as being from March and all the comments were from March too, how
strange?

Also straight from the source: [http://blog.reddit.com/2011/06/reddit-levels-
up-with-three-n...](http://blog.reddit.com/2011/06/reddit-levels-up-with-
three-new.html)

~~~
whiletruefork
[https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?#site...](https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?#siteDetails?identifier=reddit.com)

Daily UV's are growing pretty well. Interesting to see the age skews higher
then I would have assumed.

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cincinnatus
I've recently passed the 5 year mark on Reddit and watched my on-site time
drop to minutes a week over the last few months.

Not sure why, unlike some people who complain, and have been there less time,
the quality of submissions and comments is not really any worse than it has
ever been. But then it has always just been a time wasting diversion. It did
manage to kill my use of slashdot 5 years back. Maybe my Reddit time has been
killed by techmeme/river.

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TruthElixirX
I've been on reddit since 2007 under various names. I think the quality has
declined quite a bit if you view /r/all, the front page everyone sees by
default. Its really bad.

Individual subreddits are pretty good still though. /r/netsec, sysadmin,
wearethemusicmakers, gamernews, philosophyofscience, etc. Smaller ones are
still pretty quality.

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da5e
Perhaps this is a naive (or dumb) question, but what will all those new
engineers do? Reddit is doing what it has always done why does just scaling up
require so many more engineers?

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jemka
There is a law of diminished returns at some point in scaling websites. A
while ago Reddit hit a scale where a move to Amazon's services seemed like the
right thing to do. At that time the argument was solid. Since then the site
has outgrown Amazon's services at Reddit's price points. Spinning up new
services has an extremely low ROI.

The preverbial wheel of scalling solutions needs to be re-invented, yet again.
Not all services are created equal so no one is truly re-inventing anything,
just applying unique solutions to unique problems. That takes manpower.

Heck just to move from Amazon to a dedicated will take a team larger than they
had a month ago. That's right from the horses mouth. Don't have the energy to
fish out the link, though.

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raldi
As a former reddit engineer, I confirm everything you say.

Note: Please don't edit your comment to make me look foolish. :)

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yuhong
I still remember the discussions. It inspired this Ask HN submitted by me, for
example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358079>

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Gotperl
Law of small numbers- way to exploit that for a headline

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jcromartie
From 1 to 4...

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napierzaza
Great that it's a success. But since it's a pool of cheap memes I'm not about
to unblock it on my computer's hosts file.

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muppetman
No, it's not. Sure _by default_ the frontpage is full of rubbish, but if you
spend 10 minutes looking you will find a trove of useful stories and
information about whatever you're interested in. As an example, my favourite
Australian radio station (Triple J) has a great subreddit where things
relating to music etc is discussed. Not a meme in sight.

You can tune your frontpage as you please, so it's easy to have a great
experience with reddit.

But if you've got it in your hosts file (why?) you must really hate it, so I'm
probably wasting words. But your post as akin to saying Hacker News is just
full of "I'm a startup!" posts, which it's not.

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natesm
The problem I have with the subreddit system is that it's an all or nothing
thing.

Let's say I like video games, and one of those games is Minecraft. If I
subscribe to the Minecraft reddit, it seems that about 1/Nth of the posts on
my front page will be about Minecraft (where N is the number of subreddits I
have).

I'm pretty conservative with subreddits (added linux and apple, removed
politics and atheism, that's pretty much it), so suddenly I have _a lot_ of
Minecraft.

Some sort of slider would make subreddits for specific games, programming
languages, etc. much more appealing to me, so that I could say, "I really only
want to see the _best_ Python-specific stories, but I'll take all of the
general programming stories".

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mitchty
> The problem I have with the subreddit system is that it's an all or nothing
> thing.

Agreed. /r/programming used to have discussions much like HN does. But I've
had to remove it from any subreddit I have as its just full of random
programmish related stuff, barely.

Out of curiosity, what does everyone on HN think of ways to fix the subreddit
problem? Its obvious voting doesn't provide any sort of filter, and tagging
would likely only end up with the same problem.

Or are we just condemned to constantly have to flock to new sites for good
technical discussions of things?

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TruthElixirX
You fix the problem by realizing editors where in place for a reason. People
like crap and without editors to filter bullshit we get a continuing stream of
fecal matter.

In theory moderators on Reddit should be some sort of quality control, but
usually they just say "well if that is what the community wants..." and let
the most ridiculous pandering submissions slide.

Someone needs to blend user submitted stories with editors and find where the
sweet spot between the two is.

Until the two systems can be blended in an awesome hybrid, then yes, we will
continue to flock to new sites as the old ones fall prey to eternal September.

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riledhel
Great to see they're still hard.

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politician
Phrasing.

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riledhel
meh... it was "working hard"... anyway...

