
How reddit became reddit - the biggest smallest community online - kn0thing
http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smallest-biggest
======
staunch
Reddit surrendered almost complete control to the community. It led to some
pretty amazing emergent behavior, but it had a very high price. Today the site
is far more 4chan and much less Reddit circa 2006.

I think Reddit is kind of a brilliant failure. It's huge and impressive now,
but so much more shallow and flawed than it could have been.

~~~
kn0thing
Taken in aggregate, I agree.

But take a look at this reddit, for instance:
<http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/>

There are deep ends to this very big pool that is reddit. Plenty of kiddy-
sections, too, where the water is warm and attention spans are short.

e.g., Free endorphins! <http://aww.reddit.com>

~~~
jokermatt999
The trouble is that it feels like the shallow parts are growing much, much
faster than the deep ends. There's pockets of good stuff, but you have to look
harder for it. If you like the shallow sections too, then it's a great pool to
play in. But if you came for the deep ends, it's kind of a pain to swim with
all kids in the shallow end splashing everywhere.

Maybe I'm just bitter.

~~~
bonch
/r/programming has become more like a generic technology link dump. The few
programming-related links it does get tend to be either about functional-
programming-language-of-the-month or a pointless JavaScript demo.

~~~
mkr-hn
<http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/top/?t=week>

Maybe it's the sort you're using. Reddit link discussions can go on for weeks
and months. You can hop in with a top of the week sort and read a good
discussion, and still find active threads.

A lot of the complaints I see about reddit feel like the complaints people
have jumping into Linux from Windows.

Linux isn't Windows, and reddit isn't Hacker News. Learn how to operate it,
and you'll find out why people like it.

ETA: <http://i.imgur.com/UWdeU.png>

------
naner
The site continues to be useful to many people primarily because of
subreddits.

I still remember when subreddits were first introduced. All the users were
certain this was a bad idea and that reddit should have implemented tagging
instead. Now nobody mentions tagging. And most people don't remember reddit
without subreddits.

And PG got impatient and created HN because this feature wasn't available fast
enough. :P

~~~
codexon
The subreddit problem is why I started reading HN instead of proggit.

Anyone is allowed to squat on a subreddit and censor it to their whims. What
is the result of this? You get moderators (who's name I will not mention for
obvious reasons) who flood the subreddit with Haskell blog posts and bypass
the Reddit spam filter. I remember seeing 4-5 Haskell stories every single day
on reddit with low votes for many months.

When you try to submit your own story, you will likely get caught in Reddit's
"shadow ban" spam filter where it looks like it was submitted but it never
shows up in the "new" section. When you contact one of these "moderators",
half of them won't respond and someone will fix it 24 hours later where it
will appear on page 5, dooming it to never appear on the front page. The other
mods then complain you were wasting their time because they checked it after
24 hours.

I did a little experiment where I submitted a Haskell related story. It was
"shadow banned" for a mere 10 minutes (probably after one of the mods fished
it out of the spam filter). Then I tried submitting other programming related
news from HN, most of which never appeared. That was when I stopped
participating in Reddit.

You might also be interested to know that Reddit censored the Athiesm
subreddit off the front of the page so they didn't exactly grow organically.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/9efxf/an_explanatio...](http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/9efxf/an_explanation_of_why_the_atheism_reddit_does_not/)

~~~
jedberg
Did you even read the link you put in your comment? reddit did not "censor"
anything. We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that
reddit too high. It was never popular enough to be in the top 10.

~~~
codexon
_We simply fixed the the algorithm that was accidentally ranking that reddit
too high._

At the time you censored the atheism subreddit, it had just about as many
subscribers as the other top 10 subreddits at the time. You decided to
arbitrarily change the algorithm until it seemed right to you.

 _"we added the ability to prevent certain reddits from appearing in the top
ten"_

~~~
jedberg
The number of subscribers is not the metric we used. We use a metric we call
"activity". The behavior described in that blog post simply pointed out a bug
in the activity metric.

Also, to be pedantic, it is not possible for reddit to censor anyone.
Governments censor things, private entities do not.

~~~
codexon
To be pedantic, censorship is not limited to the government. Being private
does not let you avoid the label of censorship.

And yes I know the metric is called "activity". It is just too suspicious that
you let it rank well all these years and let it disappear from the front page
just because a far smaller subreddit (by subscriber) was on the front page.

------
chaosmachine
Is that floating Posterous bar[1] on the bottom of the page new? Geocities
used to do the exact same thing...

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/3JFeq.png>

~~~
kn0thing
I believe so. That, or I've only noticed it in the last few days.

~~~
solutionyogi
If you are not logged in to Posterous, you would get this bar. I think it's a
recent change.

------
yakto
> "I wish more people would listen to me when I suggest copying the reddit
> "hotness" algorithim & commenting system"

We did with Yak, which has many features of Reddit plus several original ones
and different positioning. Agree that hotness and un-sucky comment surfacing
are the "secret sauce" of Reddit. Not quite ready to open the doors, but
taking emails at <http://yak.to>

~~~
jedberg
Hey there. Can I get my invite code now? :)

~~~
yakto
Gimme 48 hours, then you and Alexis are in first, I promise.

~~~
trafficlight
I wouldn't mind an invite, if you have a few extra laying around.

~~~
rms
me too

~~~
instakill
Me three!

~~~
jamesteow
Me four!

------
citricsquid
"If users see how much the staff cares, they'll care too."

I don't think that's right, I think if users see how much the staff want the
same things as the users, then they'll care. I'm sure the Digg staff cared
about the success of Digg, but it didn't match what the users wanted so they
lost interest.

~~~
kn0thing
No doubt. But I mean 'care' in the touchy-feely sense of the word. Maybe there
was someone there who obsessed over creating those 'magical' moments for
users, but I can't say I've heard too many anecdotes about that.

~~~
citricsquid
I read it back and realised I misunderstood what you meant, understanding it
as being about the "magical moments" what you said makes sense, I was looking
it as you meant caring about what _all_ users want, not what individuals with
support requests get. In hindsight I have no idea how I came to that
conclusion, the previous section makes it clear :-)

------
Bossman
Reddit is interesting. There's a lot of crap there now and memes are way too
frequent. However, there are still some great and high-quality subreddits.
I've improved my browsing experience there by removing popular reddits like
/r/pics, /r/funny, /r/politics, etc. Then I added new ones like /r/askscience,
/r/space, and /r/worldnews. That's the best thing about the site. You don't
like a community, just remove it or don't join.

------
trustfundbaby
Seeing the evolution of reddit in screenshots was simply awesome.
<http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html>

------
heed
While I agree the users are in control for the most part, I can't help but
think of one issue that pushed Steve and Alexi toward leaving reddit, that is,
the censorship during the Sears debacle. I think there have been other cases
where Conde Nast had to step in and lay down the law as well.

------
bitwize
By scraping off the top end (intelligence-wise) of 4chan, that's how.)

------
georgieporgie
> the next thing hundreds of thousands of people are spending their workday
> reading and participating in.

...is that really a good thing?

I recently abandoned Reddit because I realized that keeping abreast of memes
wasn't helping me accomplish my goals in life. Also, the illusory superiority
thing gets hard to take. At least on HN it's more restricted to start-up vs.
big-co and open vs MS, which I can take in stride. :-)

~~~
kn0thing
I always hoped /r/startups would take off as a complement to Hacker News, but
I'm the first to admit this is my #2 destination after reddit (though
sometimes its #1). Hacker News is the best kind of distraction because it
_feels_ productive. Mmmm... Hacker News...

~~~
mkr-hn
That reddit will never take off because "startup" is not a common a word
outside the Silicon Valley social bubble.

<http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/>

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I doubt that has anything to do with it.../r/startups has more subscribers
than /r/Entrepreneur does...

<http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/>

~~~
mkr-hn
A lot of reddits fizzle out. There's no mechanism that removes people from a
reddit, so it could appear a reddit is lively if you only look at subscriber
count.

People post stories, but there's very little discussion.

It looks like both reddits are dead.

