
How to use a Reddit-clone to boost company culture - ryancarson
http://ryancarson.com/post/49494542970/how-to-use-a-reddit-clone-to-boost-company-culture
======
codinghorror
Or use Discourse which offers many of the same benefits without the "rush to
see who can post the most upvoted image and win" dynamic, and potential for
more substantive discussions!

Bonus, you don't have to write any extra code either. Well unless you want to
contribute ...

<http://github.com/discourse/discourse>

~~~
zachlatta
We're doing this for our high school robotics club and it's great!

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vyrotek
F.I.R.S.T.? :)

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zachlatta
We do a variety of things including FIRST. We also compete in CyberPatriots,
PicoCTF, the Northrop Grumman Challenge, the Raytheon Engineering Challenge,
along with a few other things. We also teach programming to anyone who's
interested.

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jimrhoskins
Hey, I wrote this, so I can answer a few of the questions.

Why not discourse/reddit/telescope/etc...? I looked into those. Solving the
problem we needed a few basic things, posts, threaded comments, and votes. The
killer feature that we wanted it to be private to our company, and we wanted
authentication integrated with <http://teamtreehouse.com>. Hacking any
existing solutions to fit that auth model seemed more work than it was worth.

When it comes down to it, it's a ridiculously simple app. There's a few
models, and not a whole lot of code. When we gauged the effort of integrating
most of the OS solutions into our oauth system and locking it down to be in-
company only, just making the app was way easier. Plus. we can easily extend
it to fit our needs, and we have. Also, I wanted to play w/ rails 4 + ruby 2
for the first time.

Regarding the name, it was a code name. The tool is built for having
conversations (convos), and I though convoy was a cool codename. As soon as
Ryan saw my working prototype, he told me to launch it, and the name stuck. I
didn't even know there was a movie.

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mistercow
>The killer feature that we wanted it to be private to our company

Seems like selling private subreddits (much like github sells private
repositories) would be a really obvious and easy way for reddit to increase
their cashflow, since I'm sure more than just companies would be interested in
that.

~~~
na85
Too much downtime

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fetbaffe
To sum up a work day.

Standup, planning meetings, discussions, speeches, emails, phone, IM, wikis,
surveys, internal blogs, and now Reddit.

When am I supposed to do actual work?

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reeses
I feel like an old person when I think it's a sign of the apocalypse when
employees are playing WoW, surfing (do people even use that anymore?) non-
work-related sites, and texting/tweeting/whatever on their mobiles AND missing
dates.

I also pull 'confused puppy' when they complain about content filters blocking
reddit, etc. Sure, there's the occasional gem there, but it's rarely a primary
source for solving a work-related problem, and I am highly suspicious of
claims that it is needed for work. (Unless you're in a very narrow niche.)

~~~
zacharypinter
Probably ties into the increasingly blurred lines between work and home. I
check emails/answer hipchat questions at home, and browse Hacker News/Reddit
occasionally at work. Seems like a fair trade-off, in moderation of course.

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pytrin
We use dashboard.io internally at 500startups - <https://dashboard.io/> (Paul
Singh's latest startup), and it's quite effective. It has multiple inner
networks on the same network (like founders, mentors and staff inside the
bigger 500startups network), discussions, events and private messaging. Highly
recommended

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human_error
reddit is open source. Is there a reason why you didn't use its codebase and
built one from scratch?

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pudquick
That's a great question.

They make it so easy, too:

[https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/reddit-install-
script-...](https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/reddit-install-script-for-
Ubuntu)

and a VM, ready for VMWare / VirtualBox (it's a vagrant setup, actually):
[http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/qnuxp/pycon_prepa...](http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/qnuxp/pycon_prepackaged_vm/)
(about a year old)

For anyone interested in more details, there's a subreddit community about it
as well: <http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev>

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HunterV
Until they hopefully outsource it: Reddit in 10 lines of code.
[http://www.drurly.com/blog/2012/06/26/reddit-in-10-lines-
of-...](http://www.drurly.com/blog/2012/06/26/reddit-in-10-lines-of-code/)

~~~
rurounijones
Reading that article I cannot help but think the entire thing is misguided.

10 lines of code? Yes

Easier to read? Hell no.

If you have to sacrifice readability and idiomatic ruby for LOC then I think
the entire premise is void and a lot of the advice misguided.

~~~
NegativeK
> a lot of the advice misguided.

The goal isn't to write pleasant code; it's to explore what's possible with
the language, even if you should be slapped for using the techniques in a real
project. Reducing LOC is akin to code golf; the shortening is an ends to
itself, and sites like codegolf.com are essentially competitive problem
solving with a very strange goal.

Tangentially: In a different subject, there was an ad hoc competition to write
the shortest science fiction story.

One example is Knock, by Fredric Brown: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a
room. There was a knock on the door..."

Another is Cosmic Report Card: Earth, by Forrest J. Ackerman. The entirety of
the story is "F".

~~~
rurounijones
Whenever I see "Tutorial: X" on the internet I immediately think "What if a
beginner read this".

Therefore whenever I see an article without a "Do not do this in real-life /
production because..." warning I immediately take a negative view.

In this case I evaluated the site with that in mind, all the techniques are
useful but the examples are pretty badly shoe-horned. There are much cleared
ways to give examples of multiple assignments than the examples there.

Other things like writing methods on one line, probably useful in situations
like defining error classes

"class MySpecialError < StandardError; end" but apart from that I frown upon
it.

There is also the "Hey, this is a nested ternary operator" example which is...
well, demo'ing nested ternary operators without a big fat "Do this in real
life and people will hurt you" warning is a no-no in my book.

A bit rambling but I suppose to sum up my main problem with this was "Here are
some things you can do" without actual discussion about when they are
suitable, when they are not, and why this is so.

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gadders
I do think there is a place, in a distributed company or working with offshore
resources, for "idle chit-chat".

Although it may seem like a waste of time, this is how people bond. Even if
you're dealing with different cultures, people still have birthdays, weekend
plans, weddings/children etc. These are common and help bring people thousands
of miles apart together.

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dirkk0
I probably would have given telescope a chance but this might have a different
feature set. <http://telesc.pe/>

~~~
ch0wn
That's what we did. You can set it up on heroku in less than 10 minutes.

~~~
sgdesign
Glad you find the app useful!

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jeremyperson
Hey Ryan, how about P2? <http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/>

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ryancarson
I'm not sure why Jim didn't go with P2. I presume because we're not a PHP
shop.

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fetbaffe
That page crashes my graphics driver when visiting it with Firefox. Nice.

A simple blog with 12 iframes.

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cloudwalking
This is a good startup idea. Services for improving company culture.

Important to make the data exportable and have a solid privacy policy.

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nuttendorfer
A lot of people here overlook that Jim clearly must have had fun building
Convoy. Working at 37Signals means that he couldn't have taken too long to
build this rather simple (yet beautiful) web app.

~~~
ryancarson
He works with me at <http://teamtreehouse.com> not 37S :)

~~~
nuttendorfer
Ha! Sorry, I mistook you for Jason Fried!

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vyrotek
How about <https://moot.it> ?

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t0
Why not create your own subreddit? You can even control who has access.

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ryancarson
We want to own the content and not rely on a third party.

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andrewguenther
git clone git://github.com/reddit/reddit.git

Done.

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ozh
You'd figure the linked article would include an open source link to download.
Duh.

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nzealand
Why not pligg?

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reddit_clone
Whaa?

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jpeg_hero
There goes Ryan again.... Crushing it!!

