
Big Reddit Changes Coming? Conde Nast Purchases 285 Reddit Domain Names - brandnewlow
http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/big-reddit-changes-coming-conde-nast-purchases-285-reddit-domain-names/
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ary
> If you did not have specific plans for 285 domain names (which would cost
> over $2200 to register for one year), you normally would not purchase them.

Clearly the author has never worked with a content company on the web (writing
for a blog aside). This kind of thing happens all the time. Purchasing domain
name permutations related to your brand en masse is still usually cheaper than
going through the legal process of taking ownership from another party.

~~~
hugh3
Also, it's hard to imagine that they could possibly have specific plans for
285 domain names ranging from zenreddit.com to redditsex.com. Oh, and my
personal favourite, redditthe.com

~~~
thezilch
Surely you've heard of Mahalo's domain spam?

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aarlo
domain spam?

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raldi
This is a good example of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong
reasons.

Big things are indeed coming for reddit, but it has a lot more to do with
Conde Nast finally investing some money in personnel than the fact that they
registered redditgreen.com and redditblue.com.

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/>

~~~
kn0thing
This.

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jcitme
I find this rather amusing, that kn0thing would make a post that's essentially
the scourge of reddit. Are the reddit admins trying their hand at being a
hipster, and /ironically/ posting this? :)

~~~
raldi
It's okay when the replier is, in some way, an authority on the subject at
hand. As in, "I, a cofounder of the site this person is talking about, hereby
endorse his position."

Nobody cares if it's just, "I, as some random person on the Internet, endorse
his position."

~~~
skeletonjelly
Why say in many words what could be said in one. I mean ah..

Agreed. :P

The information density is in kn0thing's username, the comment was merely a
nod of the head.

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hyperbovine
It speaks volumes that Conde Nast spending $2200 on Reddit is enough to
generate headlines.

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ChuckFrank
Vertical (ie. reddit___.com or _____reddit.com) and Horizontal (ie raddit.com
riddit.com etc.) domain securing is standard practice. It does not necessarily
mean that those market will be actively brought online, instead it means that
those markets will be unavailable for pirates and coat tail surfers. However,
it's always fascinating to see these little tactical moves on the part of
larger companies.

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itg
I know the phrase "reddit has become worse over time" is pretty much a meme
here on hn but wow has that website been extremely bad as of late. Nothing but
rage comics and pictures of pets, and some trolling. Probably a combination of
more and more people plus summer vacation for the kids who have too much time
on their hands.

~~~
gomer
Everything is broken into subreddits on reddit and if you learn to select the
subreddits that interest you instead of just reading the "rage comic" and "pet
picture" subreddits it might be of more interest.

~~~
jokermatt999
Rage comics, advice animals, scumbag x, etc have bled over into virtually
every subreddit now. It's basically part of reddit's culture.

I've said it before, but you can unsubscribe from a subreddit, but you can't
unsubscribe from a culture.

~~~
farnsworth
There are many subreddits where posts/comments along those lines get downvoted
hard.

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saalweachter
Didn't Reddit drop down to one developer sometime recently? If "something big"
is coming -- involving 285 domain names -- I would hate to be that one
developer.

~~~
traldan
I seem to recall reading they actually hired people recently, or were in the
process of doing so.

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bproper
This isn't a big move, it's just good houskeeping. First it was hiring
developers. Now this, which helps them with SEO, possibly using all these
sites as redirects to sub-reddits.

[http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/02/conde-nast-has-big-
plans-...](http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/02/conde-nast-has-big-plans-for-
reddit-goes-on-domain-shopping-spree/)

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zitterbewegung
I bet they are registering the subreddit domains to have them redirect to the
subreddits. All of them seem like pretty established subreddits. Perhaps they
want the subreddits to function more like stand alone websites?

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mrkurt
Sounds like someone at CN found a new domain registration toy...

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languagehacker
This is a brand protection move, pure and simple. Easier to throw money at it
now than to waste a retained lawyer's time writing cease and desist letters
later.

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gojomo
Perhaps they got some (dubious?) SEO advice suggesting that splitting
subreddits over more registered names would improve their serch rankings and
ad rates?

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ck2
Defensive registrations, other than very common typos are silly.

You can never, ever, register all the variations and new TLDs come out every
year.

In this day and age, users are not quite that stupid and all modern browsers
have phishing site checks built in.

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mrerrormessage
Assuming it did cost them $2300, that would have only been about 1% of
color.com. They got a steal.

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dreamdu5t
How about paying for proper server resources? I mean fuck... it's down every
day multiple times.

~~~
raldi
It's not the servers' fault. Even Google would have terrible uptime if they
only had five engineers -- regardless of how many servers they had.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Not in the case of Reddit? As far as I know, Reddit's main issue is constant
502 errors/requests timing out, which to my knowledge would indicate they
constantly hit the limits of their webservers or don't understand how to load
balance.

~~~
raldi
Indeed, they're hitting the limits of their webservers. But they already have
the most powerful servers EC2 provides. So they have three options:

* Move to a new provider

* Change the way things work so that the job can be spread across more servers

* Fix suboptimal things

All three of those options are extremely difficult to do quickly with a
skeleton crew. Reddit's been improving scalability as fast as 3-4 engineers
can, but their traffic is growing even faster.

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daniel-cussen
Reddit may be doing better than any of the other businesses that company owns.

