
Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars - donohoe
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit-thrives-after-advance-publications-let-it-sink-or-swim.html?hp
======
thesethings
"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his
company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left
well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might
not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community
instead.”"

I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict
during the period right after the acquisition? Didn't Reddit struggle to pay
for basic infrastructure stuff due to their new parent company's skepticism
about its viability and perception of its value?

<http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html>

And it was a long while until it got spun out.
(<http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/>)

Not that there's anything crazy in any of this. Just that the NYT story paints
it like right away they 1) knew Reddit's worth and 2) knew to have a hands-off
approach.

I'm far from a Reddit power user, happy to hear other perspectives.

~~~
raldi
Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-
off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during
that same time, they were extremely hands- _on_ about preventing us from
hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.

~~~
seunosewa
This may have been a good thing. Digg didn't have any constraints on buying
new hardware and hiring new people, and we can see how that ended (they bought
too much, hired too many people, and collapsed)!

~~~
raldi
We weren't asking for unlimited hardware and headcount. We would have been
thrilled with a rule that every time traffic doubles, we get to hire one
person.

As for hardware, all we wanted was a team printer that didn't jam, an SSD for
ketralnis's workstation, and the right for our engineers to substitute an
equal-cost laptop of their choice for the IT-approved MacBook.

------
davedx
"On Thursday, President Obama signed up for an “Ask Me Anything” (A.M.A. in
geekspeak) session at Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital
life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups."

How patronizing.

~~~
hackmiester
Indeed. Reminds me of when people say that IT work should be cheap because
"you're just pushing some buttons." Gee, I sure am glad President Obama took
some time to join us kiddies in playing with our computers!

~~~
jcbrand
Pushing buttons does nothing, it's the order in which those buttons are pushed
that requires intelligence, skill and experience.

~~~
seunosewa
Yeah. You're preaching to the choir, though!

------
taybenlor
"If the leader of the free world stops by" - sorry, he's what?

~~~
joshschreuder
This is a pretty common expression for the President of the US:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_World#.22Leader_of_the_Fre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_World#.22Leader_of_the_Free_World.22)

~~~
taybenlor
Which goes on to say that it has fallen out of use. It's a ridiculous title.

------
tokenadult
"Strategically, what they have done should be a model of how to create and
support a virtual start-up within a larger corporation,' said Anil Dash, a
writer and entrepreneur in digital realms."

Well, strategically, they might eventually want to think about making some
return on investment for the acquiring investors with actual cash profit.
Otherwise, they will eventually be shed at a loss (is anyone else here old
enough to remember AOL and Time Warner?).

Strategically, they may also be serving as a cautionary example of why start-
ups without a secure revenue model shouldn't be acquired at all, unless there
is financial upside for the investors. After all, the article further reports,
"Reddit is not an exception to every rule in the digital world. Like many
digital media companies, it has a big audience and minuscule revenue."

~~~
jvm
They bought them for 20mil, that's pretty cheap given their userbase. I bet
Conde can sell them for more than that now.

------
carleverett
I'm sorry but the first sentence made me laugh:

"There are many ways to measure the traction of a social media platform: [3
ways, to be exact]"

------
brackin
I think it's a shame that Reddit sold so early but at the same time they can
think of the users (Until Conde Nast gets involved). There's no question about
their valuation and how they'll monetize. They as a company can work on that
and build a great product but there aren't daily blogposts on TechCrunch about
it.

~~~
webwanderings
Looking for Techcrunch endorsements is so 2009ish. People who know and can
reddit, are doing fine because it is possibly one of the last few places on
the Internet where pseudonym and trolling is still alive. You feel gratified
by people answering your comment given that you have most likely trolled at
first. You eventually get a peace later on because the community kept you
alive and kicking. Hence it has all the right ingredients of what social-
network should be like on the Internet: free, open and anonymous.

~~~
kellishaver
A while back I deleted my Reddit account and just recently I've created a new
one under my real name. I decided that if I was going to post, I would do so
as myself and not hide behind an anonymous name. I hadn't really done any
trolling in the past, but I'd participated in discussions I certainly wouldn't
have participated in if they could have readily been tracked back to me.

But for better or worse, I decided to go the real name route this time.

The result is that I end up commenting on a lot less time-wasting content (and
subsequently reading less because I know I won't participate in the discussion
and reading often opinionated comments without participating will just
frustrate me), and putting more thought into the responses I do post.

That's not to say that I think there's anything necessarily wrong with the
anonymity. Sometimes it's nice to give voice to something you otherwise
wouldn't because your opinion is controversial or unpopular (and doing
business online, one has to protect one's online reputation and what ends up
in the search engines). For me, though, it's translated to less time spent on
useless AMA/AskReddit posts, more time spent on meaningful discussion, and
less time on the site overall. All of these are good things.

~~~
webwanderings
Well, that's not a bad decision if it works for you well. But anonymity
doesn't necessarily equal to the poster wasting time. I use reddit with
pseudonym and I don't troll.

My pseudonym is my authentic identity on Reddit, just as it is here on HN. A
while ago I was using one identity here on HN and for one reason or another,
some people didn't like what I had to say (even though personally I was very
authentic) so they down-voted me so much that my score went in to negative,
and I ended up deleting my account and recreating a new one. I have still not
given up on being authentic under pseudonym.

The point is that you have to believe in the conversation - gaining and
imparting knowledge - and not worry about the fluff and the other distraction
of the Internet. The trend to have real names on the Internet, the trend to
have face on the Internet....these are all distractions as far as I am
concerned.

As long as we are typing and reading each other through letters and words, we
don't need to see each others' names and pictures. It would be a different
matter when we converse through video and audio.

~~~
kellishaver
Oh, I agree with you. You don't have to be an ass, just because you're
anonymous. I didn't troll, either, but I did find that I felt more free to
comment on things I otherwise wouldn't for a variety of reasons.

That's certainly both good and bad.

The negatives, in my case, were that I would end up getting into discussions
over trivial topics, or would end up reading tons of comments, some good, some
bad, and comment on them just because I could.... For example, if I disagreed
with you, I would tell you, event hough most of the time it was over things
that just weren't worth the time and effort of getting into a debate with a
random stranger over.

On the other hand, posting anonymously also gave me freedom to talk at length
about things that matter to me but maybe aren't the best things to go talking
about using my real name when everything is indexed in a search engine
(politics, religion, etc.). I'll certainly stand up for what I believe in, but
in cases like a potential client who may be looking me up on Google, my
religious views, for instance, shouldn't be the first thing they find. It's
just irrelevant in a work relationship 99% of the time.

So making the switch to my real name, I did lose some of that freedom, and one
could argue that this is a bad thing, but for me, the constraints it places on
the types of discussions I'm willing to have means better time management and
(overall) more thoughtful responses when I do respond. I suppose if there was
a real hot-button issue that I felt compelled to comment on, I would create a
throw away account and do so, but sticking with my real identity forces me to
think and evaluate those situations more closely before doing so.

~~~
webwanderings
I think I have gone through a similar transformation and understanding as
yours and I can totally relate to the experience and dynamics you describe.
However, my conclusion was that it is better to be 100% authentic in a small
and controlled confines than it is to be in public. And slowly I have adopted
the approach of only speaking online what I could backup offline, that is with
or without anonymity.

So upon that realization, I kept using the platforms where pseudo-identities
are welcome and not frowned upon and I can be transparent where I feel
comfortable. It is similar to being in an environment where I can speak on any
matter on my own terms and not anyone else'. So when I acquire an
avatar/identity for a site, I make sure that I use that avatar/identity with
full honesty.

The people who use pseudo-identity to gratify their egos and to be abusive
towards their freedom of anonymity, are basically being dishonest with
themselves and everyone else. I think one can be anonymous and still be
authentic. Each one of us have multiple compartments from which we operate and
live our lives and we are always evolving and changing as person. Google Plus
team and Mark Zuckerburgs would wrongly want you to believe otherwise.

It is just so that Internet as a whole is not a trust-worthy place so you have
to pick and choose how and where you participate, and we have to be able to do
it on our terms.

------
mmahemoff
There's a good interview from Mark Suster with Advance Publications recently.
They talk Reddit here: <http://youtu.be/iXES4ITy7W8?t=22m>

A little surprising to hear him dismiss the role Digg 4 played in Reddit's
success, but overall, gives a good perspective on how they keep it hands-off.

------
noirman
Keep in mind that when Reddit got acquired, Reddit gold doesn't exist yet. So
they were losing (more) money every month.

~~~
easytiger
reddit gold may never have worked if it was sold without understanding that
reddit was in trouble and couldn't grow without the support of it's users. If
it had been an out of the blue proposal to slap charges for features then
people might have kicked up a fuss.

~~~
rmc
Another theory was that the owners (Conde Nast?) were very old media and used
to thinking of magazine subscriptions. So they invented subscriptions for
reddit, to show that, yes even by magazine standards, reddit is a good
business.

------
npguy
Can someone explain to me how PG funded Reddit when it was more like a HN
clone?

~~~
underwater
I might get a few details wrong; but HN certainly was inspired by reddit.

Reddit was originally written in Lisp. Paul Graham had actually written an
article about how Lisp was his secret weapon when building his Yahoo-acquired
Viacom. Reddit was one of the first YC companies so I assume their language
choice was inspired by this.

Soon after launch reddit had performance issues and was rewritten in Python.
This improved the site stability but angered one of reddit's original user
base of Lisp fans. Around the same time Paul Graham started hyping a new Lisp
dialect he was writting called arc [1]. It's what powers HN.

Arc stores the stack and a set of continuations for each possible client
action in memory on the server. These are referenced on the client by a fnid.
This is actually the source of the next-page errors you'll see here;
continuations are purged in least recently used fashion so as HN outgrows its
single server the lack of memory makes sessions expire more quickly.

I believe both HN and reddit (which had a second Python-based rewrite) are now
open source. There is nothing stopping Paul Graham from using reddit's source
code; but I believe the arc code is leaner. HN runs on a single piece of
hardware to this day.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)>

~~~
johnx123-up
I always wonder how HN works without cookies. Can you share some insights on
that?

~~~
almost
HN does actually use a cookie called "user" when you login to keep you logged
in. But for page to page state it uses an id in the url. That's why a lot of
the internal links have a "fnid" in them and why you can't share those urls.

