
Happy 10th birthday to us - CapitalistCartr
http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-celebrating.html
======
ilovecomputers
I always feel strange being nostalgic about a website. Like I don't feel weird
being nostalgic about a classic episode of The Simpsons or a rock concert, but
for YouTube or Newgrounds or now Reddit, I do.

I've used reddit for like 7 years. Gleamed helpful info from it. Even won a
contest off that site (still got that postcard of all the admin's autographs).
Yet my continuing theme with that site was their social experiments. Some of
them were one time events, like the Reddit Jet Blue Travels or naming a whale
Mr. Splashy Pants or the Rally For Sanity (okay, we technically tagged along
for that event, but I was the ones drawn to that pilgrimage). Most of them
were short lived, like Soapier or The redditor zine. However, there were
successful experiments like IAMA (we finally got the President in the end
after making joke IAMA requests), Secret Santa, and shit, we even got Snoop
Dogg as an honorary mod of /r/trees.

That was the thing with reddit, it was this general forum that various people
showed up on who wanted to try new things or learn something new. Sometimes
they took it too far and sometimes they had real life effects. Whatever
redditors tried, it was something that broke the regular order of things.
Hidden away in the subreddits, I can still see these attempts at trying
something new. Try Paleo, donate a pizza, ask a scientist or historian for
detailed answers, try not to jack off, meetup with like-minded people, try to
be more productive with GTD, try to have this obscure politician win an
election, or watch these obscure movies on netflix.

Now the site has gotten so big, so many stuff has been done on there, I'm
likely just skimming the surface here.

Anyways, Jedberg, Raldi, if you're still on this thread, thanks for your early
contributions to that site. It has brought me fond memories and even a few
friends...who I can assure you are not the steretypical reddit weirdos. For
reals!

~~~
astrodust
I think a lot of people feel the same way about Reddit as they do about _The
Simpsons_ : It used to be good.

Like so many mega-scale communities before it, Reddit is a case study in what
happens if you let your user base grow faster than your cultural core can
assimilate it.

To get the good content you need to dig deeper and deeper now, hide yourself
away from the deluge of garbage that is the top-level groups. /r/programming
remains fairly lively, but it's still a weak substitute for what it could be
given proper community oversight.

~~~
alogray
Frankly, I don't feel like Reddit's quality has changed altogether too much
since even before Digg v4 killed Digg.

There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed
higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts,
power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful subreddits.
Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.

Honestly, I'm enjoying the website more today now than I was a few years ago.

Which, I suppose, is the same thing the people say about The Simpsons.

~~~
debaserab2
> There was definitely a period where the average quality of a comment seemed
> higher. But those times also coincided with the rise of novelty accounts,
> power user personalities, often with foul sounding names and awful
> subreddits. Drama over subreddit bannings is nothing new, either.

Personally I'm pretty happy there's less of the narwhalbacon joke stuff that
used to be rampant in the comments years ago. I think the noise:signal ratio
is about the same as I can ever remember it being, but at least I can now
stand the noise.

To this day I still don't tell people I visit reddit because I don't want to
be associated with or labeled as a "redditor" despite the fact that I find the
site to be a valuable source of content. There's a strong faction of the core
user base that I just can't relate to.

------
vshan
Most people don't know this, but it was PG who gave Alexis and Steve the idea
to make something like reddit, and also gave them the tagline "the front page
of the internet".[0]

PG had vetoed their initial idea to create a food-delivery app and then called
them back and asked them to come up with something new.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po)

~~~
limeyx
Food delivery app idea looking pretty OK about now :)

------
thomson
Happy Birthday Reddit!

I also really enjoyed this post from Alexis re: their journey
[1]--particularly this excerpt:

"I talk about this a lot in my book, but it was PG who invited us to apply to
the first ever round of Y Combinator and ultimately Jessica Livingston who
banged on the table to accept us into the program after PG and the other
partners rejected us.

I often think about what would have happened if she hadn't demanded that we be
part of the program. There'd be no reddit, that's for sure."

This doesn't get repeated quite often enough as it should, but jl is probably
one of the kindest, most intelligent, and most perceptive partners at YC, and
probably in the entire venture capital industry.

[1]
[https://www.facebook.com/alexis.ohanian/posts/10102187402893...](https://www.facebook.com/alexis.ohanian/posts/10102187402893876)

------
minimaxir
Here's a GitHub repository released by Reddit of all the relevant Reddit
metrics (uniques, page views, submissions etc.), by month:
[https://github.com/drunken-economist/reddit-10-year-
data](https://github.com/drunken-economist/reddit-10-year-data)

~~~
realusername
From this data, you can see that reddit is stil highly dependent on the US
market. The international part must be the other English speaking countries I
suppose. There is still some huge work to do to have a better international
coverage. (and also a good potential for further growth).

------
ChrisArchitect
all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg
botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was
struggling at the time. Changed everything

~~~
jedberg
> Reddit, who was struggling at the time.

This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that
point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

~~~
Pxtl
That's actually really surprising. I was part of the Digg exodus and I'd
barely _heard_ about Reddit at the time of the v4 debacle, while Digg was a
pretty big brand in tech circles. Was it just better marketing while Reddit
actually had a larger-but-quieter userbase at the time?

~~~
jedberg
Digg spent _a lot_ of money on marketing, while reddit spent none, so yeah,
that was a big part of it. They had a lot of articles written about them
because they had a fabulous marketing and PR team. One we were a bit envious
of.

------
go1dfish
I've asked this repeatedly at reddit and have still yet to ever receive an
answer and I think it goes to the core of many of the concerns the reddit
community has over the new direction.

Why is /r/TwoXChromosomes the only default subreddit to allow political
advocacy?

Not a single default would have accepted kn0thing's first post in todays
reddit.

Reddit as a political soapbox died around the time of Occupy Wall Street. It's
as neutered as Facebook now.

~~~
raldi
Most political subreddits don't garner upvotes on the basis of "I'm glad I was
shown this" but rather, "YOU need to read this".

And so you get a front page full of angry crap nobody wants to read but
everyone thinks everyone else needs to see.

It doesn't make for a pleasant user experience.

~~~
odiroot
Just because you (and the rest of the staff) don't want to read it doesn't
mean the community doesn't.

Parent comment is very much right, Reddit got disappointingly neutered.

~~~
go1dfish
Not only that, they should recognize that yes one use pattern of reddit was to
get the word out of things you think other people ought to here. This attracts
users that have something to say; and that attracts users who want something
to read/hear etc...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc)

This too can drive growth. If the community gets the impression that they
don't drive the content then reddit loses all the magic.

The truth is, the users haven't driven the content of the front-page since the
fall of /r/reddit.com following Occupy Wall Street.

------
avinassh
Makes me sad that Admins did not mention Aaron Swartz[0]

\-
[https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

~~~
go1dfish
Same here, and the community noticed as well:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3auk69/happy_10th_bir...](https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3auk69/happy_10th_birthday_to_us_celebrating_the_best_of/csg7g1t)

[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit)

------
eueueu
Is Reddit still run to be profitable? It always seems like it fits more with a
wikipedia type model of donations etc.

~~~
meritt
I'm more interested in how imgur survives since they serve up far more
bandwidth that reddit does and their own advertising and community efforts are
pretty young relatively, not to mention hotlinks bypass that entirely.

~~~
billmalarky
Imgur uses the free/extremely cheap CDN Cloudflare. Same with 4chan. The vast
majority of Imgur's content gets served at the CDN layer so Imgur doesn't have
to pay for that bandwidth.

moot (of 4chan) said a while back that Cloudflare is one of the main reasons
4chan is still around these days.

~~~
MichaelGG
CloudFlare told me that using them to host images/media isn't allowed. That
they do the CDN bits for websites, but not to do excessive non-webpage stuff.
Their ToS says something like that.

Maybe that changes for a few K a month?

~~~
billmalarky
CDNs don't host the files, your servers do. They cache copies of the files
across their CDN network and serve the files from their cache until the cache
expires, then they go and get the file from you again to rebuild their cache.

As a practical example, you might have an image on your webserver. When it
goes viral on reddit, the request for the image hits the CDN first, not your
servers (that's why they call it reverse proxying), they see that they don't
have a cached version of the file, or their cached version has expired, so the
CDN sends a request to your server, copies the file, and then proceeds to
serve that file from their cache for the next million user requests or until
the cache is set to expire (usually 24 or so hours, more than long enough for
the traffic hitting your image url to die down).

Basically, the CDN made it so your actual servers (and thus your host
bandwidth bill) served one request. Not 1 million requests.

Now typically you will foot the bandwidth bill for the CDN as well, but
Cloudflare has a tiered pricing structure that is well below the rest of the
competition. See moot (owner of 4chan) talk about cost savings here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6682324)

~~~
MichaelGG
Yes I say "host" as a shorthand for "cache so I don't have to serve much".

Just saying that when I contacted them, they were clear that we shouldn't use
them for images or media, and their general ToS agrees.

Their enterprise pricing starts cheap so if they throw in "unlimited bandwidth
for everything" then it'd be quite a good deal.

~~~
billmalarky
There must have been some misunderstanding/miscommunication, if not then
Cloudflare has pivoted their business significantly from what my understanding
of it was (granted I haven't researched them in over a year).

Media is the primary purpose for CDNs. The performance boost comes from a
global network caching the media files so when requests are made for the
resources, the end user downloads the media from the nearest CDN node instead
of your server that is potentially on the other side of the world. It doesn't
matter quite so much to have non-media (such as the page html) served locally
because the size of an html page is generally significantly smaller than the
media embedded in the page.

From the small amount of research I've done on the Cloudflare service just
now, it doesn't seem very transparent how exactly it works. I've found
information on 4chan and imgur using them to serve billions of CDN requests,
but others saying don't rely on their CDN. So who knows, maybe it's on a case
by case basis.

~~~
MichaelGG
[https://www.cloudflare.com/terms](https://www.cloudflare.com/terms) Section
10:

...Additionally, the purpose of CloudFlare's Service is to proxy web content,
not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space,
including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures,
movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited...

------
jasonlotito
Actual link [http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-
us-...](http://www.redditblog.com/2015/06/happy-10th-birthday-to-us-
celebrating.html)

~~~
coldpie
Thanks. URL should be updated for this post to avoid blogspam.

~~~
VieElm
Right why link to the TC article instead of the blog post? I don't understand
it.

~~~
minimaxir
Because someone linked to the blog post previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565)

------
randall
Blogspam?

~~~
bduerst
Probably - duplicate from actual reddit article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9766565)

------
sneak
If every single vote on reddit (both up or down) over ten years were to equal
Uber's ~$40bn market cap, each of ~19bn votes would have to be worth over $2.

~~~
exacube
If my fingers were to equal Google's $375B market cap, each of my finger is
worth $37.5B.

