

This was a triumph. - JesseAldridge
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/it-was-triumph.html

======
demoon
Congrats to reddit team, despite some frequent "this is not reddit" remarks
here on HN I still love that community.

Out of curiosity I just checked compete.com and was disappointed to learn that
Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement error.

~~~
blhack
> _Digg is approximately 8 times as big, lets hope that's the measurement
> error._

Could somebody please explain this sentiment to me? I feel like all the "cool
kids" are constantly falling over one another to talk about who hates digg the
most.

Is there some trove of horrible things that Kevin Rose has done floating
around somewhere or something? I used to watch diggnation every week, and he
genuinely seemed like an _incredibly_ nice guy. Why so much hate for him? He's
living what I think a lot of us dream about. He's got an incredibly popular
website, he's got tons of funding, he's got lots of very brilliant engineers
working for him, and he's really really young...

He's living the freaking life, guys, and as far as I can tell he hasn't ever
done anything to deserve all the hatred.

As far as digg itself goes...why is it always being comparied to reddit? To
me, this is about as apt as comparing reddit to msnbc.com; they're not even in
the same category of websites.

Digg is very link-centric. It's all about links, lots an lots of links.

Reddit, on the other hand, is all about comments.

I guess a good comparison would be youtube vs some very popular web forums. On
reddit, it's all about the discussion. the comment system they put together is
freaking _outstanding_ (when it's working), and that is why people go to the
site. Digg is more like youtube; nobody really cares about youtube comments
(they're mostly crap anyway), they're there for the video.

Digg and reddit are fundamentally different. Please stop comparing them, and
please let me know what it is that everybody hates so much about the former.

~~~
codexon
_Why so much hate for him?_

Not so much hate for him as hate for how his website has de-evolved. Early on,
it was much like Slashdot or HN. When he started introducing features that
benefited power-users, your chances of getting your own stories dropped to 0
while the front page was filled with Cracked-like "top-10" lists.

They also have a whitelist of domains that can show up on the front page which
turns digg into an rss feed of those sites and the occasional Reddit story
that a poweruser feels like copying.

<http://soshable.com/digg-whitelisted-sites/>

~~~
paul9290
Once a site gets huge like Digg then the trolls and monkeys of the Internet
come in and ruin everything. At least that is why I stop reading digg in late
2007.

------
nochiel
I see no evidence in the post that they are thinking about implementing
broader ways of monetising their traffic. There were wonderful suggestions
--in HN and reddit proper-- in response to their first plea for help. Are they
going to ignore other recommended approaches (e.g maintaining a proper ad
inventory, sponsored sub reddits, employing a dedicated biz dev team, and so
on) and assume that pledge drives will scale into the future?

~~~
pavs
They didn't explicitly say anything on the blog post because they don't have
power to higher anyone without getting permission from above, they can't even
get new servers without getting permission first. The best way to know what
going on is to follow the developers/admins comments who are very much
involved within the discussion:

<http://www.reddit.com/user/raldi/> is more open than others.

<http://www.reddit.com/user/jedberg> &

<http://www.reddit.com/user/KeyserSosa> are the other two admins

Edit: Raldi mentioned that they are getting offers from other CN properties
(ie, Wired) to help them with sales/marketing.

------
brainlock
GLaD to see they're still alive ;-)

~~~
donw
Why are you still posting when there's science to do?

------
lispygem
Don't you think they should be showing comments from "gold" users differently?
Kind of like what PG did a while ago using different colors highlight
distinguished users...

~~~
patio11
That would segment Reddit immediately into at least four communities among the
gold/ungold and supports-highlighting/opposes-highlighting axes, and I suspect
many members of those communities are going to be violently passionate that
only their position is acceptable for True Reddit Supporters and that the
heretics must burn.

~~~
JesseAldridge
Judging from the comment thread[1], it looks like that's already happening.

The top rated comment starts, "As someone who donated..."

And from the second highest comment, 'I will not be "donating" money to a
corporation which has shown no real initiative in growing the site.'

That said, I think any drama would just be background noise for the vast
majority of users. People go to reddit for entertaining links and funny or
interesting comments. Drama doesn't threaten that.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/cotz3/this_wa...](http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/cotz3/this_was_a_triumph_tldr_thanks_everyone_for/)

------
emlizhenta
I wish they published some numbers though. The conversion rates for freeminum
models (that I've seen) haven't been spectacular. Lets hope reddit breaks all
rules here.

~~~
dot
They mentioned 6000 supporters.

~~~
JesseAldridge
Out of 8 million active users. So 0.075% donated. About one donation per
thousand users.

~~~
blhack
Whoa whoa whoa, I don't think reddit has even _close_ to 8 million active
users. I'd say much closer to about 100,000.

The announcement section, which is included by default, and low traffic enough
that I doubt anybody unsubscribes, has 300,000 users. Even if they're
retaining 30% of their users (and keeping them as active), that still isn't
even close to 8 million.

~~~
pavs
They had 8 million unique visitors in last month:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...](http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/congratulations_reddit/c0u0pf3)

To put things in to context, reddit ran a haiti donation campaign which was
heavily promoted through their ad spaces and blog postings and individual
"donation drive threads" and they raised $185k from 3783 users over a period
of ~30 days. They broke their first 100k within 12 hours. So if they got 6000
people to donate within 48 hours or so, that pretty damn good, over next few
weeks as they add subscription only features its bound to get much much higher
number as it gets promoted more.

[http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...](http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxfid=1511)

They didn't release the money amount yet because they are waiting for
"confirmation" from higher up to reveal the numbers.

------
zitterbewegung
I personally donated $3.14 it would be interesting to see how much people
donated or more data like average donation etc...

~~~
exception
I laid down $40. There was a thread in /r/lounge where people posted donation
amounts.

The average seemed to be around $10; however, there were donations as low as
$0.01 and as high as $1000.

------
palish
Congrats. :)

It's worth noting that this won't ever happen again, though. This was
basically a one-time gain of $X. So hopefully they don't wind up back in this
situation.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sounds like they are already. Were going to use the money to hire a new guy,
right? Instead, putting up a couple more servers. Or is that just the start?

------
kwyjibo
So the newly acquired cash is dumped into amazon EC2 again...

~~~
brown9-2
is there something wrong with this?

~~~
tlack
There is sentiment that Reddit's developers are too quick to adopt the latest
me-too web technology which overall doesn't benefit them. So I think what he's
implying is that it's money wasted on EC2 when a traditional server would be
more cost effective. I tend to agree.

~~~
kwyjibo
In the last thread they said that they are spending over 250.000$ a year just
in servers. They could save huge amounts of money if they would just switch to
rented servers.

~~~
tlack
$250k? That's disturbing.

~~~
kwyjibo
See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502171>

