
Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream - danielhonigman
http://www.wired.com/design/2014/01/the-gentrification-of-reddit-in-a-few-great-graphs/
======
VMG
Original post with HD graphics:
[http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-
evolutio...](http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-
reddit-through-post-data/)

~~~
stusmall
He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess
on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images"
feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an
"endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the
bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at
and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content.

Its my personal opinion that this has really hurt the depth of content. Its
still a fun site, just very different then when I first went there ~6 years
ago.

EDIT: Not to say RES isn't a great project and super useful. I use it and
really appreciate it. Its just interesting how ease of use can shape the
content and culture of an online community.

~~~
KVFinn
>He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess
on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images"
feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an
"endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the
bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at
and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content.

Nah, nothing to do with RES, that's just how things tend to evolve without
strict moderation. The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in
images because it's easy to consume and upvote.

[http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-
evolutio...](http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-
reddit-through-post-data/)

~~~
Crito
> _The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it
> 's easy to consume and upvote._

I honestly think that reddit would be better if they killed karma, or at least
killed displaying it to the users. The obsession over it dominates the site
with people posting cheap shit to get more of it, other people shitposting to
see how far negative they can go, people complaining that one thing got karma
while another thing did not, etc.

~~~
redacted
Quite a few subreddits do this, either permanently or time-delayed (i.e., no
comment scores visible for some time t after posting).

------
fragsworth
Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same
information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted
line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the
crap on the bottom.

The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause
everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very
difficult to see.

Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total
site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
_Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can 't even see
total site growth over time in them, which would be interesting and relevant._

I came here to say that (although your other points are good, too). The title
of the article is "Fascinating Graphs Show __How Reddit Got Huge __by Going
Mainstream " but then they normalize away all of the growth info and make it
completely impossible to see how traffic growth is related to anything they
are displaying.

------
ExpiredLink
The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions
was probably inevitable.

~~~
Kiro
I just had a look and the submissions were very similar to the front page on
HN. Are you exaggerating or do you think the quality has gone down here as
well?

~~~
oinksoft
Before Hacker News was popular, you tended to be able to go to proggit for
breaking news and large discussions. Being less popular, HN had smaller
discussions and stories took longer to rotate out. There was much more focus
on startups and California things, much less on infosec.

Proggit now seems to have been reduced to an HN mirror, but HN is something
else too.

------
martininmelb
Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more
diversified as it became more popular".

~~~
Widdershin
That is far too positive. Please try and be more negative in future, it
challenges my worldview less.

------
gdulli
What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image
site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of
unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes,
images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left.

~~~
mcantelon
Calling one of the most successful sites on the Internet a "missed
opportunity" is a bit odd. Whether you want junk or you want quality, it's
there (dig into the subreddits).

~~~
officemonkey
I wish there was a better way to discover subreddits I might like.

If Reddit did to subreddits what Pandora and Netflix did to music and movies
(analyze and recommend,) it would pay off for them.

~~~
kpennell
Hmmm...I subscribe to a number of travel and backpacker subs and am constantly
pleased by the content.

[http://metareddit.com/r/backpacking](http://metareddit.com/r/backpacking)

------
sentenza
Wow. Reddit is that young? It feels as if it has been around forever.

I'm not so sure about the image overload thing. Maybe that is just a symptom
of another problem. IMO, the standard settings of the main page should be
"fixed". It would be nice if you saw posts from a dozen or so _random_
subreddits as a standard setting, instead of the current colorful goo mixed
from the big catchall subreddits.

~~~
oceanplexian
Reddit is very young. It feels like yesterday that we were still using Digg.

------
perlpimp
4chan conjecture: all forums evolve to approximate 4chan or they die by the
death of long tail.

imo

~~~
TelmoMenezes
I think all forums evolve towards decaffeination, including 4chan. People like
to give 4chan as an example of low quality, but I think 4chan is actually in
the top 1% of quality due to being an out-of-control creative machine. The
4chan-as-low-quality cliché goes well with all the other re-re-redigested
morsels of tedium that 99% of content consist of.

------
zck
It's interesting that /r/politics got a huge bump (looks to me to be about 75%
increase in size) around the 2008 U.S. presidential election, but had no
noticeable difference in 2012.

~~~
natural219
This seem to be purely a function of volume. By 2012 there were all sorts of
other subreddits that people frequented.

~~~
danielhonigman
Good point

------
bernardom
Good lord, what happened in mid 2009?! The reddit.com blue area spikes up for
a month.

Edit: the original blogpost by Randy Olson says he doesn't know either.

~~~
evacuationdrill
That was the Digg exodus. I was a Digg user, and I switched around that time.
It had started to suck really bad, to where people like myself were willing to
give it a fair shot, only to discover that the discussions were generally
higher-quality. That's also why I'm here, from a discussion on Reddit for
other sites. But I still find that the smaller subs scratch that itch, too.

~~~
raldi
You're off by a year. Digg v4 was the end of summer _2010_.

~~~
evacuationdrill
Whoops, Thanks for the correction.

------
indlebe
Endless summer ;)

~~~
dangrossman
I think you meant "Eternal September". Endless summer is just a description of
the weather in Miami.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

~~~
indlebe
:) I was attempting a more politically correct version of:
[http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer](http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer)

I heard about eternal september last year and figured that eternal summer was
a play on it.

------
corresation
Those who only take a cursory glance will assume that Reddit started as a porn
site, with nsfw dominating. This is of course contrary to how most of us
remember it.

If you delve deeper, it is actually that Reddit started entirely without subs,
and happened to mostly be programming related, with a smattering of politics.

nsfw was created because, much like with the TLD debate on the same topic, it
was a content category that people wanted to separate. As the "subless" Reddit
started to get noisy with mainstream topics, that's when people started
fracturing off to /r/programming.

~~~
at-fates-hands
A few years ago, I heard the same thing, then went and checked out the archive
and it was about the furthest thing from the truth.

Screenshot from 2005 of the home page:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit.com/)

~~~
corresation
EDIT: Apologies, however I misunderstood at-fates-hands's point of contention,
however leave this post just for the neat archive.org links.

What is the "furthest thing from the truth"?

While you selectively chose a generalist front page, how about-

[https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com/)?

A Ruby post up at number 1. Heck, almost all of the front page is exactly the
sort of material you would find on HN.

Another 2005 day -

[https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com/)?

Another day with _four_ LISP front-pagers -
[https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com/)?

Every post wasn't always about programming specifically, but it was a site
primarily populated by programmers and other IT professionals, which is how
what would be fringe material topped the front page. But there was the _other
stuff_ , just as there is on HN.

Just to make an aside about something I found interesting on the archived
reddit page - the header "reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing
links or submit your own!". The premise was that Reddit would use clustering
and other intelligent logic to individualize itself to the viewer. They
abandoned that and went the "subscribe to subs you like" notion.

~~~
seiji
Reddit was released to the world by a link on paulgraham.com. It had an impact
on the initial user census.

It took a while for all the cat picture morons to take it over.

~~~
davidw
Exactly - that's how I found reddit, back in the day.

First it was mostly hacking, startups, and some libertarian politics. Then
there started to be more politics, and less hacking and startups. And more
"outrage stories". And it went downhill fast enough that PG started Hacker
News.

That's one of the reasons I loathe the political stories so much - they build
a momentum of their own and wreck sites like this one.

Interestingly enough, you can see PG helping to get reddit off the ground:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20050725010627/http://reddit.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050725010627/http://reddit.com/)

"bugbear" is PG.

Edit, I think it was through this essay:

[http://www.reddit.com/comments/20775](http://www.reddit.com/comments/20775)

