7 ms·

This was a triumph.

87 points by JesseAldridge 16y ago

lispygem 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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_was_a_triumph_tldr_thanks_everyone_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/cotz3/this_wa...
  - exception 16y ago
    Maybe being able to buy virtual swag might be a better way to go for Reddit, in a similar fashion to Dungeons & Dragons Online. Tiny [icons] of narwhal tusks, lolcats or rashers of bacon that could appear next to your name could prove quite popular with the community. Similarly, being able to not only upvote, downvote, but also put a 'hex' on a comment I could see as being an amusing pastime. Not to mention, they already have the beginnings of an achievement system in place with the awards panel. I could see them greatly expanding that with quest style achievements; "posted 5 links", say, to earn /reddit/credits. I'm not sure how it would affect the community, but the revenue possibilities are endless.
- mahmud 16y ago
  That would be their undoing. The last thing egalitarian reddit needs is a class system. Or maybe I am wrong, Slashdot has been starring their paid subscribes for ages, but I am not sure reddit wants to stoop to slashdot levels.
  - olefoo 16y ago
    Stoop to? I love reddit dearly, but there are some days when you could run it through. sed -e 's/narwal/Natalie Portman/' and get something that was recognizably slashdot circa 2002.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      Depends on which section you read. I introduced my fiancee to /r/IAmA and she thinks reddit is mostly about child molesting drug-dealers who fly fighter-jets and rescue endangered species, because they were raised in a polygamist cult family living in the Everest base camp. To me it's mostly proggit, hastily scanned once every 1-2 days.
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      Considering all the old slashdot fans had to have gone somewhere, I wonder why...
  - philwelch 16y ago
    /. has had editing problems, but the comment quality has not, to my experience, dipped that low. It's not as high as HN, but it hasn't dipped that low, either. HN and /. are on opposite ends of a spectrum--HN is what happens before the trolls arrive, given you seed the community well, and /. is what happens after the trolls leave.
    - btmorex 16y ago
      I always though the biggest problem with slashdot was that the moderation somehow lead to an extremely insular community. There was a prevailing "slashdot" opinion and that was pretty much the only opinion expressed in highly moderated comments. I was a reader for years and that's pretty much why I left. What's strange is that slashdot moderation isn't that different from any other site, but for whatever reason, I think it hurt slashdot far more than any other site. Maybe, it's just that by default not that many comments are displayed as opposed to reddit or hn, so it's all the more noticeable when the top 20 or so comments all are basically the same.
- xelfer 16y ago
  There is a 'lounge' subreddit that only donators can get into. I don't think they should treat people differently on the main part of reddit, it'll cause too many issues/arguments.
emlizhenta 16y ago
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 16y ago
  They mentioned 6000 supporters.
  - JesseAldridge 16y ago
    Out of 8 million active users. So 0.075% donated. About one donation per thousand users.
    - blhack 16y ago
      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.
      - jorgeortiz85 16y ago
        Most reddit users probably don't have accounts.
      - JesseAldridge 16y ago
        Hmm, good point. The 8 million number comes from the blog post. Maybe the vast majority of people who visit the site don't bother to create an account?
      - pavs 16y ago
        They had 8 million unique visitors in last month: http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/congratulations_reddit/c0u0pf3 http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c... 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&pxfid=1511 http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf... They didn't release the money amount yet because they are waiting for "confirmation" from higher up to reveal the numbers.
demoon 16y ago
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 16y ago
  >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.
  - m-photonic 16y ago
    >nobody really cares about youtube comments (they're mostly crap anyway) This is true for funny 30-second videos with millions of views and the like, but there are plenty of youtube videos on niche subjects that will never accumulate more than a few thousand views, all from like-minded people. The comment threads on these videos are a completely different matter.
brainlock 16y ago
GLaD to see they're still alive ;-)
- donw 16y ago
  Why are you still posting when there's science to do?
- pilif 16y ago
  people downvoting this clearly miss the point of the original submissions title plus the references all over the linked article itself.
zitterbewegung 16y ago
I personally donated $3.14 it would be interesting to see how much people donated or more data like average donation etc...
- exception 16y ago
  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.
- xelfer 16y ago
  I found a tiny amount of USD in my paypal account left over from something (I'm not from the US) so I donated $5.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
nochiel 16y ago
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?
- Zakuzaa 16y ago
  I'd give them some time. They are not too sure about monetisation strategy so for them the best thing to do right now is not promise anything.
- pavs 16y ago
  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/ http://www.reddit.com/user/raldi/ is more open than others. http://www.reddit.com/user/jedberg http://www.reddit.com/user/jedberg & http://www.reddit.com/user/KeyserSosa 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.
palish 16y ago
Congrats. :) It's worth noting that this won't ever happen again, though. This was basically a one-time gain of $X. So hopefully they don't wind up back in this situation.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Sounds like they are already. Were going to use the money to hire a new guy, right? Instead, putting up a couple more servers. Or is that just the start?
kwyjibo 16y ago
So the newly acquired cash is dumped into amazon EC2 again...
- brown9-2 16y ago
  is there something wrong with this?
  - tlack 16y ago
    There is sentiment that Reddit's developers are too quick to adopt the latest me-too web technology which overall doesn't benefit them. So I think what he's implying is that it's money wasted on EC2 when a traditional server would be more cost effective. I tend to agree.
    - kwyjibo 16y ago
      In the last thread they said that they are spending over 250.000$ a year just in servers. They could save huge amounts of money if they would just switch to rented servers.
      - tlack 16y ago
        $250k? That's disturbing.
        kwyjibo 16y ago
        See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502171
  - rmc 16y ago
    Amazon EC2 is very cheap if you want to use a server for a few hours. However if you want a server for 1 year, then it's cheaper to buy a 1 year lease (i.e. your own server) than it is to rent it by the hour./

87 points by JesseAldridge 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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_was_a_triumph_tldr_thanks_everyone_for/ http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/cotz3/this_wa...
- exception 16y ago
  Maybe being able to buy virtual swag might be a better way to go for Reddit, in a similar fashion to Dungeons & Dragons Online. Tiny [icons] of narwhal tusks, lolcats or rashers of bacon that could appear next to your name could prove quite popular with the community. Similarly, being able to not only upvote, downvote, but also put a 'hex' on a comment I could see as being an amusing pastime. Not to mention, they already have the beginnings of an achievement system in place with the awards panel. I could see them greatly expanding that with quest style achievements; "posted 5 links", say, to earn /reddit/credits. I'm not sure how it would affect the community, but the revenue possibilities are endless.
mahmud 16y ago
That would be their undoing. The last thing egalitarian reddit needs is a class system. Or maybe I am wrong, Slashdot has been starring their paid subscribes for ages, but I am not sure reddit wants to stoop to slashdot levels.
- olefoo 16y ago
  Stoop to? I love reddit dearly, but there are some days when you could run it through. sed -e 's/narwal/Natalie Portman/' and get something that was recognizably slashdot circa 2002.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Depends on which section you read. I introduced my fiancee to /r/IAmA and she thinks reddit is mostly about child molesting drug-dealers who fly fighter-jets and rescue endangered species, because they were raised in a polygamist cult family living in the Everest base camp. To me it's mostly proggit, hastily scanned once every 1-2 days.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Considering all the old slashdot fans had to have gone somewhere, I wonder why...
- philwelch 16y ago
  /. has had editing problems, but the comment quality has not, to my experience, dipped that low. It's not as high as HN, but it hasn't dipped that low, either. HN and /. are on opposite ends of a spectrum--HN is what happens before the trolls arrive, given you seed the community well, and /. is what happens after the trolls leave.
  - btmorex 16y ago
    I always though the biggest problem with slashdot was that the moderation somehow lead to an extremely insular community. There was a prevailing "slashdot" opinion and that was pretty much the only opinion expressed in highly moderated comments. I was a reader for years and that's pretty much why I left. What's strange is that slashdot moderation isn't that different from any other site, but for whatever reason, I think it hurt slashdot far more than any other site. Maybe, it's just that by default not that many comments are displayed as opposed to reddit or hn, so it's all the more noticeable when the top 20 or so comments all are basically the same.
xelfer 16y ago
There is a 'lounge' subreddit that only donators can get into. I don't think they should treat people differently on the main part of reddit, it'll cause too many issues/arguments.

emlizhenta 16y ago

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 16y ago
They mentioned 6000 supporters.
- JesseAldridge 16y ago
  Out of 8 million active users. So 0.075% donated. About one donation per thousand users.
  - blhack 16y ago
    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.
    - jorgeortiz85 16y ago
      Most reddit users probably don't have accounts.
    - JesseAldridge 16y ago
      Hmm, good point. The 8 million number comes from the blog post. Maybe the vast majority of people who visit the site don't bother to create an account?
    - pavs 16y ago
      They had 8 million unique visitors in last month: http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/congratulations_reddit/c0u0pf3 http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c... 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&pxfid=1511 http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf... They didn't release the money amount yet because they are waiting for "confirmation" from higher up to reveal the numbers.

demoon 16y ago

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 16y ago
>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.
- m-photonic 16y ago
  >nobody really cares about youtube comments (they're mostly crap anyway) This is true for funny 30-second videos with millions of views and the like, but there are plenty of youtube videos on niche subjects that will never accumulate more than a few thousand views, all from like-minded people. The comment threads on these videos are a completely different matter.

brainlock 16y ago

GLaD to see they're still alive ;-)

donw 16y ago
Why are you still posting when there's science to do?
pilif 16y ago
people downvoting this clearly miss the point of the original submissions title plus the references all over the linked article itself.

zitterbewegung 16y ago

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

exception 16y ago
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.
xelfer 16y ago
I found a tiny amount of USD in my paypal account left over from something (I'm not from the US) so I donated $5.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

nochiel 16y ago

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?

Zakuzaa 16y ago
I'd give them some time. They are not too sure about monetisation strategy so for them the best thing to do right now is not promise anything.
pavs 16y ago
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/ http://www.reddit.com/user/raldi/ is more open than others. http://www.reddit.com/user/jedberg http://www.reddit.com/user/jedberg & http://www.reddit.com/user/KeyserSosa 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.

palish 16y ago

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 16y ago
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 16y ago

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

brown9-2 16y ago
is there something wrong with this?
- tlack 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      $250k? That's disturbing.
      - kwyjibo 16y ago
        See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502171 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502171
- rmc 16y ago
  Amazon EC2 is very cheap if you want to use a server for a few hours. However if you want a server for 1 year, then it's cheaper to buy a 1 year lease (i.e. your own server) than it is to rent it by the hour./