8 ms·
How reddit became reddit - the biggest smallest community online
- chaosmachine 16y agoIs that floating Posterous bar[1] on the bottom of the page new? Geocities used to do the exact same thing... [1] http://i.imgur.com/3JFeq.png http://i.imgur.com/3JFeq.png
- kn0thing 16y agoI believe so. That, or I've only noticed it in the last few days.
- solutionyogi 16y agoIf you are not logged in to Posterous, you would get this bar. I think it's a recent change.
- w1ntermute 16y agoJust hide it with a userscript - the element ID is "posterous_footerbar".
- blocke 16y agoAs a Posterous user this makes me cringe. This, the GoDaddy bar in the admin panel that can't be made to go away and the spammer "subscriber" I can't delete even though he's not an admin definately have cheapened the experience. And the worst part is I can't even pay to make it go away like I could with wordpress.com.
- davidmurphy 16y agoGod, that's horrendous. It certainly turns me off Posterous -- quite strongly. I simply cannot stand stuff like that.
- georgieporgie 16y ago> the next thing hundreds of thousands of people are spending their workday reading and participating in. ...is that really a good thing? I recently abandoned Reddit because I realized that keeping abreast of memes wasn't helping me accomplish my goals in life. Also, the illusory superiority thing gets hard to take. At least on HN it's more restricted to start-up vs. big-co and open vs MS, which I can take in stride. :-)
- kn0thing 16y agoI always hoped /r/startups would take off as a complement to Hacker News, but I'm the first to admit this is my #2 destination after reddit (though sometimes its #1). Hacker News is the best kind of distraction because it feels productive. Mmmm... Hacker News...
- mkr-hn 16y agoThat reddit will never take off because "startup" is not a common a word outside the Silicon Valley social bubble. http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/
- ryanwaggoner 16y agoI doubt that has anything to do with it.../r/startups has more subscribers than /r/Entrepreneur does... http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mkr-hn 16y agoA lot of reddits fizzle out. There's no mechanism that removes people from a reddit, so it could appear a reddit is lively if you only look at subscriber count. People post stories, but there's very little discussion. It looks like both reddits are dead.
- citricsquid 16y ago"If users see how much the staff cares, they'll care too." I don't think that's right, I think if users see how much the staff want the same things as the users, then they'll care. I'm sure the Digg staff cared about the success of Digg, but it didn't match what the users wanted so they lost interest.
- kn0thing 16y agoNo doubt. But I mean 'care' in the touchy-feely sense of the word. Maybe there was someone there who obsessed over creating those 'magical' moments for users, but I can't say I've heard too many anecdotes about that.
- citricsquid 16y agoI read it back and realised I misunderstood what you meant, understanding it as being about the "magical moments" what you said makes sense, I was looking it as you meant caring about what all users want, not what individuals with support requests get. In hindsight I have no idea how I came to that conclusion, the previous section makes it clear :-)
- staunch 16y agoReddit surrendered almost complete control to the community. It led to some pretty amazing emergent behavior, but it had a very high price. Today the site is far more 4chan and much less Reddit circa 2006. I think Reddit is kind of a brilliant failure. It's huge and impressive now, but so much more shallow and flawed than it could have been.
- zacharycohn 16y agoMake Reddit a meaningful/useful/productive experience requires some work and some self control. When I realized that I was wasting a lot of time on useless things on Reddit, I removed most of the default sub-reddits from my profile (Pics, WTF, funny, etc), and added dramatically smaller subreddits (AndroidDev, Seattle, Parkour). Now my experience is useful and tailored extensively to my interests, and I don't waste time looking at funny pictures of cats. The default setup in Reddit is based around appealing to what a large number of users want - entertainment.
- kn0thing 16y agoTaken in aggregate, I agree. But take a look at this reddit, for instance: http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/ http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/ There are deep ends to this very big pool that is reddit. Plenty of kiddy-sections, too, where the water is warm and attention spans are short. e.g., Free endorphins! http://aww.reddit.com http://aww.reddit.com
- blhack 16y agoDon't forget about: http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit/ http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit/
- steveklabnik 16y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub http://www.reddit.com/r/depthhub too
- alexophile 16y ago/r/ is, I think, the defining quality of reddit - it's a very elegant solution to the (x) is turning into (y) problem. /r/truereddit is already a pretty strong contingent of people pining for 06 reddit. But when all the cool redditors start hanging out on /r/truereddit, it will be choked with complaints that it's becoming like vanilla reddit. And thus, http://www.reddit.com/r/truetruereddit http://www.reddit.com/r/truetruereddit
- yakto 16y ago> "I wish more people would listen to me when I suggest copying the reddit "hotness" algorithim & commenting system" We did with Yak, which has many features of Reddit plus several original ones and different positioning. Agree that hotness and un-sucky comment surfacing are the "secret sauce" of Reddit. Not quite ready to open the doors, but taking emails at http://yak.to http://yak.to
- kn0thing 16y agoHurray! Tweeting about ya.
- jedberg 16y agoHey there. Can I get my invite code now? :)
- yakto 16y agoGimme 48 hours, then you and Alexis are in first, I promise.
- trafficlight 16y agoI wouldn't mind an invite, if you have a few extra laying around.
- rms 16y ago
- heed 16y agoWhile I agree the users are in control for the most part, I can't help but think of one issue that pushed Steve and Alexi toward leaving reddit, that is, the censorship during the Sears debacle. I think there have been other cases where Conde Nast had to step in and lay down the law as well.
- trustfundbaby 16y agoSeeing the evolution of reddit in screenshots was simply awesome. http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html http://reddit.blogspot.com/2006/12/time-machine.html
- Bossman 16y agoReddit is interesting. There's a lot of crap there now and memes are way too frequent. However, there are still some great and high-quality subreddits. I've improved my browsing experience there by removing popular reddits like /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/politics, etc. Then I added new ones like /r/askscience, /r/space, and /r/worldnews. That's the best thing about the site. You don't like a community, just remove it or don't join.
- naner 16y agoThe site continues to be useful to many people primarily because of subreddits. I still remember when subreddits were first introduced. All the users were certain this was a bad idea and that reddit should have implemented tagging instead. Now nobody mentions tagging. And most people don't remember reddit without subreddits. And PG got impatient and created HN because this feature wasn't available fast enough. :P
- jamesteow 16y agoI don't see why tagging is a bad thing. It essentially allows sub-Reddits to still exist while providing people an opportunity to submit content to multiple relevant topics.
- naner 16y agoSubreddits allow curation by group and group-specific discussions instead of classification en masse. It also allows private (you have to apply for membership/not publicly viewable) groups and community-specific discussions. There are different subreddits for 'programming', 'compsci', and 'python' for example. For a link relevant to all three it isn't always desirable to have a giant group discussion. Similarly, there are subreddits for 'science', 'askscience', 'softscience', 'sciencepolicy', etc. All which might have articles that, if reddit had tagging, would be tagged for science. And there's like 50 different subreddits about smoking weed. All serving different communities. Or maybe they just forgot where the pot smoking subreddit was so they keep creating new ones. The point is, tags would be all inclusive. Crossposting isn't really a problem and is often desired. You can see all discussions related to a link by clicking on the "other discussions" tab when viewing the comments.
- jamesteow 16y agoI completely agree that the group-specific discussion is pretty useful. I slightly disagree about crossposting not being a problem. On major issues that populate multiple Reddits, it gets cumbersome to see the same headline used on multiple Reddits, such as say Reddit.com/WorldNews/News. It's the only way to get around the lack of a tagging system. How does one choose which discussion to follow? It's easier for me to look at comments in one 'thread' about one incident or specific story rather than four or more, especially when the same arguments/observations are made. On AskReddit, people post a lot of questions that should be in other subreddits but it's still upvoted anyway. Some do this because the applicable subreddit's aren't discoverable and so they don't know they exist. Others do it because AskReddit has such a vast number of subscribers more than the related sub-reddits. With tagging, it's also easier to discover new communities/tags. How do I discover a new Reddit outside of hearing some person in the comments talk about something? With tagging it's clear as day.
- bitwize 16y agoBy scraping off the top end (intelligence-wise) of 4chan, that's how.)