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Big Reddit Changes Coming? Conde Nast Purchases 285 Reddit Domain Names
- ary 15y ago> If you did not have specific plans for 285 domain names (which would cost over $2200 to register for one year), you normally would not purchase them. Clearly the author has never worked with a content company on the web (writing for a blog aside). This kind of thing happens all the time. Purchasing domain name permutations related to your brand en masse is still usually cheaper than going through the legal process of taking ownership from another party.
- p4bl0 15y agoI agree. $2200 is close to nothing for a company as big as Condé Nast. And it's certainly less than what a lawyer would cost to try to get back one of these domains.
- hugh3 15y agoAlso, it's hard to imagine that they could possibly have specific plans for 285 domain names ranging from zenreddit.com to redditsex.com. Oh, and my personal favourite, redditthe.com
- InclinedPlane 15y agoYeah... there's a disconnect here between the idea of "big plans" and spending $2200. The latter is not a particularly large expenditure, representing maybe a week or less of dev. time including all overhead.
- replicatorblog 15y agoTo put it in perspective $2200 would be 3.5 billable hours from our IP attorney. Spending this small sum up front could save $500K in legal fees (assuming it only took 3.5 hours to reclaim a squatted domain legally).
- saalweachter 15y agoDidn't Reddit drop down to one developer sometime recently? If "something big" is coming -- involving 285 domain names -- I would hate to be that one developer.
- traldan 15y agoI seem to recall reading they actually hired people recently, or were in the process of doing so.
- mrkurt 15y agoSounds like someone at CN found a new domain registration toy...
- raldi 15y agoThis is a good example of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons. Big things are indeed coming for reddit, but it has a lot more to do with Conde Nast finally investing some money in personnel than the fact that they registered redditgreen.com and redditblue.com. http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/
- kn0thing 15y agoThis.
- jcitme 15y agoI find this rather amusing, that kn0thing would make a post that's essentially the scourge of reddit. Are the reddit admins trying their hand at being a hipster, and /ironically/ posting this? :)
- raldi 15y agoIt's okay when the replier is, in some way, an authority on the subject at hand. As in, "I, a cofounder of the site this person is talking about, hereby endorse his position." Nobody cares if it's just, "I, as some random person on the Internet, endorse his position."
- skeletonjelly 15y agoWhy say in many words what could be said in one. I mean ah.. Agreed. :P The information density is in kn0thing's username, the comment was merely a nod of the head.
- lurker19 15y agoI dunno. Redditblue.com sounds like something that could finally make Reddit a really profitable enterprise.
- languagehacker 15y agoThis is a brand protection move, pure and simple. Easier to throw money at it now than to waste a retained lawyer's time writing cease and desist letters later.
- gojomo 15y agoPerhaps they got some (dubious?) SEO advice suggesting that splitting subreddits over more registered names would improve their serch rankings and ad rates?
- itg 15y agoI know the phrase "reddit has become worse over time" is pretty much a meme here on hn but wow has that website been extremely bad as of late. Nothing but rage comics and pictures of pets, and some trolling. Probably a combination of more and more people plus summer vacation for the kids who have too much time on their hands.
- gomer 15y agoEverything is broken into subreddits on reddit and if you learn to select the subreddits that interest you instead of just reading the "rage comic" and "pet picture" subreddits it might be of more interest.
- farnsworth 15y agoAgreed. My mix of subreddits is article heavy and awesome. I'm always a little surprised when I find myself logged off on the default front page - about 85% imgur links at least.
- jokermatt999 15y agoRage comics, advice animals, scumbag x, etc have bled over into virtually every subreddit now. It's basically part of reddit's culture. I've said it before, but you can unsubscribe from a subreddit, but you can't unsubscribe from a culture.
- farnsworth 15y agoThere are many subreddits where posts/comments along those lines get downvoted hard.
- mindcrime 15y agoI haven't seen that at all on the sub-reddits I frequent. Maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough, but I still find /r/machinelearning, /r/semanticweb, /r/compscipapers, /r/csbooks, etc. to be very useful.
- Legion 15y ago
- bproper 15y agoThis isn't a big move, it's just good houskeeping. First it was hiring developers. Now this, which helps them with SEO, possibly using all these sites as redirects to sub-reddits. http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/02/conde-nast-has-big-plans-for-reddit-goes-on-domain-shopping-spree/ http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/02/conde-nast-has-big-plans-...
- zitterbewegung 15y agoI bet they are registering the subreddit domains to have them redirect to the subreddits. All of them seem like pretty established subreddits. Perhaps they want the subreddits to function more like stand alone websites?
- ChuckFrank 15y agoVertical (ie. reddit___.com or _____reddit.com) and Horizontal (ie raddit.com riddit.com etc.) domain securing is standard practice. It does not necessarily mean that those market will be actively brought online, instead it means that those markets will be unavailable for pirates and coat tail surfers. However, it's always fascinating to see these little tactical moves on the part of larger companies.
- hyperbovine 15y agoIt speaks volumes that Conde Nast spending $2200 on Reddit is enough to generate headlines.
- dreamdu5t 15y agoHow about paying for proper server resources? I mean fuck... it's down every day multiple times.
- raldi 15y agoIt's not the servers' fault. Even Google would have terrible uptime if they only had five engineers -- regardless of how many servers they had.
- dreamdu5t 15y agoNot in the case of Reddit? As far as I know, Reddit's main issue is constant 502 errors/requests timing out, which to my knowledge would indicate they constantly hit the limits of their webservers or don't understand how to load balance.
- raldi 15y agoIndeed, they're hitting the limits of their webservers. But they already have the most powerful servers EC2 provides. So they have three options: * Move to a new provider * Change the way things work so that the job can be spread across more servers * Fix suboptimal things All three of those options are extremely difficult to do quickly with a skeleton crew. Reddit's been improving scalability as fast as 3-4 engineers can, but their traffic is growing even faster.
- daniel-cussen 15y agoReddit may be doing better than any of the other businesses that company owns.
- mrerrormessage 15y agoAssuming it did cost them $2300, that would have only been about 1% of color.com. They got a steal.
- ck2 15y agoDefensive registrations, other than very common typos are silly. You can never, ever, register all the variations and new TLDs come out every year. In this day and age, users are not quite that stupid and all modern browsers have phishing site checks built in.