22 ms·

Reddit traffic doubles in less than a year, to 2 billion monthly pageviews

251 points by raldi 15y ago

leak 15y ago
That's incredible. Congrats!! :) Are we allowed to ask how/if they're making money?
- tokenadult 15y ago
  Yes, how many of those eyeball visits produce revenue, and does the company have actual earnings (profits)?
  - pdenya 15y ago
    Reddit has sponsored links paid by CPM so all eyeballs account for some revenue. I don't have any info on profit but between the ads, reddit gold and schwag i'd guess they're in the black.
    - baq 15y ago
      i guess so too, but not by a huge margin. reddit must be on the very top of visitors/sysadmins ranking.
- fletchowns 15y ago
  I'm guessing they are making money (ads & reddit gold) since they have been able to make a few hires recently. Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.
  - mattgreenrocks 15y ago
    Reddit is the new Digg. Groupthink on an epic scale, linkbait headlines, and hordes of people that want to feel angry about things so they can at least feel something. (Just like old media!) Now, there is some good content on there, but there's way too much crap to wade through in order to find it.
    - cryptoz 15y ago
      Former and active NASA engineers hang out in r/space sometimes. r/askscience is full of incredible questions and smart answers. r/science recently started enforcing stricter standards and now has plenty of amazing discussion and knowledge moving around. r/physics is the same. It all depends on where you go, and I strongly disagree that finding those places is difficult.
      - 27182818284 15y ago
        This is a good point, you just have to leave the mainpageish universe completely. /r/linguistics has interesting stuff. Similarly the subreddit for creating your own language is also neat, but these are niche, small reddits. The big reddits have been taken over by group think and are difficult to read and often boring.
        baq 15y ago
        everybody who's been on usenet for a nontrivial amount of time has experienced exactly what you describe, several times. expecting reddit to be different is like hoping for world peace. you should instead assume that degradation of quality will naturally happen as a community forum becomes more popular and either introduce moderation or fork off a smaller forum... and both of those happen, as you noticed. this comment may be misplaced, but i've finally entered rant mode after reading the 5th or so comment saying "reddit is popular hence degrades" and misses (or stops short of) the point that all communities degrade with increase of their popularity - every now and then somebody writes that hacker news is not what it used to be.
        mattgreenrocks 15y ago
        A lot of the quality degradation stems from the mistaken idea that everyone has something of value to contribute. They don't. Discussion often involves a handful of quality posts, and then a bunch of "I agree"'s clogging it up. Posts that don't add to the discussion should be moderated, or, at the very least, targeted for downvotes. Of course, it'd be tough to gain traction with users who believe their karma score matters. Better to hide it from them completely and indicate scores in another way.
  - leak 15y ago
    Was money the problem before for hiring or the lack of support from the parent company (Conde Nast)? I don't know if they suddenly made more money and as a result were able to hire. Edit: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have-another.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have...
    - jasonlotito 15y ago
      Unless they are lying, the impression I got was that the issue was money, and that things like Gold Members directly impacted their ability to hire.
      - raldi 15y ago
        In July 2010, some yutz who used to work there said that Conde Nast likes to "allocate resources proportionate to revenue." http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
        jasonlotito 15y ago
        Exactly my point. The issue was revenue (and, of course, the parent company). But, with more revenue, came more support.
  - patrickod 15y ago
    Unfortunately the degradation of community and content is one of the issues that is associated with scale. I personally think reddit has done a much better job at staying off the decline than digg did. I'll be interested to see how things progress as their traffic numbers continue (presumably) to rise.
    - kmfrk 15y ago
      Is there a consensus about what caused the decline of Digg? I thought it had a lot to do with the redesign that couldn't be reverted, but I don't like to peddle hearsay and assumptions like it's the truth, especially since I never used Digg.
      - patrickod 15y ago
        IIRC the redesign was the final straw for many users and caused the mass-exodus. I think the functionality of subreddits and the ability to completely ignore the "mainstream content" if you so wish has been the main feature that has helped reddit stop the decline.
        AtTheLast 15y ago
        Subreddits are what will keep Reddit strong. Even though Reddit has tons of members, subreddits make it feel much smaller and personal.
      - recursive 15y ago
        I know they suffered a big drop when it came out that they were manually curating the links on their front page. I don't remember the details, but that's what did it for me.
  - ama 15y ago
    There is few good reddits with good/decent moderation (deleting silly memes and off topic comments, /r/AskScience , /r/fitness and /r/DepthHub/ comes to mind).
  - kmfrk 15y ago
    The reddit admins have made a policy out of basically never intervening on the site - how ever egregious the transgressions are - so the inmates have slowly taken over the asylum. There's also something to be learnt about this on HN. :) I think reddit as more of a platform than a community at this point aside from the hivemind and reddit memes going on there. I'm sure it's still an interesting place to create your own subreddit, if you have the time to moderate it (although you can't IP nor e-mail ban people from it).
    - icebraining 15y ago
      Well, they did shutdown r/jailbait for "threatening the structural integrity of the greater reddit community."
      - kmfrk 15y ago
        They shut it down because it had child porn. Not "very young girls", but literally de jure child porn.
        icebraining 15y ago
        It always did, and it always got deleted and the people were banned. The problem wasn't just the content, but the fact that some people took over the mods in a "coup" and were trying to fuck it up. Of course the CP wasn't deleted and they had to act. They still could've deleted just the CP and restored the mods, but considering they had already moved to r/teen_girls, that probably wouldn't make much sense.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - alex_c 15y ago
      I know, I know, "things were better back in the day", but the Reddification of Reddit has really accelerated over the past year and a bit. Between rage comics, advice animals, and the Atheism subreddit, the default front page is a very different place than it was a year(?) ago. There is still a lot of value in the smaller subreddits, and that's really Reddit's saving grace. As a whole, however, the site is pretty cringe-worthy.
raldi 15y ago
To put that in perspective, Flickr is at 1.5B. LinkedIn, 2.7B. Edit: I'd like to go on record with a bet that by the end of the year, reddit will get more traffic than LinkedIn (which currently has a market cap in excess of $6,000,000,000). Anyone want to bet against me? https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiCqWFxzxR https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiC...
- pdenya 15y ago
  It wouldn't be surprising, the reddit community is growing quickly and I expect linkedin has a lower pages/visit than reddit.
- jonknee 15y ago
  LinkedIn's audience/traffic is far more valuable though, so I'm not sure why you added the bit about their market cap. Reddit users by and large are there for entertainment and don't click on ads. LinkedIn's users are there for work and by and large are the ads.
  - raldi 15y ago
    Reddit doesn't discuss profitability, but note that the Cheezburger Network has been profitable since inception: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857411 If they can make money off ads, what makes you think reddit can't?
    - jonknee 15y ago
      No one said reddit lacks any revenue. Comparing LNKD's market cap to reddit based on page views is what I took exception to--they're in no way related.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      I think the culture of a community can be a powerful force against earning money from ads. Here's a sample of why Reddit may be earning less than it should: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/mour1/4_books_for_learning_to_design_the_hard_way/c32pgh1?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/mour1/4_books_f... (disclaimer - that comment is on my own link and made me bitter unfortunately)
danso 15y ago
Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign up. We don’t harass users to invite their friends. We don’t pester you to download our app. We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks. We don't know anything about SEO. We don't integrate with Facebook. We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.
- ig1 15y ago
  If you're one of the 3-5 sites a user goes to everyday, you have a completely different set of rules from everyone else
  - sjs 15y ago
    Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base like everyone else.
    - blangblang 15y ago
      Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base in a manner unlike everyone else. FTFY.
      - sjs 15y ago
        Poor wording on my part. What I meant is that they too had to build a user base from nothing.
- rudiger 15y ago
  Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.
rbranson 15y ago
It would be really cool to see an architecture update post from them regarding where they are now and where they want to go. Pretty please? :)
- astrodust 15y ago
  It's still in shambles and probably serves as an example of how not to host your site. Amazon is causing me all kinds of grief lately and their AWS customer support is the worst in the industry, useless to the point of comedy.
Adaptive 15y ago
Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt. I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.
- astrodust 15y ago
  If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up. Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.
  - Adaptive 15y ago
    Yeah, I wasn't referring to the quality problem (I'm in full agreement with you on that). I think they are in a better position that Digg at the Digg-bar point (even with low qual participation, engagement still seems deeper than Digg at that time), but the quality is decidedly Eternal September (lower, really). This is a movie plot. Seriously. Condé Nast is the government. They are largely incompetent and mostly concerned about political infighting and palace intrigues. The reddit team is the hodge podge group of geeks that happened to be (insert constrained environment here): * on a cruise ship with the worlds top nuclear scientists (and a bomb!) * touring an underground viral research facility on a school outing during which there is a "containment breach!" * orbiting earth in an experimental space plane they built in their barn when the entire GPS sat system FAILS! The government (condé nast) can do nothing to assist them other than sit uncomfortably on the edge of their chairs, wrinkling their expensive suits, waiting to see if our intrepid developers succeed. Unlike a Hollywood production, however, we don't know if this plot has a happy ending. I'm rooting for our plucky team, but the clock is ticking. Tick. Tock. (I'll leave the rest of you to imagine the movie poster)
    - astrodust 15y ago
      If you don't weed out your counter-productive citizens you end up with Digg. If you do, if you keep it tight, you might be lucky enough to have a metafilter.com which after a decade is still an amazing place. Strangely, Something Awful is actually a great model for a community. A great case-study in how to keep a community from imploding.
revorad 15y ago
The most surprising figure to me is that 65% traffic is from the United States. I think for a lot of the biggest sites, that number is much lower and going down.
xxiao 15y ago
was getting tired of digg in the past, esp when its boss sometimes was shown as the headline there for no reason... nice to see reddit is making it.
joshklein 15y ago
Congrats to our local HN'er kn0thing and everybody else at Reddit. 2B is quite an achievement. Regarding below questions about the business side of Reddit, see the previous conversation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
giberson 15y ago
I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com (the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random assortment of stuff I didn't care about. Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/<things I actually care about>. Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits multiple times every day. I no longer subscribe to the main reddit feed. So, for things in store for 2012, you absolutely must focus on "help new users better understand the way reddit works". In addition, if I were in charge of reddit for a day, I'd get rid of the reddit main page aggregation and instead replace it with a word cloud and the heading "Pick a topic that interests you to visit that sub-reddit for valuable discussion and content". Because, on the whole, the main reddit feed devalues the entire site with slop. edit: removed misleading line.
- wisty 15y ago
  You do know you can unsubscribe to the main page, and the other default subscriptions, so your main page is entirely business, world news, programming, and Doctor Who, right?
  - giberson 15y ago
    I know that now. I'm saying I didn't know that then, I didn't know then, that there were even sub-reddits. It wasn't until I did discover those facts that I became a reddit frequenter.
  - Tuckerism 15y ago
    I think the parent is referring to encouraging lurkers/first-time viewers to creating an account to do just that. Reddit is something that can push a lot of people away right at the get go with it's default subs (/r/atheism & /r/politics are polarizing, /r/pics can make the site look childish, etc)
  - jjcm 15y ago
    You can also just bookmark aggregate subreddits, and visit those. Example: http://www.reddit.com/r/hacks+android+iphone+webdev+startups+mylittlepony http://www.reddit.com/r/hacks+android+iphone+webdev+startups...
jebblue 15y ago
One of their sub sites uses the "f" bomb, not a very professional way to operate a company.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  One? I suppose you are aware of /r/gonewild for starters
  - icebraining 15y ago
    gonewild? r/teen_girls r/picsofdeadkids (yes, it's what it advertises) r/DeadPeople r/rape r/incest Basically, everything moderated by violentacrez: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/violentacrez http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/violentacrez
psawaya 15y ago
I admit that it's hard to measure this in an absolute way (and I agree pageviews is a flawed metric), but I submit that in two years, reddit will be as popular as Twitter is now.
andrewhillman 15y ago
I guess this answers my question to how badly reddit crushed digg.
- ch0wn 15y ago
  Here is another nice view of that: http://gs.statcounter.com/#digg_vs_reddit-ww-monthly-200905-201112 http://gs.statcounter.com/#digg_vs_reddit-ww-monthly-200905-...
iamandrus 15y ago
Reddit's growth has been amazing. It gets a lot of hate because of users reposting content without giving credit, but it really is an amazing site. I used to search Google endlessly for sites to get, for example, help on video games or services for video games, but now I think, "Well, I'll just check out their subreddit and see if anyone else has this problem." It's great for news and breaking stories. Sometimes I see it on reddit before I even see it breaking on Twitter. I think Conde Nast did a good job as well in not fucking it up for the site. They let the owners do their own thing and let the site grow (an action I really wish other large companies would take when acquiring startups) instead of forcing them to put annoying ads all over or other stupid things. However, I wish reddit would make it easier for users to find features and generally understand the site. I'm still finding useful features that have been hidden in the software. I thank the reddit staff for their amazing work and hope that they keep it up. :)
ngokevin 15y ago
Could this have something to do with the quality being halved?
marvin 15y ago
I love the reddit community, and I've been an active member for almost 6 years now. Congratulations to the reddit team for building a huge, diverse and successful community. However, I think that this latest stage of growth brings a lot of problems. The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years. It's what someone said about groupthink - downvoting or posting a quick, hostile reply to something you disagree with is much easier than actually articulating why you disagree. There is a lot of hating and lots of personal attacks instead of honest discussion. I've been thinking about this for a bit. As an outsider it seems a lot like an up-scaled version of American society. Reddit used to be a relatively homogenuous group of people, but is now _very_ heterogenous, in the same way the US is. The problem is that reddit doesn't have the custom of politely avoiding contentious topics in the public space. So you end up getting mens' rights activists and militant feminists yelling at each other, Christians and atheists, racists and minorities etc. I think this problem is only going to keep growing. Reddit has survived a long time, but this is a fundamental issue which is more about keeping an open mind and being tolerant of differences of opinion. It has more to do with societal conditioning than technology. It's a great example of what happens when you put radically different people within shouting distance of each other without traditional common courtesy to moderate things. Like I said, I've been on Reddit for almost 6 years, but things are getting pretty bad. Almost every single time something that is considered controversial by any group is posted, there are multiple aggressive comments...which are upvoted if they are formulated in a sufficiently assertive way. The community is moving away from rational discourse, to a more traditional extroverts-first system where being loud and assuming that your opponent is wrong gets more recognition.
- fossuser 15y ago
  I feel like that move happened a few years ago. I thought the people who still frequent reddit primarily visit the smaller higher quality subreddits that are more reminiscent of how the site used to be.
- swombat 15y ago
  The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years. On the contrary, I think the groupthink was much more obvious before they started policing the subreddits more closely in the last year. It used to be that /r/business was the most anti-business place on the web - any post that was positive about business would get instantly downvoted to oblivion, in favour of posts decrying how businesses were exploiting individuals and the government in various ways. Then they split it up into multiple sub-sub-reddits, and now /business is actually a sensible place to read stuff about business.
kaonashi 15y ago
No wonder the comment section now competes with YouTube for most inane on the net.
rmc 15y ago
I sorta wish the title added the (YCXX) tag (which was YC05 IIRC ?)
losethos 15y ago
http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-torture-of-the-highest-form/ http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-tortur...

251 points by raldi 15y ago

leak 15y ago

That's incredible. Congrats!! :) Are we allowed to ask how/if they're making money?

tokenadult 15y ago
Yes, how many of those eyeball visits produce revenue, and does the company have actual earnings (profits)?
- pdenya 15y ago
  Reddit has sponsored links paid by CPM so all eyeballs account for some revenue. I don't have any info on profit but between the ads, reddit gold and schwag i'd guess they're in the black.
  - baq 15y ago
    i guess so too, but not by a huge margin. reddit must be on the very top of visitors/sysadmins ranking.
fletchowns 15y ago
I'm guessing they are making money (ads & reddit gold) since they have been able to make a few hires recently. Unfortunately the overall quality of content on reddit has really gone downhill. Even after unsubscribing to the subreddits that were the worst offenders, it's really hard to find interesting stuff with meaningful discussions. These days I'm almost embarrassed to tell people I use reddit.
- mattgreenrocks 15y ago
  Reddit is the new Digg. Groupthink on an epic scale, linkbait headlines, and hordes of people that want to feel angry about things so they can at least feel something. (Just like old media!) Now, there is some good content on there, but there's way too much crap to wade through in order to find it.
  - cryptoz 15y ago
    Former and active NASA engineers hang out in r/space sometimes. r/askscience is full of incredible questions and smart answers. r/science recently started enforcing stricter standards and now has plenty of amazing discussion and knowledge moving around. r/physics is the same. It all depends on where you go, and I strongly disagree that finding those places is difficult.
    - 27182818284 15y ago
      This is a good point, you just have to leave the mainpageish universe completely. /r/linguistics has interesting stuff. Similarly the subreddit for creating your own language is also neat, but these are niche, small reddits. The big reddits have been taken over by group think and are difficult to read and often boring.
      - baq 15y ago
        everybody who's been on usenet for a nontrivial amount of time has experienced exactly what you describe, several times. expecting reddit to be different is like hoping for world peace. you should instead assume that degradation of quality will naturally happen as a community forum becomes more popular and either introduce moderation or fork off a smaller forum... and both of those happen, as you noticed. this comment may be misplaced, but i've finally entered rant mode after reading the 5th or so comment saying "reddit is popular hence degrades" and misses (or stops short of) the point that all communities degrade with increase of their popularity - every now and then somebody writes that hacker news is not what it used to be.
        mattgreenrocks 15y ago
        A lot of the quality degradation stems from the mistaken idea that everyone has something of value to contribute. They don't. Discussion often involves a handful of quality posts, and then a bunch of "I agree"'s clogging it up. Posts that don't add to the discussion should be moderated, or, at the very least, targeted for downvotes. Of course, it'd be tough to gain traction with users who believe their karma score matters. Better to hide it from them completely and indicate scores in another way.
- leak 15y ago
  Was money the problem before for hiring or the lack of support from the parent company (Conde Nast)? I don't know if they suddenly made more money and as a result were able to hire. Edit: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have-another.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have...
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    Unless they are lying, the impression I got was that the issue was money, and that things like Gold Members directly impacted their ability to hire.
    - raldi 15y ago
      In July 2010, some yutz who used to work there said that Conde Nast likes to "allocate resources proportionate to revenue." http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
      - jasonlotito 15y ago
        Exactly my point. The issue was revenue (and, of course, the parent company). But, with more revenue, came more support.
- patrickod 15y ago
  Unfortunately the degradation of community and content is one of the issues that is associated with scale. I personally think reddit has done a much better job at staying off the decline than digg did. I'll be interested to see how things progress as their traffic numbers continue (presumably) to rise.
  - kmfrk 15y ago
    Is there a consensus about what caused the decline of Digg? I thought it had a lot to do with the redesign that couldn't be reverted, but I don't like to peddle hearsay and assumptions like it's the truth, especially since I never used Digg.
    - patrickod 15y ago
      IIRC the redesign was the final straw for many users and caused the mass-exodus. I think the functionality of subreddits and the ability to completely ignore the "mainstream content" if you so wish has been the main feature that has helped reddit stop the decline.
      - AtTheLast 15y ago
        Subreddits are what will keep Reddit strong. Even though Reddit has tons of members, subreddits make it feel much smaller and personal.
    - recursive 15y ago
      I know they suffered a big drop when it came out that they were manually curating the links on their front page. I don't remember the details, but that's what did it for me.
- ama 15y ago
  There is few good reddits with good/decent moderation (deleting silly memes and off topic comments, /r/AskScience , /r/fitness and /r/DepthHub/ comes to mind).
- kmfrk 15y ago
  The reddit admins have made a policy out of basically never intervening on the site - how ever egregious the transgressions are - so the inmates have slowly taken over the asylum. There's also something to be learnt about this on HN. :) I think reddit as more of a platform than a community at this point aside from the hivemind and reddit memes going on there. I'm sure it's still an interesting place to create your own subreddit, if you have the time to moderate it (although you can't IP nor e-mail ban people from it).
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Well, they did shutdown r/jailbait for "threatening the structural integrity of the greater reddit community."
    - kmfrk 15y ago
      They shut it down because it had child porn. Not "very young girls", but literally de jure child porn.
      - icebraining 15y ago
        It always did, and it always got deleted and the people were banned. The problem wasn't just the content, but the fact that some people took over the mods in a "coup" and were trying to fuck it up. Of course the CP wasn't deleted and they had to act. They still could've deleted just the CP and restored the mods, but considering they had already moved to r/teen_girls, that probably wouldn't make much sense.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - alex_c 15y ago
    I know, I know, "things were better back in the day", but the Reddification of Reddit has really accelerated over the past year and a bit. Between rage comics, advice animals, and the Atheism subreddit, the default front page is a very different place than it was a year(?) ago. There is still a lot of value in the smaller subreddits, and that's really Reddit's saving grace. As a whole, however, the site is pretty cringe-worthy.

raldi 15y ago

To put that in perspective, Flickr is at 1.5B. LinkedIn, 2.7B. Edit: I'd like to go on record with a bet that by the end of the year, reddit will get more traffic than LinkedIn (which currently has a market cap in excess of $6,000,000,000). Anyone want to bet against me? https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiCqWFxzxR https://plus.google.com/u/1/109191382354704910211/posts/ZRiC...

pdenya 15y ago
It wouldn't be surprising, the reddit community is growing quickly and I expect linkedin has a lower pages/visit than reddit.
jonknee 15y ago
LinkedIn's audience/traffic is far more valuable though, so I'm not sure why you added the bit about their market cap. Reddit users by and large are there for entertainment and don't click on ads. LinkedIn's users are there for work and by and large are the ads.
- raldi 15y ago
  Reddit doesn't discuss profitability, but note that the Cheezburger Network has been profitable since inception: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857411 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1857411 If they can make money off ads, what makes you think reddit can't?
  - jonknee 15y ago
    No one said reddit lacks any revenue. Comparing LNKD's market cap to reddit based on page views is what I took exception to--they're in no way related.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    I think the culture of a community can be a powerful force against earning money from ads. Here's a sample of why Reddit may be earning less than it should: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/mour1/4_books_for_learning_to_design_the_hard_way/c32pgh1?context=3 http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/mour1/4_books_f... (disclaimer - that comment is on my own link and made me bitter unfortunately)

danso 15y ago

Whatever you think of @reddit's march towards decline...this was my favorite part of the blog post...and something I hope rings with other popular sites: Here’s a list of things we don’t (and won’t) do for traffic: We don't get traffic through ads. We don’t participate in any traffic trading. We don’t email our users (unless they choose to enter an email and then forget their password). We don’t harass users to sign up. We don’t harass users to invite their friends. We don’t pester you to download our app. We don’t use slideshows and other pageview gimmicks. We don't know anything about SEO. We don't integrate with Facebook. We don't even link to our Facebook or twitter accounts.

ig1 15y ago
If you're one of the 3-5 sites a user goes to everyday, you have a completely different set of rules from everyone else
- sjs 15y ago
  Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base like everyone else.
  - blangblang 15y ago
    Reddit didn't appear out of the ether as one of those sites. They built a user base in a manner unlike everyone else. FTFY.
    - sjs 15y ago
      Poor wording on my part. What I meant is that they too had to build a user base from nothing.
rudiger 15y ago
Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.

rbranson 15y ago

It would be really cool to see an architecture update post from them regarding where they are now and where they want to go. Pretty please? :)

astrodust 15y ago
It's still in shambles and probably serves as an example of how not to host your site. Amazon is causing me all kinds of grief lately and their AWS customer support is the worst in the industry, useless to the point of comedy.

Adaptive 15y ago

Condé Nast had no idea what they were buying. The best decision they made, one I'm sure that was the result of the Reddit team making the case for it, was relatively hands off mgmt. I suspect CN still doesn't really know what to do with it other than sit back and not screw it up.

astrodust 15y ago
If you don't actively unscrew it up, it will screw itself up. Reddit is already in steep decline even though page-views are up. It's attracting a different crowd now. They're just one Digg-bar moment away from disaster.
- Adaptive 15y ago
  Yeah, I wasn't referring to the quality problem (I'm in full agreement with you on that). I think they are in a better position that Digg at the Digg-bar point (even with low qual participation, engagement still seems deeper than Digg at that time), but the quality is decidedly Eternal September (lower, really). This is a movie plot. Seriously. Condé Nast is the government. They are largely incompetent and mostly concerned about political infighting and palace intrigues. The reddit team is the hodge podge group of geeks that happened to be (insert constrained environment here): * on a cruise ship with the worlds top nuclear scientists (and a bomb!) * touring an underground viral research facility on a school outing during which there is a "containment breach!" * orbiting earth in an experimental space plane they built in their barn when the entire GPS sat system FAILS! The government (condé nast) can do nothing to assist them other than sit uncomfortably on the edge of their chairs, wrinkling their expensive suits, waiting to see if our intrepid developers succeed. Unlike a Hollywood production, however, we don't know if this plot has a happy ending. I'm rooting for our plucky team, but the clock is ticking. Tick. Tock. (I'll leave the rest of you to imagine the movie poster)
  - astrodust 15y ago
    If you don't weed out your counter-productive citizens you end up with Digg. If you do, if you keep it tight, you might be lucky enough to have a metafilter.com which after a decade is still an amazing place. Strangely, Something Awful is actually a great model for a community. A great case-study in how to keep a community from imploding.

revorad 15y ago

The most surprising figure to me is that 65% traffic is from the United States. I think for a lot of the biggest sites, that number is much lower and going down.

xxiao 15y ago

was getting tired of digg in the past, esp when its boss sometimes was shown as the headline there for no reason... nice to see reddit is making it.

joshklein 15y ago

Congrats to our local HN'er kn0thing and everybody else at Reddit. 2B is quite an achievement. Regarding below questions about the business side of Reddit, see the previous conversation here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

giberson 15y ago

I'll admit to being one of the latecomers to reddit in the last year. I use to avoid reddit like the plague, because I thought reddit was just www.reddit.com (the main page) which the few times I visited was filled with random assortment of stuff I didn't care about. Later, I discovered the true essence of reddit, sub-reddits. Things like r/loseit, r/fitness, r/gamedev, r/<things I actually care about>. Now I'm hooked--I visit the sub reddits multiple times every day. I no longer subscribe to the main reddit feed. So, for things in store for 2012, you absolutely must focus on "help new users better understand the way reddit works". In addition, if I were in charge of reddit for a day, I'd get rid of the reddit main page aggregation and instead replace it with a word cloud and the heading "Pick a topic that interests you to visit that sub-reddit for valuable discussion and content". Because, on the whole, the main reddit feed devalues the entire site with slop. edit: removed misleading line.

wisty 15y ago
You do know you can unsubscribe to the main page, and the other default subscriptions, so your main page is entirely business, world news, programming, and Doctor Who, right?
- giberson 15y ago
  I know that now. I'm saying I didn't know that then, I didn't know then, that there were even sub-reddits. It wasn't until I did discover those facts that I became a reddit frequenter.
- Tuckerism 15y ago
  I think the parent is referring to encouraging lurkers/first-time viewers to creating an account to do just that. Reddit is something that can push a lot of people away right at the get go with it's default subs (/r/atheism & /r/politics are polarizing, /r/pics can make the site look childish, etc)
- jjcm 15y ago
  You can also just bookmark aggregate subreddits, and visit those. Example: http://www.reddit.com/r/hacks+android+iphone+webdev+startups+mylittlepony http://www.reddit.com/r/hacks+android+iphone+webdev+startups...

jebblue 15y ago

One of their sub sites uses the "f" bomb, not a very professional way to operate a company.

zerostar07 15y ago
One? I suppose you are aware of /r/gonewild for starters
- icebraining 15y ago
  gonewild? r/teen_girls r/picsofdeadkids (yes, it's what it advertises) r/DeadPeople r/rape r/incest Basically, everything moderated by violentacrez: http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/violentacrez http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/violentacrez

psawaya 15y ago

I admit that it's hard to measure this in an absolute way (and I agree pageviews is a flawed metric), but I submit that in two years, reddit will be as popular as Twitter is now.

andrewhillman 15y ago

I guess this answers my question to how badly reddit crushed digg.

ch0wn 15y ago
Here is another nice view of that: http://gs.statcounter.com/#digg_vs_reddit-ww-monthly-200905-201112 http://gs.statcounter.com/#digg_vs_reddit-ww-monthly-200905-...

iamandrus 15y ago

Reddit's growth has been amazing. It gets a lot of hate because of users reposting content without giving credit, but it really is an amazing site. I used to search Google endlessly for sites to get, for example, help on video games or services for video games, but now I think, "Well, I'll just check out their subreddit and see if anyone else has this problem." It's great for news and breaking stories. Sometimes I see it on reddit before I even see it breaking on Twitter. I think Conde Nast did a good job as well in not fucking it up for the site. They let the owners do their own thing and let the site grow (an action I really wish other large companies would take when acquiring startups) instead of forcing them to put annoying ads all over or other stupid things. However, I wish reddit would make it easier for users to find features and generally understand the site. I'm still finding useful features that have been hidden in the software. I thank the reddit staff for their amazing work and hope that they keep it up. :)

ngokevin 15y ago

Could this have something to do with the quality being halved?

marvin 15y ago

I love the reddit community, and I've been an active member for almost 6 years now. Congratulations to the reddit team for building a huge, diverse and successful community. However, I think that this latest stage of growth brings a lot of problems. The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years. It's what someone said about groupthink - downvoting or posting a quick, hostile reply to something you disagree with is much easier than actually articulating why you disagree. There is a lot of hating and lots of personal attacks instead of honest discussion. I've been thinking about this for a bit. As an outsider it seems a lot like an up-scaled version of American society. Reddit used to be a relatively homogenuous group of people, but is now _very_ heterogenous, in the same way the US is. The problem is that reddit doesn't have the custom of politely avoiding contentious topics in the public space. So you end up getting mens' rights activists and militant feminists yelling at each other, Christians and atheists, racists and minorities etc. I think this problem is only going to keep growing. Reddit has survived a long time, but this is a fundamental issue which is more about keeping an open mind and being tolerant of differences of opinion. It has more to do with societal conditioning than technology. It's a great example of what happens when you put radically different people within shouting distance of each other without traditional common courtesy to moderate things. Like I said, I've been on Reddit for almost 6 years, but things are getting pretty bad. Almost every single time something that is considered controversial by any group is posted, there are multiple aggressive comments...which are upvoted if they are formulated in a sufficiently assertive way. The community is moving away from rational discourse, to a more traditional extroverts-first system where being loud and assuming that your opponent is wrong gets more recognition.

fossuser 15y ago
I feel like that move happened a few years ago. I thought the people who still frequent reddit primarily visit the smaller higher quality subreddits that are more reminiscent of how the site used to be.
swombat 15y ago
The entire tone of reddit (in general) has become a lot more hostile during the last 1.5 years. On the contrary, I think the groupthink was much more obvious before they started policing the subreddits more closely in the last year. It used to be that /r/business was the most anti-business place on the web - any post that was positive about business would get instantly downvoted to oblivion, in favour of posts decrying how businesses were exploiting individuals and the government in various ways. Then they split it up into multiple sub-sub-reddits, and now /business is actually a sensible place to read stuff about business.

kaonashi 15y ago

No wonder the comment section now competes with YouTube for most inane on the net.

rmc 15y ago

I sorta wish the title added the (YCXX) tag (which was YC05 IIRC ?)

losethos 15y ago

http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-torture-of-the-highest-form/ http://www.noob.us/humor/the-office-dwight-faces-nerd-tortur...