7 ms·

Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars

206 points by donohoe 14y ago

thesethings 14y ago
"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”" I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after the acquisition? Didn't Reddit struggle to pay for basic infrastructure stuff due to their new parent company's skepticism about its viability and perception of its value? http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html And it was a long while until it got spun out. (http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/) Not that there's anything crazy in any of this. Just that the NYT story paints it like right away they 1) knew Reddit's worth and 2) knew to have a hands-off approach. I'm far from a Reddit power user, happy to hear other perspectives.
- ww520 14y ago
  I remember before Reddit was moved to an independent subsidiary, there were tension between Conde and Reddit on how to increase the revenue or profit (were they ever profitable?) At one time, the site was crashing frequently due to lack of infrastructure capacity. They were forced to try different things to make money, like Reddit Golds, ad placement, etc. I think Conde had realized later on that Reddit can become like Craigslist where while it won't be squeezed every ad dollar out of it but it will become enormously profitable and prominent in the web.
- cagenut 14y ago
  Keep in mind this is one of dozens of "internet" companies Steve owns depending on where you draw the lines in the greater Newhouse ecosystem (see: http://advance.net http://advance.net and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications). He's also pushing a $500M portfolio into every new-media-investing VC fund he can find: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/advances-ma-man-builds-out-team-140856 http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/advances-ma-... So the fact that reddit got ignored for a few years, both to its detriment (having to beg for money) and to its benefit (not getting eaten/squished) is mostly just a byproduct of advance/newhouse's "buy all the things, figure out what to do with them later" strategy.
- danso 14y ago
  I'm a Reddit frequent user...I can't comment specifically on your assertions...just that it continues to amaze me how the site has remained as free from pervasive chiclets, (official) spam, and Digg-like networking... Whether this was a deliberate plan or the byproduct of executive apathy, it's still quite amazing
- raldi 14y ago
  Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands-on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.
  - manelvf 14y ago
    That should be very frustrating. Were you tempted to break with Conde and start again or some sort or change on your agreement with them?
    - raldi 14y ago
      My "change on my agreement with them" was to quit. Including myself, three of the four reddit programmers came to that conclusion within the same six month period. (Props to spladug for keeping the flame alive!)
  - seunosewa 14y ago
    This may have been a good thing. Digg didn't have any constraints on buying new hardware and hiring new people, and we can see how that ended (they bought too much, hired too many people, and collapsed)!
    - raldi 14y ago
      We weren't asking for unlimited hardware and headcount. We would have been thrilled with a rule that every time traffic doubles, we get to hire one person. As for hardware, all we wanted was a team printer that didn't jam, an SSD for ketralnis's workstation, and the right for our engineers to substitute an equal-cost laptop of their choice for the IT-approved MacBook.
    - vaksel 14y ago
      Digg didn't collapse because of hardware or headcount...they collapsed because they trashed their product with unnecessary changes and pissed off their user base Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic
brackin 14y ago
I think it's a shame that Reddit sold so early but at the same time they can think of the users (Until Conde Nast gets involved). There's no question about their valuation and how they'll monetize. They as a company can work on that and build a great product but there aren't daily blogposts on TechCrunch about it.
- arkonaut 14y ago
  huh?
- webwanderings 14y ago
  Looking for Techcrunch endorsements is so 2009ish. People who know and can reddit, are doing fine because it is possibly one of the last few places on the Internet where pseudonym and trolling is still alive. You feel gratified by people answering your comment given that you have most likely trolled at first. You eventually get a peace later on because the community kept you alive and kicking. Hence it has all the right ingredients of what social-network should be like on the Internet: free, open and anonymous.
  - kellishaver 14y ago
    A while back I deleted my Reddit account and just recently I've created a new one under my real name. I decided that if I was going to post, I would do so as myself and not hide behind an anonymous name. I hadn't really done any trolling in the past, but I'd participated in discussions I certainly wouldn't have participated in if they could have readily been tracked back to me. But for better or worse, I decided to go the real name route this time. The result is that I end up commenting on a lot less time-wasting content (and subsequently reading less because I know I won't participate in the discussion and reading often opinionated comments without participating will just frustrate me), and putting more thought into the responses I do post. That's not to say that I think there's anything necessarily wrong with the anonymity. Sometimes it's nice to give voice to something you otherwise wouldn't because your opinion is controversial or unpopular (and doing business online, one has to protect one's online reputation and what ends up in the search engines). For me, though, it's translated to less time spent on useless AMA/AskReddit posts, more time spent on meaningful discussion, and less time on the site overall. All of these are good things.
carleverett 14y ago
I'm sorry but the first sentence made me laugh: "There are many ways to measure the traction of a social media platform: [3 ways, to be exact]"
tokenadult 14y ago
"Strategically, what they have done should be a model of how to create and support a virtual start-up within a larger corporation,' said Anil Dash, a writer and entrepreneur in digital realms." Well, strategically, they might eventually want to think about making some return on investment for the acquiring investors with actual cash profit. Otherwise, they will eventually be shed at a loss (is anyone else here old enough to remember AOL and Time Warner?). Strategically, they may also be serving as a cautionary example of why start-ups without a secure revenue model shouldn't be acquired at all, unless there is financial upside for the investors. After all, the article further reports, "Reddit is not an exception to every rule in the digital world. Like many digital media companies, it has a big audience and minuscule revenue."
- jvm 14y ago
  They bought them for 20mil, that's pretty cheap given their userbase. I bet Conde can sell them for more than that now.
taybenlor 14y ago
"If the leader of the free world stops by" - sorry, he's what?
- joshschreuder 14y ago
  This is a pretty common expression for the President of the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_World#.22Leader_of_the_Free_World.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_World#.22Leader_of_the_Fre...
  - taybenlor 14y ago
    Which goes on to say that it has fallen out of use. It's a ridiculous title.
  - arethuza 14y ago
    I don't think that phrase has had any meaning for at least 20 years.
- timc3 14y ago
  I couldnt read the rest of the article after that
- hk_kh 14y ago
  "Welcome to the Information Superhighway!"
noirman 14y ago
Keep in mind that when Reddit got acquired, Reddit gold doesn't exist yet. So they were losing (more) money every month.
- easytiger 14y ago
  reddit gold may never have worked if it was sold without understanding that reddit was in trouble and couldn't grow without the support of it's users. If it had been an out of the blue proposal to slap charges for features then people might have kicked up a fuss.
  - rmc 14y ago
    Another theory was that the owners (Conde Nast?) were very old media and used to thinking of magazine subscriptions. So they invented subscriptions for reddit, to show that, yes even by magazine standards, reddit is a good business.
npguy 14y ago
Can someone explain to me how PG funded Reddit when it was more like a HN clone?
- kaonashi 14y ago
  I thought it was the other way around.
- underwater 14y ago
  I might get a few details wrong; but HN certainly was inspired by reddit. Reddit was originally written in Lisp. Paul Graham had actually written an article about how Lisp was his secret weapon when building his Yahoo-acquired Viacom. Reddit was one of the first YC companies so I assume their language choice was inspired by this. Soon after launch reddit had performance issues and was rewritten in Python. This improved the site stability but angered one of reddit's original user base of Lisp fans. Around the same time Paul Graham started hyping a new Lisp dialect he was writting called arc [1]. It's what powers HN. Arc stores the stack and a set of continuations for each possible client action in memory on the server. These are referenced on the client by a fnid. This is actually the source of the next-page errors you'll see here; continuations are purged in least recently used fashion so as HN outgrows its single server the lack of memory makes sessions expire more quickly. I believe both HN and reddit (which had a second Python-based rewrite) are now open source. There is nothing stopping Paul Graham from using reddit's source code; but I believe the arc code is leaner. HN runs on a single piece of hardware to this day. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
  - johnx123-up 14y ago
    I always wonder how HN works without cookies. Can you share some insights on that?
    - ccozan 14y ago
      it DOES work with cookies. At this moment I have a cookie from ycombinator called "user".
mmahemoff 14y ago
There's a good interview from Mark Suster with Advance Publications recently. They talk Reddit here: http://youtu.be/iXES4ITy7W8?t=22m http://youtu.be/iXES4ITy7W8?t=22m A little surprising to hear him dismiss the role Digg 4 played in Reddit's success, but overall, gives a good perspective on how they keep it hands-off.
davedx 14y ago
"On Thursday, President Obama signed up for an “Ask Me Anything” (A.M.A. in geekspeak) session at Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups." How patronizing.
- hackmiester 14y ago
  Indeed. Reminds me of when people say that IT work should be cheap because "you're just pushing some buttons." Gee, I sure am glad President Obama took some time to join us kiddies in playing with our computers!
  - jcbrand 14y ago
    Pushing buttons does nothing, it's the order in which those buttons are pushed that requires intelligence, skill and experience.
    - seunosewa 14y ago
      Yeah. You're preaching to the choir, though!
- darien 14y ago
  Yea, that's David Carr's voice (the NYTimes writer). He's kind of a skeptical luddite, but I have immense respect for him. He's one of the central figure in the NYTimes documentary "Page One: Inside the New York Times."

206 points by donohoe 14y ago

"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”" I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after the acquisition? Didn't Reddit struggle to pay for basic infrastructure stuff due to their new parent company's skepticism about its viability and perception of its value? http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html And it was a long while until it got spun out. (http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/reddit-break-conde-nast/) Not that there's anything crazy in any of this. Just that the NYT story paints it like right away they 1) knew Reddit's worth and 2) knew to have a hands-off approach. I'm far from a Reddit power user, happy to hear other perspectives.

ww520 14y ago
I remember before Reddit was moved to an independent subsidiary, there were tension between Conde and Reddit on how to increase the revenue or profit (were they ever profitable?) At one time, the site was crashing frequently due to lack of infrastructure capacity. They were forced to try different things to make money, like Reddit Golds, ad placement, etc. I think Conde had realized later on that Reddit can become like Craigslist where while it won't be squeezed every ad dollar out of it but it will become enormously profitable and prominent in the web.
cagenut 14y ago
Keep in mind this is one of dozens of "internet" companies Steve owns depending on where you draw the lines in the greater Newhouse ecosystem (see: http://advance.net http://advance.net and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications). He's also pushing a $500M portfolio into every new-media-investing VC fund he can find: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/advances-ma-man-builds-out-team-140856 http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/advances-ma-... So the fact that reddit got ignored for a few years, both to its detriment (having to beg for money) and to its benefit (not getting eaten/squished) is mostly just a byproduct of advance/newhouse's "buy all the things, figure out what to do with them later" strategy.
danso 14y ago
I'm a Reddit frequent user...I can't comment specifically on your assertions...just that it continues to amaze me how the site has remained as free from pervasive chiclets, (official) spam, and Digg-like networking... Whether this was a deliberate plan or the byproduct of executive apathy, it's still quite amazing
raldi 14y ago
Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands-on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.
- manelvf 14y ago
  That should be very frustrating. Were you tempted to break with Conde and start again or some sort or change on your agreement with them?
  - raldi 14y ago
    My "change on my agreement with them" was to quit. Including myself, three of the four reddit programmers came to that conclusion within the same six month period. (Props to spladug for keeping the flame alive!)
- seunosewa 14y ago
  This may have been a good thing. Digg didn't have any constraints on buying new hardware and hiring new people, and we can see how that ended (they bought too much, hired too many people, and collapsed)!
  - raldi 14y ago
    We weren't asking for unlimited hardware and headcount. We would have been thrilled with a rule that every time traffic doubles, we get to hire one person. As for hardware, all we wanted was a team printer that didn't jam, an SSD for ketralnis's workstation, and the right for our engineers to substitute an equal-cost laptop of their choice for the IT-approved MacBook.
  - vaksel 14y ago
    Digg didn't collapse because of hardware or headcount...they collapsed because they trashed their product with unnecessary changes and pissed off their user base Sure, the fact that they had a huge headcount, meant that they had to take more risk to try to monetize...but the nail in their coffin wasn't cost...but loss of traffic

brackin 14y ago

I think it's a shame that Reddit sold so early but at the same time they can think of the users (Until Conde Nast gets involved). There's no question about their valuation and how they'll monetize. They as a company can work on that and build a great product but there aren't daily blogposts on TechCrunch about it.

arkonaut 14y ago
huh?
webwanderings 14y ago
Looking for Techcrunch endorsements is so 2009ish. People who know and can reddit, are doing fine because it is possibly one of the last few places on the Internet where pseudonym and trolling is still alive. You feel gratified by people answering your comment given that you have most likely trolled at first. You eventually get a peace later on because the community kept you alive and kicking. Hence it has all the right ingredients of what social-network should be like on the Internet: free, open and anonymous.
- kellishaver 14y ago
  A while back I deleted my Reddit account and just recently I've created a new one under my real name. I decided that if I was going to post, I would do so as myself and not hide behind an anonymous name. I hadn't really done any trolling in the past, but I'd participated in discussions I certainly wouldn't have participated in if they could have readily been tracked back to me. But for better or worse, I decided to go the real name route this time. The result is that I end up commenting on a lot less time-wasting content (and subsequently reading less because I know I won't participate in the discussion and reading often opinionated comments without participating will just frustrate me), and putting more thought into the responses I do post. That's not to say that I think there's anything necessarily wrong with the anonymity. Sometimes it's nice to give voice to something you otherwise wouldn't because your opinion is controversial or unpopular (and doing business online, one has to protect one's online reputation and what ends up in the search engines). For me, though, it's translated to less time spent on useless AMA/AskReddit posts, more time spent on meaningful discussion, and less time on the site overall. All of these are good things.

carleverett 14y ago

I'm sorry but the first sentence made me laugh: "There are many ways to measure the traction of a social media platform: [3 ways, to be exact]"

tokenadult 14y ago

"Strategically, what they have done should be a model of how to create and support a virtual start-up within a larger corporation,' said Anil Dash, a writer and entrepreneur in digital realms." Well, strategically, they might eventually want to think about making some return on investment for the acquiring investors with actual cash profit. Otherwise, they will eventually be shed at a loss (is anyone else here old enough to remember AOL and Time Warner?). Strategically, they may also be serving as a cautionary example of why start-ups without a secure revenue model shouldn't be acquired at all, unless there is financial upside for the investors. After all, the article further reports, "Reddit is not an exception to every rule in the digital world. Like many digital media companies, it has a big audience and minuscule revenue."

jvm 14y ago
They bought them for 20mil, that's pretty cheap given their userbase. I bet Conde can sell them for more than that now.

taybenlor 14y ago

"If the leader of the free world stops by" - sorry, he's what?

joshschreuder 14y ago
This is a pretty common expression for the President of the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_World#.22Leader_of_the_Free_World.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_World#.22Leader_of_the_Fre...
- taybenlor 14y ago
  Which goes on to say that it has fallen out of use. It's a ridiculous title.
- arethuza 14y ago
  I don't think that phrase has had any meaning for at least 20 years.
timc3 14y ago
I couldnt read the rest of the article after that
hk_kh 14y ago
"Welcome to the Information Superhighway!"

noirman 14y ago

Keep in mind that when Reddit got acquired, Reddit gold doesn't exist yet. So they were losing (more) money every month.

easytiger 14y ago
reddit gold may never have worked if it was sold without understanding that reddit was in trouble and couldn't grow without the support of it's users. If it had been an out of the blue proposal to slap charges for features then people might have kicked up a fuss.
- rmc 14y ago
  Another theory was that the owners (Conde Nast?) were very old media and used to thinking of magazine subscriptions. So they invented subscriptions for reddit, to show that, yes even by magazine standards, reddit is a good business.

npguy 14y ago

Can someone explain to me how PG funded Reddit when it was more like a HN clone?

kaonashi 14y ago
I thought it was the other way around.
underwater 14y ago
I might get a few details wrong; but HN certainly was inspired by reddit. Reddit was originally written in Lisp. Paul Graham had actually written an article about how Lisp was his secret weapon when building his Yahoo-acquired Viacom. Reddit was one of the first YC companies so I assume their language choice was inspired by this. Soon after launch reddit had performance issues and was rewritten in Python. This improved the site stability but angered one of reddit's original user base of Lisp fans. Around the same time Paul Graham started hyping a new Lisp dialect he was writting called arc [1]. It's what powers HN. Arc stores the stack and a set of continuations for each possible client action in memory on the server. These are referenced on the client by a fnid. This is actually the source of the next-page errors you'll see here; continuations are purged in least recently used fashion so as HN outgrows its single server the lack of memory makes sessions expire more quickly. I believe both HN and reddit (which had a second Python-based rewrite) are now open source. There is nothing stopping Paul Graham from using reddit's source code; but I believe the arc code is leaner. HN runs on a single piece of hardware to this day. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
- johnx123-up 14y ago
  I always wonder how HN works without cookies. Can you share some insights on that?
  - ccozan 14y ago
    it DOES work with cookies. At this moment I have a cookie from ycombinator called "user".

mmahemoff 14y ago

There's a good interview from Mark Suster with Advance Publications recently. They talk Reddit here: http://youtu.be/iXES4ITy7W8?t=22m http://youtu.be/iXES4ITy7W8?t=22m A little surprising to hear him dismiss the role Digg 4 played in Reddit's success, but overall, gives a good perspective on how they keep it hands-off.

davedx 14y ago

"On Thursday, President Obama signed up for an “Ask Me Anything” (A.M.A. in geekspeak) session at Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups." How patronizing.

hackmiester 14y ago
Indeed. Reminds me of when people say that IT work should be cheap because "you're just pushing some buttons." Gee, I sure am glad President Obama took some time to join us kiddies in playing with our computers!
- jcbrand 14y ago
  Pushing buttons does nothing, it's the order in which those buttons are pushed that requires intelligence, skill and experience.
  - seunosewa 14y ago
    Yeah. You're preaching to the choir, though!
darien 14y ago
Yea, that's David Carr's voice (the NYTimes writer). He's kind of a skeptical luddite, but I have immense respect for him. He's one of the central figure in the NYTimes documentary "Page One: Inside the New York Times."