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How to use a Reddit-clone to boost company culture
- t0 13y agoWhy not create your own subreddit? You can even control who has access.
- ryancarson 13y agoWe want to own the content and not rely on a third party.
- andrewguenther 13y agogit clone git://github.com/reddit/reddit.git Done.
- ryancarson 13y agoHere's a better description of our reasoning: http://ryancarson.com/post/49494542970/how-to-use-a-reddit-clone-to-boost-company-culture#comment-883318247 http://ryancarson.com/post/49494542970/how-to-use-a-reddit-c...
- jeremyperson 13y agoHey Ryan, how about P2? http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/ http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/
- ryancarson 13y agoI'm not sure why Jim didn't go with P2. I presume because we're not a PHP shop.
- human_error 13y agoreddit is open source. Is there a reason why you didn't use its codebase and built one from scratch?
- ryancarson 13y agoNot sure - Jim will have to answer that.
- pudquick 13y agoThat's a great question. They make it so easy, too: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/reddit-install-script-for-Ubuntu https://github.com/reddit/reddit/wiki/reddit-install-script-... and a VM, ready for VMWare / VirtualBox (it's a vagrant setup, actually): http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/qnuxp/pycon_prepackaged_vm/ http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/qnuxp/pycon_prepa... (about a year old) For anyone interested in more details, there's a subreddit community about it as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev
- supercoder 13y agoYeah when I read the title I thought this is what they had done..
- ryancarson 13y agoHere's the explanation: http://ryancarson.com/post/49494542970/how-to-use-a-reddit-clone-to-boost-company-culture#comment-883318247 http://ryancarson.com/post/49494542970/how-to-use-a-reddit-c...
- cloudwalking 13y agoThis is a good startup idea. Services for improving company culture. Important to make the data exportable and have a solid privacy policy.
- codinghorror 13y agoOr use Discourse which offers many of the same benefits without the "rush to see who can post the most upvoted image and win" dynamic, and potential for more substantive discussions! Bonus, you don't have to write any extra code either. Well unless you want to contribute ... http://github.com/discourse/discourse http://github.com/discourse/discourse
- zachlatta 13y agoWe're doing this for our high school robotics club and it's great!
- aton 13y agoI guess setting up discourse is too heavy for this use case. The same may be applied to the original reddit source, but at least reddit comes with a VM image.
- mbesto 13y agoDiscourse has a VM image (vagrant) too: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/VAGRANT.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/VAGR...
- jimrhoskins 13y agoI replied in more depth, but it came down to making it private and authenticating against our own app via oauth. Hacking existing solutions seemed like more work than building our own. Plus it's fun to make things.
- fetbaffe 13y agoThat page crashes my graphics driver when visiting it with Firefox. Nice. A simple blog with 12 iframes.
- dirkk0 13y agoI probably would have given telescope a chance but this might have a different feature set. http://telesc.pe/ http://telesc.pe/
- fetbaffe 13y agoTo sum up a work day. Standup, planning meetings, discussions, speeches, emails, phone, IM, wikis, surveys, internal blogs, and now Reddit. When am I supposed to do actual work?
- DHowett 13y agoWhen you get home after having left the office at 8 PM, of course. Or during the company happy hour slash recruiting event!
- sageikosa 13y agoYou are busy, that's what work is all about these days.
- reeses 13y agoI feel like an old person when I think it's a sign of the apocalypse when employees are playing WoW, surfing (do people even use that anymore?) non-work-related sites, and texting/tweeting/whatever on their mobiles AND missing dates. I also pull 'confused puppy' when they complain about content filters blocking reddit, etc. Sure, there's the occasional gem there, but it's rarely a primary source for solving a work-related problem, and I am highly suspicious of claims that it is needed for work. (Unless you're in a very narrow niche.)
- zacharypinter 13y agoProbably ties into the increasingly blurred lines between work and home. I check emails/answer hipchat questions at home, and browse Hacker News/Reddit occasionally at work. Seems like a fair trade-off, in moderation of course.
- HunterV 13y agoUntil they hopefully outsource it: Reddit in 10 lines of code. http://www.drurly.com/blog/2012/06/26/reddit-in-10-lines-of-code/ http://www.drurly.com/blog/2012/06/26/reddit-in-10-lines-of-...
- arb99 13y agohttps://github.com/reddit/reddit https://github.com/reddit/reddit
- rurounijones 13y agoReading that article I cannot help but think the entire thing is misguided. 10 lines of code? Yes Easier to read? Hell no. If you have to sacrifice readability and idiomatic ruby for LOC then I think the entire premise is void and a lot of the advice misguided.
- NegativeK 13y ago> a lot of the advice misguided. The goal isn't to write pleasant code; it's to explore what's possible with the language, even if you should be slapped for using the techniques in a real project. Reducing LOC is akin to code golf; the shortening is an ends to itself, and sites like codegolf.com are essentially competitive problem solving with a very strange goal. Tangentially: In a different subject, there was an ad hoc competition to write the shortest science fiction story. One example is Knock, by Fredric Brown: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..." Another is Cosmic Report Card: Earth, by Forrest J. Ackerman. The entirety of the story is "F".
- rurounijones 13y agoWhenever I see "Tutorial: X" on the internet I immediately think "What if a beginner read this". Therefore whenever I see an article without a "Do not do this in real-life / production because..." warning I immediately take a negative view. In this case I evaluated the site with that in mind, all the techniques are useful but the examples are pretty badly shoe-horned. There are much cleared ways to give examples of multiple assignments than the examples there. Other things like writing methods on one line, probably useful in situations like defining error classes "class MySpecialError < StandardError; end" but apart from that I frown upon it. There is also the "Hey, this is a nested ternary operator" example which is... well, demo'ing nested ternary operators without a big fat "Do this in real life and people will hurt you" warning is a no-no in my book. A bit rambling but I suppose to sum up my main problem with this was "Here are some things you can do" without actual discussion about when they are suitable, when they are not, and why this is so.
- nzealand 13y agoWhy not pligg?
- ozh 13y agoYou'd figure the linked article would include an open source link to download. Duh.
- gadders 13y agoI do think there is a place, in a distributed company or working with offshore resources, for "idle chit-chat". Although it may seem like a waste of time, this is how people bond. Even if you're dealing with different cultures, people still have birthdays, weekend plans, weddings/children etc. These are common and help bring people thousands of miles apart together.
- gadders 13y agoI do think there is a place, in a distributed company or working with offshore resources, for "idle chit-chat". Although it may seem like a waste of time, this is how people bond. Even if you're dealing with different cultures, people still have birthdays, weekend plans, weddings/children etc. These are common and help bring people thousands of miles apart together.
- pytrin 13y agoWe use dashboard.io internally at 500startups - https://dashboard.io/ https://dashboard.io/ (Paul Singh's latest startup), and it's quite effective. It has multiple inner networks on the same network (like founders, mentors and staff inside the bigger 500startups network), discussions, events and private messaging. Highly recommended
- jpeg_hero 13y agoThere goes Ryan again.... Crushing it!!
- nuttendorfer 13y agoA lot of people here overlook that Jim clearly must have had fun building Convoy. Working at 37Signals means that he couldn't have taken too long to build this rather simple (yet beautiful) web app.
- ryancarson 13y agoHe works with me at http://teamtreehouse.com http://teamtreehouse.com not 37S :)
- nuttendorfer 13y agoHa! Sorry, I mistook you for Jason Fried!
- jimrhoskins 13y agoHey, I wrote this, so I can answer a few of the questions. Why not discourse/reddit/telescope/etc...? I looked into those. Solving the problem we needed a few basic things, posts, threaded comments, and votes. The killer feature that we wanted it to be private to our company, and we wanted authentication integrated with http://teamtreehouse.com http://teamtreehouse.com. Hacking any existing solutions to fit that auth model seemed more work than it was worth. When it comes down to it, it's a ridiculously simple app. There's a few models, and not a whole lot of code. When we gauged the effort of integrating most of the OS solutions into our oauth system and locking it down to be in-company only, just making the app was way easier. Plus. we can easily extend it to fit our needs, and we have. Also, I wanted to play w/ rails 4 + ruby 2 for the first time. Regarding the name, it was a code name. The tool is built for having conversations (convos), and I though convoy was a cool codename. As soon as Ryan saw my working prototype, he told me to launch it, and the name stuck. I didn't even know there was a movie.
- Splendor 13y agoI'm more interested in the culture-building aspect of this. Can you give us some examples of the types of conversations that take place in Convoy?
- jimrhoskins 13y agoWell it's primary purpose was to cut email. And it has. We had a lot of emails that had a lot of replies that were not actionable, like birthday emails, and new hire intros. After 30 "Happy Birthdays!" and "Welcome to the team!" responses you get pretty annoyed seing the thread hit your inbox. We also has a lot of emails about interesting articles about our company, or the space we're in. Sometimes discussions would happen in email, and not being well threaded it was hard to follow. Also those emails are not usually actionable, but they appear in your inbox. We post a lot of interesting links in convoy, as well as all the above categories of conversation. It definitely has more of a reddit feel than a HN feel. It's not a work-only type of environment. We have fun. Since the video team has hours of video of the teachers, they have this habbit of making embarrassing animated gifs and posting them, which is fun. We don't really have rules about what you CAN post in convoy, we have guidelines about what you SHOULDN'T put in email. If it's not a good convoy post, votes will take care of it.
- vyrotek 13y agoHow about https://moot.it https://moot.it ?
- reddit_clone 13y agoWhaa?