12 ms·

Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream

115 points by danielhonigman 13y ago

VMG 13y ago
Original post with HD graphics: http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/ http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...
- stusmall 13y ago
  He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content. Its my personal opinion that this has really hurt the depth of content. Its still a fun site, just very different then when I first went there ~6 years ago. EDIT: Not to say RES isn't a great project and super useful. I use it and really appreciate it. Its just interesting how ease of use can shape the content and culture of an online community.
  - bigtech 13y ago
    If I remember correctly, which is doubtful, picture posts became more popular, and while Reddit has the ability to shape the types of content that make it to the front page, they chose not to as this seems to express the will of the users.
  - heyheyhey 13y ago
    I think reddit being picture heavy is just a cause of its exploding popularity. Ever follow a subreddit from infancy to infamy? You'll see as it grows, there will be more and more posts of just pictures/memes, which in turn will cause users to complain, mods to step in to filter these out, more subreddits dedicated solely to memes about this topic, etc. While I do think RES is awesome, most of my non-tech friends who browse Reddit (usually on their phone) haven't even heard of RES.
  - officemonkey 13y ago
    The other big boost to images taking over was the popularity of imgur. Other picture hosting sites were so poor that I think it actually reduced the amount of picture content prior to 2009.
    - cheapsteak 13y ago
      Here's imgur's creator's post from 4 years ago introducing the site to redditors: My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think? http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to... Here's an AMA (ask me anything, reddit interview post) he did: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_... Interesting quote from the AMA: "Imageshack tried to buy it 6 months after I made it". I'm sure everyone is glad he didn't sell. IIRC half of imageshack links were "bandwidth exceeded" messages
      - Mythrl 13y ago
        If I recall correctly, he specifically created imgur because Reddit links to Imageshack and the like would always die.
    - skeletonjelly 13y ago
      I went from Digg to reddit due to digg being heavily saturated with pictures. :( Now it's the opposite. FYI MrGrim created imgur for both reddit and Digg. He now needs neither though.
  - KVFinn 13y ago
    >He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content. Nah, nothing to do with RES, that's just how things tend to evolve without strict moderation. The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it's easy to consume and upvote. http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/ http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...
    - skeletonjelly 13y ago
      I disagree. Nothing to do with RES? Before RES you had to click on images. Images in comments were even weirder being an all text site (as in, the opposite of forums with image signatures). RES, with its expando, made this a one button change, especially with the "view all images" button. To say it was 0% RES and 100% moderation is false. It can be both you know.
      - KVFinn 13y ago
        >Nothing to do with RES? Before RES you had to click on images. I don't know anyone in 'real life' who uses RES, but many who use reddit. I expect it's less than 10% and maybe much less of readers.
        skeletonjelly 13y ago
        I don't think anyone here but reddit admins can tell us the split. My point is that it's most definitely due to both in share.
    - Crito 13y ago
      > The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it's easy to consume and upvote. I honestly think that reddit would be better if they killed karma, or at least killed displaying it to the users. The obsession over it dominates the site with people posting cheap shit to get more of it, other people shitposting to see how far negative they can go, people complaining that one thing got karma while another thing did not, etc.
- joejohnson 13y ago
  Aw, the data is a year old. I wonder how much more of the site has transformed into video/picture content.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    I recently did an analysis using Reddit data between 7/22/13 and 9/26/13. 1 in 3 links go to Imgur or YouTube. http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/ http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/
ExpiredLink 13y ago
The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions was probably inevitable.
- thenmar 13y ago
  It does seem to be the blind leading the blind much more than in other forums.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  This is probably related to SO and the later rise of HN in that area as well.
- Kiro 13y ago
  I just had a look and the submissions were very similar to the front page on HN. Are you exaggerating or do you think the quality has gone down here as well?
  - code_duck 13y ago
    I think that actually, most of the submissions there come from the front page of HN.
  - sehr 13y ago
    The submissions are nearly identical on any given day. The discussions? Not so much. Not saying HN comment threads are the pinnacle of discourse, but they are an order of magnitude better than proggit's.
  - oinksoft 13y ago
    Before Hacker News was popular, you tended to be able to go to proggit for breaking news and large discussions. Being less popular, HN had smaller discussions and stories took longer to rotate out. There was much more focus on startups and California things, much less on infosec. Proggit now seems to have been reduced to an HN mirror, but HN is something else too.
- troebr 13y ago
corresation 13y ago
Those who only take a cursory glance will assume that Reddit started as a porn site, with nsfw dominating. This is of course contrary to how most of us remember it. If you delve deeper, it is actually that Reddit started entirely without subs, and happened to mostly be programming related, with a smattering of politics. nsfw was created because, much like with the TLD debate on the same topic, it was a content category that people wanted to separate. As the "subless" Reddit started to get noisy with mainstream topics, that's when people started fracturing off to /r/programming.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  A few years ago, I heard the same thing, then went and checked out the archive and it was about the furthest thing from the truth. Screenshot from 2005 of the home page: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...
  - corresation 13y ago
    EDIT: Apologies, however I misunderstood at-fates-hands's point of contention, however leave this post just for the neat archive.org links. What is the "furthest thing from the truth"? While you selectively chose a generalist front page, how about- https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com...? A Ruby post up at number 1. Heck, almost all of the front page is exactly the sort of material you would find on HN. Another 2005 day - https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com...? Another day with four LISP front-pagers - https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com...? Every post wasn't always about programming specifically, but it was a site primarily populated by programmers and other IT professionals, which is how what would be fringe material topped the front page. But there was the other stuff, just as there is on HN. Just to make an aside about something I found interesting on the archived reddit page - the header "reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or submit your own!". The premise was that Reddit would use clustering and other intelligent logic to individualize itself to the viewer. They abandoned that and went the "subscribe to subs you like" notion.
gdulli 13y ago
What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes, images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left.
- mcantelon 13y ago
  Calling one of the most successful sites on the Internet a "missed opportunity" is a bit odd. Whether you want junk or you want quality, it's there (dig into the subreddits).
  - officemonkey 13y ago
    I wish there was a better way to discover subreddits I might like. If Reddit did to subreddits what Pandora and Netflix did to music and movies (analyze and recommend,) it would pay off for them.
    - oftenwrong 13y ago
      You get subreddit suggestions ("people also added:") when creating multireddits.
    - kpennell 13y ago
      Hmmm...I subscribe to a number of travel and backpacker subs and am constantly pleased by the content. http://metareddit.com/r/backpacking http://metareddit.com/r/backpacking
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - stbtrax 13y ago
    In my experience, the problem with subreddits is that they are either too well trafficked, in which case it eventually devolves back into puns and memes, or it's way too sparse and there's no content.
- 13y ago
sentenza 13y ago
Wow. Reddit is that young? It feels as if it has been around forever. I'm not so sure about the image overload thing. Maybe that is just a symptom of another problem. IMO, the standard settings of the main page should be "fixed". It would be nice if you saw posts from a dozen or so _random_ subreddits as a standard setting, instead of the current colorful goo mixed from the big catchall subreddits.
- oceanplexian 13y ago
  Reddit is very young. It feels like yesterday that we were still using Digg.
zck 13y ago
It's interesting that /r/politics got a huge bump (looks to me to be about 75% increase in size) around the 2008 U.S. presidential election, but had no noticeable difference in 2012.
- danielhonigman 13y ago
  Will be interesting to see what happens in 2016, with Obama having reached his two-term limit. Plus, I also think Obama was focusing on more "mainstream" channels like FB, Twitter, etc.
- natural219 13y ago
  This seem to be purely a function of volume. By 2012 there were all sorts of other subreddits that people frequented.
  - danielhonigman 13y ago
    Good point
- bhaumik 13y ago
  In 2012, Obama's AMA received 5.6 million views (1.6 m unique) [1] "The site averaged over three billion pageviews each month in 2012, which is a 50% increase from the two billion the site reported for the month of December in 2011." [1] http://www.slashgear.com/reddit-saw-37-billion-pageviews-in-2012-president-obama-ama-most-popular-post-01262723/ http://www.slashgear.com/reddit-saw-37-billion-pageviews-in-...
bernardom 13y ago
Good lord, what happened in mid 2009?! The reddit.com blue area spikes up for a month. Edit: the original blogpost by Randy Olson says he doesn't know either.
- fragmede 13y ago
  US schools let out for summer vacation
- evacuationdrill 13y ago
  That was the Digg exodus. I was a Digg user, and I switched around that time. It had started to suck really bad, to where people like myself were willing to give it a fair shot, only to discover that the discussions were generally higher-quality. That's also why I'm here, from a discussion on Reddit for other sites. But I still find that the smaller subs scratch that itch, too.
  - raldi 13y ago
    You're off by a year. Digg v4 was the end of summer 2010.
    - evacuationdrill 13y ago
      Whoops, Thanks for the correction.
fragsworth 13y ago
Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the crap on the bottom. The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very difficult to see. Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant.
- Bill_Dimm 13y ago
  Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time in them, which would be interesting and relevant. I came here to say that (although your other points are good, too). The title of the article is "Fascinating Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream" but then they normalize away all of the growth info and make it completely impossible to see how traffic growth is related to anything they are displaying.
perlpimp 13y ago
4chan conjecture: all forums evolve to approximate 4chan or they die by the death of long tail. imo
- TelmoMenezes 13y ago
  I think all forums evolve towards decaffeination, including 4chan. People like to give 4chan as an example of low quality, but I think 4chan is actually in the top 1% of quality due to being an out-of-control creative machine. The 4chan-as-low-quality cliché goes well with all the other re-re-redigested morsels of tedium that 99% of content consist of.
martininmelb 13y ago
Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more diversified as it became more popular".
- Widdershin 13y ago
  That is far too positive. Please try and be more negative in future, it challenges my worldview less.
indlebe 13y ago
Endless summer ;)
- dangrossman 13y ago
  I think you meant "Eternal September". Endless summer is just a description of the weather in Miami. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    I recently saw someone make a similar reference to the endless summer. We are anyway moving towards the long October, where the number of new people using the (English) internet is roughly proportional to the number of new people.
  - indlebe 13y ago
    :) I was attempting a more politically correct version of: http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer I heard about eternal september last year and figured that eternal summer was a play on it.

115 points by danielhonigman 13y ago

VMG 13y ago

Original post with HD graphics: http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/ http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...

stusmall 13y ago
He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content. Its my personal opinion that this has really hurt the depth of content. Its still a fun site, just very different then when I first went there ~6 years ago. EDIT: Not to say RES isn't a great project and super useful. I use it and really appreciate it. Its just interesting how ease of use can shape the content and culture of an online community.
- bigtech 13y ago
  If I remember correctly, which is doubtful, picture posts became more popular, and while Reddit has the ability to shape the types of content that make it to the front page, they chose not to as this seems to express the will of the users.
- heyheyhey 13y ago
  I think reddit being picture heavy is just a cause of its exploding popularity. Ever follow a subreddit from infancy to infamy? You'll see as it grows, there will be more and more posts of just pictures/memes, which in turn will cause users to complain, mods to step in to filter these out, more subreddits dedicated solely to memes about this topic, etc. While I do think RES is awesome, most of my non-tech friends who browse Reddit (usually on their phone) haven't even heard of RES.
- officemonkey 13y ago
  The other big boost to images taking over was the popularity of imgur. Other picture hosting sites were so poor that I think it actually reduced the amount of picture content prior to 2009.
  - cheapsteak 13y ago
    Here's imgur's creator's post from 4 years ago introducing the site to redditors: My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think? http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to_reddit_i_created_an_image_hosting http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to... Here's an AMA (ask me anything, reddit interview post) he did: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_ama http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_... Interesting quote from the AMA: "Imageshack tried to buy it 6 months after I made it". I'm sure everyone is glad he didn't sell. IIRC half of imageshack links were "bandwidth exceeded" messages
    - Mythrl 13y ago
      If I recall correctly, he specifically created imgur because Reddit links to Imageshack and the like would always die.
  - skeletonjelly 13y ago
    I went from Digg to reddit due to digg being heavily saturated with pictures. :( Now it's the opposite. FYI MrGrim created imgur for both reddit and Digg. He now needs neither though.
- KVFinn 13y ago
  >He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content. Nah, nothing to do with RES, that's just how things tend to evolve without strict moderation. The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it's easy to consume and upvote. http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolution-of-reddit-through-post-data/ http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...
  - skeletonjelly 13y ago
    I disagree. Nothing to do with RES? Before RES you had to click on images. Images in comments were even weirder being an all text site (as in, the opposite of forums with image signatures). RES, with its expando, made this a one button change, especially with the "view all images" button. To say it was 0% RES and 100% moderation is false. It can be both you know.
    - KVFinn 13y ago
      >Nothing to do with RES? Before RES you had to click on images. I don't know anyone in 'real life' who uses RES, but many who use reddit. I expect it's less than 10% and maybe much less of readers.
      - skeletonjelly 13y ago
        I don't think anyone here but reddit admins can tell us the split. My point is that it's most definitely due to both in share.
  - Crito 13y ago
    > The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it's easy to consume and upvote. I honestly think that reddit would be better if they killed karma, or at least killed displaying it to the users. The obsession over it dominates the site with people posting cheap shit to get more of it, other people shitposting to see how far negative they can go, people complaining that one thing got karma while another thing did not, etc.
joejohnson 13y ago
Aw, the data is a year old. I wonder how much more of the site has transformed into video/picture content.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  I recently did an analysis using Reddit data between 7/22/13 and 9/26/13. 1 in 3 links go to Imgur or YouTube. http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/ http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/

ExpiredLink 13y ago

The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions was probably inevitable.

thenmar 13y ago
It does seem to be the blind leading the blind much more than in other forums.
lazyjones 13y ago
This is probably related to SO and the later rise of HN in that area as well.
Kiro 13y ago
I just had a look and the submissions were very similar to the front page on HN. Are you exaggerating or do you think the quality has gone down here as well?
- code_duck 13y ago
  I think that actually, most of the submissions there come from the front page of HN.
- sehr 13y ago
  The submissions are nearly identical on any given day. The discussions? Not so much. Not saying HN comment threads are the pinnacle of discourse, but they are an order of magnitude better than proggit's.
- oinksoft 13y ago
  Before Hacker News was popular, you tended to be able to go to proggit for breaking news and large discussions. Being less popular, HN had smaller discussions and stories took longer to rotate out. There was much more focus on startups and California things, much less on infosec. Proggit now seems to have been reduced to an HN mirror, but HN is something else too.
troebr 13y ago

corresation 13y ago

Those who only take a cursory glance will assume that Reddit started as a porn site, with nsfw dominating. This is of course contrary to how most of us remember it. If you delve deeper, it is actually that Reddit started entirely without subs, and happened to mostly be programming related, with a smattering of politics. nsfw was created because, much like with the TLD debate on the same topic, it was a content category that people wanted to separate. As the "subless" Reddit started to get noisy with mainstream topics, that's when people started fracturing off to /r/programming.

at-fates-hands 13y ago
A few years ago, I heard the same thing, then went and checked out the archive and it was about the furthest thing from the truth. Screenshot from 2005 of the home page: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...
- corresation 13y ago
  EDIT: Apologies, however I misunderstood at-fates-hands's point of contention, however leave this post just for the neat archive.org links. What is the "furthest thing from the truth"? While you selectively chose a generalist front page, how about- https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com...? A Ruby post up at number 1. Heck, almost all of the front page is exactly the sort of material you would find on HN. Another 2005 day - https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com...? Another day with four LISP front-pagers - https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com...? Every post wasn't always about programming specifically, but it was a site primarily populated by programmers and other IT professionals, which is how what would be fringe material topped the front page. But there was the other stuff, just as there is on HN. Just to make an aside about something I found interesting on the archived reddit page - the header "reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or submit your own!". The premise was that Reddit would use clustering and other intelligent logic to individualize itself to the viewer. They abandoned that and went the "subscribe to subs you like" notion.

gdulli 13y ago

What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes, images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left.

mcantelon 13y ago
Calling one of the most successful sites on the Internet a "missed opportunity" is a bit odd. Whether you want junk or you want quality, it's there (dig into the subreddits).
- officemonkey 13y ago
  I wish there was a better way to discover subreddits I might like. If Reddit did to subreddits what Pandora and Netflix did to music and movies (analyze and recommend,) it would pay off for them.
  - oftenwrong 13y ago
    You get subreddit suggestions ("people also added:") when creating multireddits.
  - kpennell 13y ago
    Hmmm...I subscribe to a number of travel and backpacker subs and am constantly pleased by the content. http://metareddit.com/r/backpacking http://metareddit.com/r/backpacking
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- stbtrax 13y ago
  In my experience, the problem with subreddits is that they are either too well trafficked, in which case it eventually devolves back into puns and memes, or it's way too sparse and there's no content.
13y ago

sentenza 13y ago

Wow. Reddit is that young? It feels as if it has been around forever. I'm not so sure about the image overload thing. Maybe that is just a symptom of another problem. IMO, the standard settings of the main page should be "fixed". It would be nice if you saw posts from a dozen or so _random_ subreddits as a standard setting, instead of the current colorful goo mixed from the big catchall subreddits.

oceanplexian 13y ago
Reddit is very young. It feels like yesterday that we were still using Digg.

zck 13y ago

It's interesting that /r/politics got a huge bump (looks to me to be about 75% increase in size) around the 2008 U.S. presidential election, but had no noticeable difference in 2012.

danielhonigman 13y ago
Will be interesting to see what happens in 2016, with Obama having reached his two-term limit. Plus, I also think Obama was focusing on more "mainstream" channels like FB, Twitter, etc.
natural219 13y ago
This seem to be purely a function of volume. By 2012 there were all sorts of other subreddits that people frequented.
- danielhonigman 13y ago
  Good point
bhaumik 13y ago
In 2012, Obama's AMA received 5.6 million views (1.6 m unique) [1] "The site averaged over three billion pageviews each month in 2012, which is a 50% increase from the two billion the site reported for the month of December in 2011." [1] http://www.slashgear.com/reddit-saw-37-billion-pageviews-in-2012-president-obama-ama-most-popular-post-01262723/ http://www.slashgear.com/reddit-saw-37-billion-pageviews-in-...

bernardom 13y ago

Good lord, what happened in mid 2009?! The reddit.com blue area spikes up for a month. Edit: the original blogpost by Randy Olson says he doesn't know either.

fragmede 13y ago
US schools let out for summer vacation
evacuationdrill 13y ago
That was the Digg exodus. I was a Digg user, and I switched around that time. It had started to suck really bad, to where people like myself were willing to give it a fair shot, only to discover that the discussions were generally higher-quality. That's also why I'm here, from a discussion on Reddit for other sites. But I still find that the smaller subs scratch that itch, too.
- raldi 13y ago
  You're off by a year. Digg v4 was the end of summer 2010.
  - evacuationdrill 13y ago
    Whoops, Thanks for the correction.

fragsworth 13y ago

Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the crap on the bottom. The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very difficult to see. Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant.

Bill_Dimm 13y ago
Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time in them, which would be interesting and relevant. I came here to say that (although your other points are good, too). The title of the article is "Fascinating Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream" but then they normalize away all of the growth info and make it completely impossible to see how traffic growth is related to anything they are displaying.

perlpimp 13y ago

4chan conjecture: all forums evolve to approximate 4chan or they die by the death of long tail. imo

TelmoMenezes 13y ago
I think all forums evolve towards decaffeination, including 4chan. People like to give 4chan as an example of low quality, but I think 4chan is actually in the top 1% of quality due to being an out-of-control creative machine. The 4chan-as-low-quality cliché goes well with all the other re-re-redigested morsels of tedium that 99% of content consist of.

martininmelb 13y ago

Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more diversified as it became more popular".

Widdershin 13y ago
That is far too positive. Please try and be more negative in future, it challenges my worldview less.

indlebe 13y ago

Endless summer ;)

dangrossman 13y ago
I think you meant "Eternal September". Endless summer is just a description of the weather in Miami. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- maxerickson 13y ago
  I recently saw someone make a similar reference to the endless summer. We are anyway moving towards the long October, where the number of new people using the (English) internet is roughly proportional to the number of new people.
- indlebe 13y ago
  :) I was attempting a more politically correct version of: http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer I heard about eternal september last year and figured that eternal summer was a play on it.