| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder(s) | Steve Huffman Alexis Ohanian |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Yishan Wong (CEO) |
| Owner | Advance Publications |
| Employees | 11[1] |
| Slogan | The front page of the internet |
| Website | reddit.com |
| Alexa rank | |
| Type of site | Social news |
| Advertising | Banner ads |
| Registration | Optional, required to submit |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Current status | Active |
Reddit (stylized as reddit; pronounced /ˈrɛdɪt/)[3] is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.
Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in October 2006. In September 2011, Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications.
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Registered users (also referred to as redditors) may subscribe to individual reddits (called "subreddits" informally, but "reddits" officially) — communities created around specific areas of interest — to customize the content that appears on their front page, or subscribe to no individual reddits and have a general front page displayed; however, as of October 18, 2011, the general front page was archived[4] owing to a changing community.[5][6][7][8] Front page rank, for both the general front page and for individual reddits, is determined by the age of the submission, positive ("upvoted") to negative ("downvoted") feedback ratio and the total vote count.[9] Dozens of submissions cycle through these front pages daily.
Users submit content via links or with "self" posts that contain user-generated text. Other users may then vote the post "up" or "down," with the most successful posts gaining prominence by reaching the site's front page or the front page of individual reddits, through the ranking process described above. Users may also comment on the posted links or "self" posts and reply to other commentators, much like an online forum or discussion group. Unlike typical forums, however, comments can also be "upvoted" or "downvoted" by other users. Comment votes do not affect the main article's rank, but when the "comments" link is clicked from a front page, only the most popular comments are shown according to the default comment preference view (which can be changed to list comments in other forms of ascension). The user must click an additional link or change preferences to see all comments. If a user posts an item that becomes popular, or posts a comment which is positively received by the community, the user then earns either "link karma" or "comment karma," respectively. Users cannot get karma for self posts, however. The karma can indicate the user's overall contributions on the site, and reflects how their contributions have been received by the community.
As of June 2011[update], commentary on the site is particularly active, often running into the hundreds on some submissions. Popular comments have generated many memes within the Reddit community.[citation needed]
Any registered user may create a subreddit, although a link to do so does not appear on the user's homepage until after thirty days.[10] There are over 67,000 subreddits to peruse, with the default set being (as of May 7, 2012):
| Name | Subscribers (To nearest 10,000) | Created |
|---|---|---|
| pics | 1,720,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| gaming | 1,450,000 | 2007-09-17 |
| worldnews | 1,530,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| videos | 1,270,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| todayilearned | 1,370,000 | 2008-12-27 |
| IAmA | 1,320,000 | 2009-05-27 |
| funny | 1,760,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| atheism | 740,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| politics | 1,340,000 | 2007-08-05 |
| science | 1,340,000 | 2006-10-18 |
| AskReddit | 1,580,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| technology | 1,110,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| WTF | 1,360,000 | 2008-01-25 |
| blog & announcements | 1,590,000 & 1,720,000 | 2008-01-25 & 2009-06-17 |
| bestof | 660,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| AdviceAnimals | 810,000 | 2010-12-07 |
| Music | 880,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| aww | 770,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| movies | 760,000 | 2008-01-28 |
Users may customize what is shown on their personal front page by subscribing to individual reddits through a page that shows all reddits available — http://www.reddit.com/reddits/ . The site's general front page is also accessible via a link to "all" at the top of the individual user's customised front page.
The Reddit community has been known to socialise at local parks and bars around the world,[11] and there are many localised reddits for local meetings.
One of the most popular Reddits is IAmA “I am a” where users prompt others to AMA “Ask me anything”. Recently, many celebrities have taken to this section, including Jimmy Kimmel, Ron Paul, Stephen Colbert, Bear Grylls, Deadmau5, Zach Braff, Neil Strauss, Tim Ferriss, and others.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] All allowing users to ask any questions they wish. The two most popular AMAs all time are Neil Degrasse Tyson and Ken Jennings.[20]
Reddit was founded in June 2005 [21] by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in Medford MA, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia.[6] It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe in 2005. Aaron Swartz joined in late January 2006 as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami.[22] Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006.[23] Shortly thereafter, Swartz was fired.[24]
On June 18, 2008, Reddit became an open source project.[25] With the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available on Github.[26]
By the end of 2008, the team had grown to include Erik Martin, Jeremy Edberg,[27] David King,[28] and Mike Schiraldi.[29] In 2009, Huffman and Ohanian moved on to form Hipmunk, recruiting Slowe[30] and King[31] shortly thereafter.
In July 2010, after explosive traffic growth, reddit introduced Reddit Gold, offering new features for a price of US$3.99/month or US$29.99/year.[32] The revenue and attention got them approval to buy more servers and employ more people.
On September 6, 2011, reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, now operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications.[33]
On January 11, 2012 Reddit announced that it would be participating in a 12-hour sitewide blackout in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act.[34] The blackout occurred on January 18 and coincided with the blackouts of Wikipedia and several other Internet properties.
According to Google DoubleClick Ad Planner's estimate, the median U.S. Reddit user is male (72%), 25–34 years of age, has some college education, and is in the lowest income bracket of US$0–$24,999. The analysis also shows that many of the top ten audience interests are in the tech field, suggesting a computer savvy demographic.[35]
In September 2010, Reddit users started a movement to persuade Stephen Colbert to have a rally in Washington DC.[36] The movement was started by user mrsammercer, in a post where he describes waking up from a dream in which Stephen Colbert holds a satirical rally in D.C.[37]
He writes, "This would be the high water mark of American satire. Half a million people pretending to suspend all rational thought in unison. Perfect harmony. It'll feel like San Francisco in the late 60s, only we won't be able to get any acid."
The idea resonated with the Reddit community, which launched a campaign to bring the event to life. Over $600,000[38] was raised for charity to gain the attention of Colbert. The campaign was mentioned on-air several times, and when the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was held in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 2010, thousands of redditors made the journey.[39]
During a post-rally press conference, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian asked, "What role did the Internet campaign play in convincing you to hold this rally?" Jon Stewart responded by saying that, though it was a very nice gesture, the two had already thought of the idea prior and the deposit on using the National Mall was already paid during the summer, so it acted mostly as a "validation of what we were thinking about attempting."[40] In a message to the Reddit community, Colbert later added, "I have no doubt that your efforts to organize and the joy you clearly brought to your part of the story contributed greatly to the turnout and success."[41]
Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in December 2005.[42] The reasons given for the switch were faster performance, wider access to code libraries, and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework that former Reddit employee Aaron Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project.[43]
Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework.[44] As of November 2009[update], Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services.[45]
Reddit uses PostgreSQL as primary datastore and slowly moving to Apache Cassandra, a column oriented datastore. It uses RabbitMQ for offline processing, HAProxy for load balancing and memcached for caching. In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery.[46]
On June 7, 2010, Reddit staff launched a revamped mobile interface featuring rewritten CSS, a new color scheme, and a multitude of improvements.[47]
There are several unofficial applications that use the Reddit API on the Android Market, including Reddit is Fun,[48] Andreddit,[49] F5, BaconReader,[50] and an Android tablet specific application called Reddita.[51] For Apple's iOS, there is an official Reddit app called iReddit [52] and the user favorite, but unofficial, Alien Blue (also available as Alien Blue HD for the iPad).[53]
On July 21, 2010, Reddit outsourced the Reddit search engine to Flaptor, who used its search product IndexTank.[54]
The website is known for its open nature and diverse user community that generate its content. Its demographics allows for wide-ranging subject areas, or main subreddits, that receive much attention, as well as the ability for smaller subreddits to serve more niche purposes. The unique possibilities that subreddits provide create new opportunities for raising attention and fostering discussion across many areas. In gaining popularity in terms of unique users per day, Reddit has been a platform for many to raise publicity for a number of causes. And with that increased ability to garner attention and a large audience, users can use one of the largest communities on the Internet for new, revolutionary, and influential purposes.[55]
Its popularity has enabled users to take unprecedented advantage of such a large community. Its innovative socially-ranked rating and sorting system drives a method that is useful for fulfilling certain goals of viewership or simply finding answers to interesting questions. User sentiments about the website's function and structure include feelings about the breadth and depth of the discussions on Reddit and how the site makes it easy to discover new and interesting items. Almost all of the user reviews on Alexa.com, which rates Reddit's monthly unique traffic rating 125th in the United States, mention Reddit's "good content" as a likable quality. However, others raise the negative aspects of the potential for Reddit's communities to possess a "hive mind" of sorts[56], embodying some negative aspects of group interaction theories like crowd psychology and collective consciousness.
In recent history, Reddit has been known as the instigator of several large-scale projects, some short and others long-term, in order to benefit others. A selection of major events are outlined below:
The website has a strong culture of free speech and very few rules about the types of content that may be posted; it only prohibits posting of personal information. This has led to the creation of several subreddits that have been perceived as extremely offensive, including forums dedicated to jailbait (since banned)[69] and pictures of dead bodies; several such subreddits were the focus of an edition of Anderson Cooper 360 in September 2011.[70] However, "Suggestive or sexual content featuring minors" was not explicitly banned until February 2012, after members of the forum Something Awful planned to send correspondence to "Parent Teacher Associations, politicians, churches, news outlets and the FBI" about such subreddits.[71] In March 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center included r/mensrights as part of its coverage of misogyny and the men's rights movement.[72]
In May 2010, reddit was named in Lead411's "2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies" list.[73]
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