Reddit
Encyclopedia
reddit 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
.
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.
, 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.
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.
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
.
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.
, 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.
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.
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
.
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.
, 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.
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.
Reddit was founded in June 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia
. 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. Condé Nast Publications
, owner of Wired
, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006. Shortly thereafter, Swartz was fired.
project. With the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available on Github
.
.
Ad Planner's estimate, the median U.S. Reddit user is male, 35-44 years of age, has some college education, and is making a middle-range income of $25,000 - $49,000 USD. The analysis also shows that the top audience interests of the site are development tools, scripting languages, and C and C++, suggesting a computer savvy demographic and culture.
to have a rally in Washington DC. 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.
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 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.
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." 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."
but was rewritten in Python
in 2005. 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.
Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework. , Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services
.
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
.
, a new color scheme, and a multitude of improvements.
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
and pictures of dead bodies.
Social news
A social news website is a type of website that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity.-Slashdot:Slashdot, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors...
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
Condé Nast Publications
Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...
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
Advance Publications
Advance Publications, Inc., is an American media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. It is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family...
.
Overview
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 owing to a changing community. 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. 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.
, 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.
reddits
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. There are over 67,000 subreddits to peruse, with the default set being (as of October 18th 2011):| Name | Subscribers (To nearest 10,000) | Created |
|---|---|---|
| pics | 1,060,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| gaming | 850,000 | 2007-09-17 |
| worldnews | 920,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| videos | 650,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| todayilearned | 690,000 | 2008-12-27 |
| IAmA | 670,000 | 2009-05-27 |
| funny | 1,070,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| atheism | 250,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| politics | 850,000 | 2007-08-05 |
| science | 670,000 | 2006-10-18 |
| AskReddit | 940,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| technology | 420,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| WTF | 700,000 | 2008-01-25 |
| blog & announcements | 990,000 & 1,080,000 | 2008-01-25 & 2009-06-17 |
| bestof | 160,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| AdviceAnimals | 170,000 | 2010-12-07 |
| Music | 260,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| aww | 180,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| askscience | 160,000 | 2008-09-05 |
| trees | 141,000 | 2009-10-15 |
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.
Reddit meet ups
The Reddit community has been known to socialise at local parks and bars around the world, and there are many localised reddits for local meetings.History
reddit is a social newsSocial news
A social news website is a type of website that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity.-Slashdot:Slashdot, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors...
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
Condé Nast Publications
Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...
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
Advance Publications
Advance Publications, Inc., is an American media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. It is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family...
.
Overview
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 owing to a changing community. 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. 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.
, 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.
reddits
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. There are over 67,000 subreddits to peruse, with the default set being (as of October 18th 2011):| Name | Subscribers (To nearest 10,000) | Created |
|---|---|---|
| pics | 1,060,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| gaming | 850,000 | 2007-09-17 |
| worldnews | 920,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| videos | 650,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| todayilearned | 690,000 | 2008-12-27 |
| IAmA | 670,000 | 2009-05-27 |
| funny | 1,070,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| atheism | 250,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| politics | 850,000 | 2007-08-05 |
| science | 670,000 | 2006-10-18 |
| AskReddit | 940,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| technology | 420,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| WTF | 700,000 | 2008-01-25 |
| blog & announcements | 990,000 & 1,080,000 | 2008-01-25 & 2009-06-17 |
| bestof | 160,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| AdviceAnimals | 170,000 | 2010-12-07 |
| Music | 260,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| aww | 180,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| askscience | 160,000 | 2008-09-05 |
| trees | 141,000 | 2009-10-15 |
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.
Reddit meet ups
The Reddit community has been known to socialise at local parks and bars around the world, and there are many localised reddits for local meetings.History
reddit is a social newsSocial news
A social news website is a type of website that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity.-Slashdot:Slashdot, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors...
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
Condé Nast Publications
Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...
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
Advance Publications
Advance Publications, Inc., is an American media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. It is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family...
.
Overview
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 owing to a changing community. 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. 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.
, 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.
reddits
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. There are over 67,000 subreddits to peruse, with the default set being (as of October 18th 2011):| Name | Subscribers (To nearest 10,000) | Created |
|---|---|---|
| pics | 1,060,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| gaming | 850,000 | 2007-09-17 |
| worldnews | 920,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| videos | 650,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| todayilearned | 690,000 | 2008-12-27 |
| IAmA | 670,000 | 2009-05-27 |
| funny | 1,070,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| atheism | 250,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| politics | 850,000 | 2007-08-05 |
| science | 670,000 | 2006-10-18 |
| AskReddit | 940,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| technology | 420,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| WTF | 700,000 | 2008-01-25 |
| blog & announcements | 990,000 & 1,080,000 | 2008-01-25 & 2009-06-17 |
| bestof | 160,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| AdviceAnimals | 170,000 | 2010-12-07 |
| Music | 260,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| aww | 180,000 | 2008-01-24 |
| askscience | 160,000 | 2008-09-05 |
| trees | 141,000 | 2009-10-15 |
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.
Reddit meet ups
The Reddit community has been known to socialise at local parks and bars around the world, and there are many localised reddits for local meetings.History
Reddit was founded in June 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
. It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe in 2005. Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification...
joined in late January 2006 as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami. Condé Nast Publications
Condé Nast Publications
Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...
, owner of Wired
Wired (magazine)
Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...
, acquired Reddit on October 31, 2006. Shortly thereafter, Swartz was fired.
Open source
On June 18, 2008, Reddit became an open sourceOpen source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
project. With the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available on Github
Github
GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both commercial plans and free accounts for open source projects...
.
Growth
By the end of 2008, the team had grown to include Erik Martin, Jeremy Edberg, David King, and Mike Schiraldi. In 2009, Huffman and Ohanian moved on to form Hipmunk, recruiting Slowe and King shortly thereafter.Reddit Gold
In July 2010, facing severe underfunding despite explosive traffic growth, Reddit introduced Reddit Gold, offering new features for a price of US$3.99/month or US$29.99/year. The revenue and attention got them approval to buy more servers and employ more people.Independence
On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, now operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance PublicationsAdvance Publications
Advance Publications, Inc., is an American media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. It is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family...
.
Demographics
According to Google DoubleClickDoubleClick
DoubleClick is a subsidiary of Google that develops and provides Internet ad serving services. Its clients include agencies, marketers and publishers who serve customers like Microsoft, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Motorola, L'Oréal, Palm, Inc., Apple Inc., Visa USA, Nike, Carlsberg among others...
Ad Planner's estimate, the median U.S. Reddit user is male, 35-44 years of age, has some college education, and is making a middle-range income of $25,000 - $49,000 USD. The analysis also shows that the top audience interests of the site are development tools, scripting languages, and C and C++, suggesting a computer savvy demographic and culture.
"Restoring Truthiness" Campaign
In September 2010, Reddit users started a movement to persuade Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits.Colbert originally studied to be an...
to have a rally in Washington DC. 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.
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 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.
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." 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."
Technology
Reddit was originally written in Common LispCommon Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
but was rewritten in Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
in 2005. 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
Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz is an American programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist. He is best known in programming circles for co-authoring the RSS 1.0 specification...
developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project.
Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework. , Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that together make up a cloud computing platform, offered over the Internet by Amazon.com...
.
Reddit uses PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...
as primary datastore and slowly moving to Apache Cassandra, a column oriented datastore. It uses RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software , using the standard Advanced Message Queuing Protocol . The RabbitMQ server is written in Erlang and is built on the Open Telecom Platform framework for clustering and failover. Rabbit Technologies Ltd., acquired in April 2010 by VMware, develops...
for offline processing, HAProxy for load balancing and memcached for caching.
In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery
JQuery
jQuery is a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig...
.
Mobile web
On June 7, 2010, Reddit staff launched a revamped mobile interface featuring rewritten CSSCSS
-Computing:*Cascading Style Sheets, a language used to describe the style of document presentations in web development*Central Structure Store in the PHIGS 3D API*Closed source software, software that is not distributed with source code...
, a new color scheme, and a multitude of improvements.
Client interface applications
There are several unofficial applications that use the Reddit API, including reddit is fun, Andreddit, F5, BaconReader, and an Android tablet specific application called Reddita.Search
On July 21, 2010, Reddit out-sourced the reddit search engine to Flaptor, who used its search product IndexTank.Culture
Reddit is known for its various site-wide charity campaigns which have included- In early December of 2010, the members of the Christianity subreddit and the Atheism subreddit came together to cross-promote fundraising drives for World VisionWorld VisionWorld Vision, founded in the USA in 1950, is an evangelical relief and development organization whose stated goal is "to follow our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in working with the poor and oppressed to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the good news of the Kingdom of...
's Clean Water Fund and Médecins Sans FrontièresMédecins Sans Frontières' , or Doctors Without Borders, is a secular humanitarian-aid non-governmental organization best known for its projects in war-torn regions and developing countries facing endemic diseases. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland...
(Doctors Without Borders), respectively. Later, the Islam subreddit joined in, raising money for Islamic ReliefIslamic ReliefIslamic Relief Worldwide is a Muslim international relief and development organization consisting of a family of 15 aid agencies that aims to alleviate the suffering of the world’s poorest people...
. In less than a week, the three communities (as well as the reddit community at-large) raised over $45,000 for charity. - In early October 2010, a story was posted on Reddit about a seven-year-old girl, Kathleen Edward, who was in the advanced stages of Huntington’s disease. The girl's neighbors were taunting her and her family. Redditors banded together and gave the girl a shopping spree at Tree Town Toys, a toy store local to the story owned by a reddit user.
- Reddit started the largest Secret SantaSecret SantaSecret Santa is a Western Christmas tradition, in which members of a group or community are randomly assigned a person to whom they anonymously give a gift. Often practiced in workplaces, or amongst large families, participation in it is usually voluntary...
program in the world, which is still in operation to date. For the 2010 Holiday season, 92 countries were involved in the Secret Santa program. There were 17,543 participants, and $662,907.60 was collectively spent on gift purchases and shipping costs. - Members from reddit donated over $600,000 to DonorsChooseDonorsChooseDonorsChoose.org is a United States based nonprofit organization that provides a way for people to donate directly to specific projects at public schools ....
in support of Stephen Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive. The donation spree broke previous records for the most money donated to a single cause by the reddit community and resulted in an interview with Colbert on reddit. - Reddit users donated $185,356.70 to Direct Relief International for Haiti after the earthquake devastated the island in January 2010.
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
Jailbait
Jailbait is American English slang for a person who is younger than the legal age of consent for sexual activity, but physically mature enough to be mistaken for an adult and be considered sexually desirable...
and pictures of dead bodies.
Awards
In May 2010, Reddit was named in Lead411's "2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies" list.See also
- DiggDiggDigg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
- DiigoDiigoDiigo is a social bookmarking website which allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag web-pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. These annotations can be kept private, shared with a group within...
- Delicious
- FarkFarkFark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites...
- ImgurImgurimgur is an online image hosting service founded by Alan Schaaf. It offers free image hosting to millions of users a day, serving over thirty terabytes of images daily....
- StumbleUponStumbleUponStumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.Toolbar versions exist for...
- SlashdotSlashdotSlashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
- Social bookmarkingSocial bookmarkingSocial bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
- Social newsSocial newsA social news website is a type of website that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity.-Slashdot:Slashdot, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors...
- Web 2.0Web 2.0The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
External links
- reddit's official blog
- reddit's source code (hosted by GitHubGithubGitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both commercial plans and free accounts for open source projects...
) - Alien Logo Archive