Today is my 2nd Reddit birthday. I should be happy, but I’m not. There’s something that has been bugging me for a while and realizing that I’ve been here for 2 years is a reminder that it probably won’t be resolved anytime soon.
Reddit Moneybombing: Serious Cash from a Mischievous Community
April 9, 2011 By 1 Comment
There is a difference between Reddit and other social news sites. While they have never really staked a claim of being the biggest, baddest, or most powerful, they have demonstrated it time and time again, particularly in the arena of financial donations.
This graphic by WePay takes a look at some of the most significant random acts of moneybombing that have influenced people and charities across the world.
Is Conde Nast Squandering Reddit’s Potential?
March 19, 2011 By 4 Comments
How many software engineers does it take to operate a site that serves over 1 billion pageviews a month? At Reddit, the answer is (hopefully) one, at least for now.
Yesterday Senior Software Engineer Mike “Raldi” Schiraldi resigned to take on his “dream job” at Google, leaving the total headcount of software engines at one. David King left last week to join Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian at Hipmunk.
After eclipsing Digg to take the top spot amongst social news sites, Reddit has seen little in the way of “love” from their owners, Conde Nast. Promises have been made to dramatically increase the size of the skeleton crew that keeps the site running, but is that really enough?
Reddit vs Digg: A Case Study
January 11, 2011 By 37 Comments
We’ve been planning on this story for a while but it’s been challenging finding a piece of content that fit the criteria. It needed to be very close to being equally popular on both Digg and Reddit, plus we needed the site owner to be willing to share their analytics data with us. Thanks to our friends at Techi, we found a case study story.
Crossroads: 7 Questions that Twitter, Digg, and Others Must Answer in 2011
December 20, 2010 By 5 Comments
When I originally posted this article on Techi, I forgot to take one major thing into account. Most people who are passionate about their favorite social media sites are often blinded by their feelings. They understand the need for change and innovation but often do not take honest feedback very well.
That was the case with these questions as I received a barrage of emails, IMs, and even phone calls from people telling me that their favorite sites “are doing just fine, thank you very much.” In most cases, I replied with a terse but honest response.
“Wake up.”
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from MySpace, it’s that no matter how big you are you can fall if you don’t adjust. Social media is mercurial with it’s rate of change and as a result many (most?) who have fallen over the years did so because they didn’t ask themselves the tough questions.
Reddit goes into “read-only” mode; Digg quality crumbles as a result
May 5, 2010 By 41 Comments
Two sites, Reddit and Digg, went into emergency mode today as Reddit had technical difficulties preventing users from submitting new content to the site.
reddit is in “emergency read-only mode” right now.
you won’t be able to log in. we’re sorry, and are working frantically to fix the problem.
Other social news sites such as Digg experienced a drop in the quality of content as one of the primary sources for content, Reddit, went into “read-only mode” making it challenging for many top Digg users to find content. The front page of Digg has not yet experienced the fallout as most of the top images today were from yesterday’s Reddit front page, but tomorrow is expected to be a low-Digg-count-day with Redditors unable to supply Digg users with content to submit.
Many Redditors were seen outside today. Some made their monthly trip to the grocery store, barber shops, and liquor stores early, while others simply experienced external weather conditions for the first time in ages.
Social News “Darling” Imgur Has Staggering Statistics
January 27, 2010 By 1 Comment
When Imgur.com first hit the scene a year ago, it quickly became the “hip” way to post, host, and share images on Reddit. Digg took notice and it soon became the most popular image site there as well.
A year later, one thing is certain – Imgur’s numbers as a result are nothing short of amazing. While these numbers are nothing compared to more well-known image sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, or Imageshack, it is still impressive considering that the traffic is almost entirely social media driven.
Click to see the full view.
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Read more about social news on this blog.
How Spam Killed Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon
December 25, 2009 By 16 Comments
The statement could be pushed over to just about any true Web 2.0 site where voting and popularity determine the success of a piece of content. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace – overrun by spam. Mixx, Propeller, Yahoobuzz – spam havens.
For social news powerhouses Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon to be so changed by the presence of gobs and gobs of spam hits a little harder. They are the sites where I started my journey in Web 2.0. They are the shiny beacons of user-controlled, traffic-generating goodness that made mainstream media look to the people for their opinions and discoveries.
They are, for all intents and purposes, shells of what they should be, and spam is to blame. Perhaps more importantly, how they handled spam over the years has caused them to close their networks in one way or another through a series of witchhuntesque spam countermeasures.
Social News WAR pt 2/3. Ncomment does it again.
Lee Garnett from ncomment did it again. We knew that the first comic was absolutely amazing, but this Part 2 took it to another level.
Click the image for the full comic (but check out part I first if you haven’t already).
How awesome is that!
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Read more about social news on this blog.