People soshalize. They don't care how it's spelled. They just do it.
In the past, emergency outages at Reddit have been caused by an overload of comments. When astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hit Reddit yesterday with “I am Neil deGrasse Tyson — AMA“, the community responded. During the subsequent slow period on Reddit early this morning, the site went into emergency maintenance mode for over an hour. Coincidence?
This should actually be a long, comprehensive piece detailing the recent meteoric rise, subsequent expansion of power, and reluctant emergence of the site into the same power category as Twitter and even (gulp!) Facebook. The numbers support it. The content is excellent (even though old-school users claim that it’s in decline). Mainstream media and average netizens are starting to take notice.
Calling Reddit “the best kept secret in social media” is no longer valid. The site is no longer a secret. Reddit is getting huge.
When Condé Nast acquired Reddit 5 years ago, they were getting 700k page views daily.
Today, Reddit gets 700k page views in a less than an hour… at 3am. In peak times, it can get that much traffic in 15 minutes.
For the last several days, I’ve been studying Reddit. I’ve been visiting the site daily for two years now but it was only recently that I actually started studying the site. What makes it tick? Why is it so successful in an arena that has eaten up so many for so long? Why does it continue to get stronger while others get weaker?
Whether they want to admit it or not, Reddit was once the ultimate “hipster” site. No, it wasn’t/isn’t populated by people who wearing horn-rim glasses and skinny jeans carrying around graphic novels in their hemp knapsacks. It was hipster because it was only cool to those lucky few who knew about it. The site normally broke EVERYTHING first to the point that when people saw something for the first time on Twitter or Facebook, Redditors could say, “Oh, I saw that on Reddit last week.”
Then, Digg V4 happened. Since then, the traffic has gone up tremendously.
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.
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.
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?
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.
