It’s all hands on deck at Reddit this week.
In the wake of Digg’s bungled redesign, its rival is enjoying a surge in traffic and a jump in ad and subscription sales. Since Monday, the site has been averaging 900,000 uniques per day— a 50% increase from Reddit’s pre-”Digg 4″ average, according to senior programmer, Chris Slowe. The six-member team does not openly celebrate the technical woes of its competitor but there is a certain giddiness in the air at Reddit’s SF headquarters (a small room, tucked in the corner of Wired’s expansive office).
The Conde Nast owned startup is having a moment, and they know it.
On Thursday, we dropped by their offices for a pulse check. While programmer David King’s eyes were glued to his monitor— tweaking a feature that will hopefully improve the site’s scalability— senior programmer Chris Slowe was available to take our questions, video ahead. → Read More
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian will be taking a position at early stage venture firm Y Combinator, we’ve confirmed.
Ohanian left Reddit, one of the first Y Combinator startups, in 2009. He’s not returning to do another startup, like cofounder Steve Huffman did earlier this year with Hipmunk. Rather, he’ll be taking a position with Y Combinator itself.
His new position, based in New York, will be Y Combinator’s Ambassador to the East where he will be meeting with East coast applicants and generally representing Y Combinator. → Read More
The news page on Digg, and particularly the Technology category, is currently plastered with links to discussions and images posted on rival Reddit instead. That’ll bring Reddit some traffic this morning, but more importantly it’s a bit of an embarrassing situation for Digg.
The Next Web speculates that Reddit is ‘gaming’ Digg, but there seems to be something else at play here, namely Digg users actively displaying their discontent with the recently launched new version of the site by using it to promote links to its competitor. → Read More
It’s no secret that social link sharing community Reddit isn’t singing the praises of its corporate parent Condé Nast, which acquired the company in 2006. Earlier today the two sparred over running ads in support of California’s Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in the state. And Reddit has previously written about the shortage of resources that Condé Nast is willing to provide. Now Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the Cheezburger network, is offering to take Reddit off Condé’s hands.
In a letter published by The Daily What (a part of the Cheezburger network), Huh writes that he’s offered to buy Reddit before privately, and he’s now making it public. From the post:
Condé Nast, I’m publicly offering to buy Reddit. → Read More
Later this year, California residents will be voting on Proposition 19, a measure that would legalize marijuana in the state. And, given how much controversy revolves around the issue (think of the children!), we’re bound to see plenty of ads in the run-up to the November 2 election. Thing is, you won’t be seeing ads in favor of legalization on some of the web’s most popular sites, because their parent companies are afraid of being associated with a pro-marijuana stance.
The issue has come to a head over at Reddit, which reported to its users earlier today that its parent company Condé Nast would not allow it to accept paid ads in support of Prop. 19. Redditors predictably rebelled, voting up numerous stories in favor of the law (see screenshot below). And now, in a daring move, Reddit is fighting back too: it’s announced that it will begin running ads supporting Proposition 19, free of charge. → Read More
Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman has teamed with Adam Goldstein to create new travel site Hipmunk. Like Reddit, Hipmunk is a Y Combinator startup, making this the second time through the program for Huffman.
Reddit was founded in 2005 by Huffman and Alexis Ohanian as one of the first Y Combinator startups. The company was also one of Y Combinator’s first liquidity events when it was acquired by Condé Nast. Few startups have gathered such a rabid and loyal fanbase as Reddit – even with a giant corporate parent they recently were able to raise a substantial amount of money from users to help speed development cycles. → Read More
There’s always been a form of healthy rivalry between Reddit and Digg, and its respective user bases. I’m one of those indifferent people who think there’s plenty of room for multiple sites of the kind, and that these sites actually make each other stronger and better in their state of co-existence. Rising tide lifting all boats and all that.
Nevertheless, I was keen on sharing an email from reader Harry Maugans, which we received moments ago: (after the jump) → Read More
Late last week, news recommendation service reddit started soliciting users to donate i.e. subscribe to reddit gold in order to allow the Condé Nast-owned company to hire more people and buy more servers.
In a new blog post, reddit says approximately 6,000 users have donated to date. That represents less than 0.1 percent of reddit’s total number of users (unique visitors?), which comes in at roughly 8 million today, according to the company. → Read More
In a slightly odd blog post published Friday night, Condé Nast-owned news recommendation service reddit calls for help.
The company would love to hire engineers to complement the current technical team, which has been struggling with site sluggishness and outages lately and would also like to add some new features to reddit at some point.
However, they write, although the company is owned by a mega media corp with billions of dollars in revenue, there’s isn’t any budget to hire people and add more resources.
Its own revenues are too weak, they add, in a – refreshingly – brutally honest way. → Read More
If you have an iPhone or an Android phone and you’ve ever visiting reddit.com, you know it sucks. Reddit has never been about design, but the text is so small and the layout is spaced so poorly that it’s basically impossible to use and read on a small screen. The mobile optimized version of Reddit isn’t much better. Today, that finally changes.
Reddit has completely revamped the mobile web version of its site to be absolutely usable on touch screen devices. Gone are small, virtually unclickable buttons and links — with the new version, it’s all big buttons and easy-to-read coloring. → Read More
One of the founders of Reddit, a Digg-clone, openly criticized Digg founder Kevin Rose yesterday for his plans to implement “me-too” features into the new version of the service. We consider this to be absurd and rather impolite.
Yesterday we discovered a video showing some of the features of the upcoming relaunch of Digg. In a nutshell, Digg has been trying to find a way to leverage social sharing to make the site more relevant, and users will soon see links to interesting things based on the what people and entities they choose to follow are voting on.
That goal isn’t anything new, founder Kevin Rose has been talking openly about it for more than a year now. → Read More
Last fall Reddit, a very popular link sharing community, launched a new self-serve ad platform that allowed any of its users to spend a little dough to get their links prominently displayed on the site. The logic? People were always trying to game the system anyway, so Reddit figured it might as well get them to pay for it. Today, Reddit is rolling out an upgraded version of the ad platform.
The biggest addition to the ad platform, and the one that most people have been asking for, is targeting — you’ll now be able to specify which sections of Reddit you’d like your ad to appear on (there are many options, including everything from ‘funny’ to ‘cooking’). When you target a link at, say, the Science Reddit, it will appear both on that section and on the Reddit homepage for logged-in users who have subscribed to the Science section. Reddit is also using some logic to help advertisers targeting more niche Reddits get their money’s worth — if you target the ‘Knitting’ Reddit (which isn’t particularly popular), then Reddit will make sure that the small number of users who are subscribed to Knitting will see that ad on the Reddit homepage. → Read More
It’s easy to look at sites like Reddit, Digg, or any other substantially large web community, and view their aggregate userbase with a certain level of disdain — anonymity has the nasty habit of turning reasonable people into world-class jerks. But sometimes we come across stories that reaffirm that there are honest, kind people behind many of these avatars. One such case happened this holiday season on Reddit, where thousands of users have banded together to create what may have been the largest Secret Santa program of all time. And they managed to pull it off.
Reddit user Antonio Cangiano has written a long blog post detailing the program, and it’s really quite heartwarming. The whole thing started when a handful of Redditors decided amongst themselves that a Secret Santa program would be fun. → Read More
In a world where Facebook and Twitter dominate the headlines, it’s easy to forget that other social properties, like Reddit still send a ton of traffic to sites. But they absolutely do, and now you can buy your way into that. Starting today, Reddit is testing out a new closed beta experiment to allow anyone to purchase a sponsored link on Reddit’s homepage. Yes, that means you, not just some random advertiser. And not just the homepage, it’s the top overall link.
Now, obviously, this link will be clearly labeled as “sponsored,” but that shouldn’t make it that much less of an enticing opportunity for some individuals who want to drive traffic to their site. Reddit says it sees anywhere from a 2% to a 10% click-through-rate on the ads that run in this area. At the very least, this should mean thousands of hits coming to your site that wouldn’t otherwise get. → Read More
Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have just announced that they’ll be leaving the company come October 31, when their contracts expire. The news doesn’t come as a huge surprise — it will have been three years to the day that Condé Nast acquired Reddit, and the founders likely had a three year contract as part of the deal. Reddit’s post notes that while co-founder Chris Slowe’s contract also expired he’ll be staying on board.
Reddit was funded by Y Combinator and launched back in 2005, emerging as the most popular alternative to Digg. As with Digg, stories are presented based on how many people have up and down voted them, but the two sites have distinctly different communities. → Read More
One of the best features of Reddit that differentiates it from competitors is its karma system. Simply put, it’s an easy way to distinguish the submissions and comments from good users versus the bad ones. It’s also kind of a game to play. And as with all games, it’s more fun to play in real-time. And Reddit now has a app to do just that.
RedditAddict Lite is a new desktop application run on Adobe Air, that allows you to track both your regular Reddit karma and your comment karma in real-time. Both are displayed on a graph with different color lines, and you can set the data points to tone your graph. It also easily allows you to take a screengrab of your graph for those moments when your karma is peaking. → Read More
There are no shortage of job listing sites out there, especially in this economy. But how do you know if the jobs listed on any of them are actually any good? Why not vote on them?
Not surprisingly, that’s a key selling point of Reddit Jobs, a new job listing site branded by the popular social voting site. Just with the regular Reddit site, on the main page you’ll see a list of content — in this case, jobs — and you can give any of them an “up” or “down” vote depending on if you like them or not. “We think this is a pretty sweet opportunity for employers to find great tech-savvy folks and learn more about how they’re perceived by potential employees,” Luke Groesbeck, the co-founder of JobAlchemist (which created the site for Reddit), tells us. → Read More
Mixx is steadily growing, and they’re hoping to spur even greater traffic increases with a completely revamped website. But every social news service is showing growth, and Mixx actually appears to be lagging if you compare publicly available data.
Last time we wrote about Mixx, they were touting healthy traffic numbers and boasting the fact that Hitwise report suggested that its users are more mainstream than those of their main competitor Digg. Today, the company says its visitor numbers have increased to about 7 million per month (citing January figures), which is up from 5.8 million in October 2008.
Meanwhile, all the big social news and discovery services are showing healthy growth, and Mixx appears to still play in the minor leagues. Take a look at this snapshot from Compete, for example, which show Digg is thriving and Reddit is steadily outpacing Mixx. → Read More
Three years ago, Paul Graham and his Y Combinator incubator funded Reddit, a social news site that has grown to over 2.5 million unique visitors a month. Reddit has never been able to match the success of Digg, its closest competitor, but in 2006 it got its payday after being acquired by Condé Nast/Wired for an undisclosed amount. Now, it seems that Y Combinator is hoping that lightning will strike twice. Its latest startup, Slinkset, is looking to offer a “hosted Reddit” solution, allowing users to create their own social news sites with as little technical knowhow as possible. You can see a hosted version of the site that has been created for TechCrunch readers here. At first glance, Slinkset looks like little more than a Reddit clone. Users can vote news stories Up or Down, with the most popular stories rising to the top of the page. The big difference here is that unlike Digg and Reddit, Slinkset isn’t looking to become a destination site. Instead, it’s offering users the chance to create their own branded “Reddits” with no coding necessary. For the time being Slinkset is offering its hosting service free of charge, with plans to introduce a fixed fee in the future. Unfortunately, despite its aspirations to let users to create no-hassle branded pages, Slinkset’s customization options are pretty limited. Site admins can easily swap the color schemes, adjust fonts, and add a logo, but that’s about it. In the future the site hopes to integrate drag-and-drop widgets and ad placement, but with a company that currently consists of only two co-founders, these are probably a ways off. So is Slinkset really necessary? You can already create your own hosted Reddit through Reddit itself (albeit with limited customizability). Mixx, another competitor in this space, also features a similar hosted offering. And the site’s launch comes less than a month after Reddit went open-source, allowing developers to create their own, fully tweakable, Reddit clones (you can see our version, Tech News, here). Slinkset co-founder Brett Gibson says that while the release of Reddit’s source code will help skilled programmers create their own social news site, it won’t do any good for the legions of bloggers and small-time sites that don’t know how to implement it, which is where he hopes Slinkset comes in. This may be the case, but unless Slinkset can improve on its customization features, it → Read More
Reddit announced an open source version of its popular news aggregator service this evening, and we’ve launched our own version of the service, called TechCrunch TechNews. Links from any news source can be added, we’ll leave it up to the community to filter it up or down. This is to take nothing away from Reddit itself, or Digg, Hacker News or the other dozens of news aggregation sites out there. We just want to see the news that our own community thinks is most relevant, and Reddit just made that incredibly easy for us. We put this together pretty quickly this afternoon, and it is still on one of our test servers. Over the next few days we’ll get the details sorted out. Here is a (completely unwatchable) video stream from the Reddit party tonight where earlier tonight they announced the new product, and the launch of TechNews. http://qik.com/player.swf?streamname=4458f969df8b45eaa92c6c4f1df31582&vid=106949&playback=false&polling=false&user=techcrunch&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous CrunchBase Information Reddit Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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