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| Screenshot reddit front page on June 11, 2008reddit front page on June 11, 2008 | |
| Type of site | News aggregation site |
|---|---|
| Owner | Condé Nast Publications |
| Created by | Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian |
| URL | www.reddit.com |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Free |
reddit (also Reddit) is a social news website on which users can post links to content on the Internet. Other users may then vote the posted links down or up, causing them to appear more or less prominently on the Reddit home page.
Overview
The site has discussion areas in which users may discuss the posted links and vote for or against others' comments. When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default, although a reader can display it through a link or preference. Users who submit articles which other users like and subsequently "vote up" receive "karma" points as a reward for submitting interesting articles.
Reddit also includes topical sections called "subreddits", which focus on specific topics, such as politics, programming, "not safe for work", science, and "jailbait". There are hundreds of subreddits. Users can create subreddits.
The Reddit logo changes for various holidays and often for no reason, paying homage to Star Wars, classic video games, and geek culture in general. It often changes in response to major discussion subjects within the site or major news stories.
Reddit developers have built a system to aid with curtailing spam, which allows users to report suspected abuses.
Yo Dawg
Reddit is currently down. Feel free to add comments.
History
Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, 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 and Aaron Swartz in 2005. Aaron Swartz joined in late January 2006 as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami. The combined company was known as "not a bug." Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired not a bug on October 31, 2006.
On June 18, 2008, Reddit became an open source project. With the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available on another website dubbed "Fixxit."
Reddit was named by Ohanian while browsing the University of Virginia's Alderman Library. It is short for "read it," and is generally pronounced in the past perfect tense, as in "I have read it."
Technology
Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp, 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.
It now uses the Pylons web framework.
Reddit is hosted on several Debian Linux servers running lighttpd, HaProxy, and paster.
In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery.
On February 18, 2009, Reddit released an iPhone Application for $1.99 with a free, ad-supported version coming in the future. Reddit has since updated the app to version 1.0.1, which fixes a problem causing some users to experience a crash while loading user settings.
See also
References
- reddits
- Adams, Richard (2005-12-08). "reddit.com". The Guardian. Retrieved 2006-12-23.
- Swartz, Aaron (February 27, 2006). "Introducing Infogami". Infogami. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
- Arrington, Michael (October 31, 2006). "Breaking news: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires reddit". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2007-01-06.
- Open source announcement on the Reddit blog
- http://code.reddit.com/
- "reddit nostalgia: whence came the name?," on Alexis Ohanian's blog
- "On lisp" blog post by reddit moderator "spez," detailing the reasons for switching to python from lisp
- Official web.py site
- http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscommunity/Sites+Using+Pylons
- Netcraft report on reddit.com
External links
- Official site
- Fixxit (Reddit's code repository)
- think you've reddit all? - Alexis's blog (the logo artist).
- Interview with Reddit - Interview with Steve Huffman, co-founder of reddit.
- Interview with Reddit II - Interview with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit.
- Interview - Alexis Ohanian, reddit Co-Founder - Interview with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of reddit.
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