By Skye Mainguy and Hekmat Iskandarani

WHAT IS REDDIT?

A social news and entertainment website, where registered users submit content in the form of a link or a text post

A source for what’s new and popular on the web

In English: An online community where people can go and submit links or photos, get votes on said links or photos, and even have discussions.

The more upvotes you get, the more “karma” one receives. Basically the amount of points you get.

There are subreddits for what you particularly may be interested in such as: reddit.com/r/aww or reddit.com/r/wtf, etc…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlI022aUWQQ

SOME HISTORY ABOUT REDDIT

Reddit started in June 2005 in Massachusetts by:

Steve Hoffman and Alexis Ohanian

Alexis was studying as a law student when at a Waffle

House, he first thought up the idea and decided he’d rather

do independent projects than become a lawyer

Y Combinator was the first initial funder for Reddit

THE ORIGINAL SKETCHES

Alexis, bored in his marketing class of senior year, starting sketching what Their new website would be called, and what the logo would be.

Alexis decided he wanted a mascot, and these are the first original drawings.

“THE FRONT PAGE OF THE INTERNET” – REDDIT’S SLOGAN In January 2006, Reddit merged with a company called Infogami

Reddit was later on bought by a publications company called Conde Nast Publications on October 31, 2006.

By September 6, 2011, Reddit split from Conde Nast Publications and was a subsidiary of its parents company, Advance Publications.

By 2012, Reddit re-incorporated and is now a complete independent entity.

Reddit’s headquarters is in San Francisco, California.

The current CEO of Reddit is Yishan Wong.

PLATFORM

Reddit is written in Python, however was previously written in Common Lisp The change was so that there could be a wider access to code libraries and greater development flexibility

It uses Pylon framework and also uses Amazon Web Services, Amazon CloudSearch, and jQuery

PostgreSQL: Primary datastore and slowly moving to Apache Cassandra

RrabbitMQ: Offline processing

HAProxy: Load balancing

Memcached: Caching

Flaptor: Reddit’s search engine

Reddit created an API for mobile interfaces using re-written CSS

In addition, there are also several Windows 8 apps, and an unofficial desktop app called Reditr exists that is compatible with Windows, OS X, Linux and ChromeOS

FUNDING AND PROFITS

Reddit is NON-PROFIT

Actually, Reddit actually loses more money than they make

However, Reddit can make money from the following: Advertisements

Reddit Gold (Just an upgrade for your account by removing ads and other small things, but is really just a way of supporting the website)

Reddit Gifts

Reddit makes money for other purposes, not Reddit itself

HOW REDDIT GREW

Reddit grew, fast, within the last couple of years. More and more people have joined Reddit for various reasons:

It’s entertaining and a good way to keep informed on the latest

It allows others to share

It has a variety of categories for people’s personal interests, so they can keep updated and share what they find intriuging

It involves more than just ordinary people, but also celebrities when they do an Ask Me Anything (AMA)

Examples of those who have done AMA’s are: President Obama, Snoop Dogg, and Alexis Ohanian himself!

It’s informative, entertaining, and social all at the same time

KEY MOMENTS

Alexis Ohanian’s first fundraiser that raised over $3K.

This began the spread of people getting together for even more fundraisers and charities

This gained a lot of publicity and more people were interested to see what Reddit was about and how they could help or join

The rise of Memes pop culture brought a lot of people in because of its huge gain in popularity

Having the largest Secret Santa in the world

Recently Reddit was running out of money, so Redditors started buying Reddit gold, exchanging and buying Reddit gold karma, along with more gift exchanges to keep Reddit running.

CHARITY EXAMPLES

Redditors raised over $70,000 to the Faraja orphanage in Africa in order to make it more secure and build improvements

A 7 year old girl Kathleen Edward, posted on Reddit about her advanced stages of Huntington’s disease. Redditors got together and gave her a shopping spree at Tree Town Toys, a local store owned by one of the redditors.

Over $185,356 was donated to Direct Relief International for Haiti

In addition, over $600,000 was donated to DonorsChoose in support of Stephen Colbert’s March to Keep Fear Alive

REDDIT SITE

Color scheme: Blue, dark grey, black, and white

Logo: Alien man (also called a Snew)

Banner: The usual Reddit

However with each subreddit, the logo and banner usually changes, banner is optional:

HOW TO CREATE AN ACCOUNT

CHANGES TO REDDIT

Since Reddit started, there have been multiple changes, for instance:

The written code as discussed was changed from Common Lisp to Python

Reddit Gold and Reddit gifts came about

Bitcoin started becoming accepted, you can donate in bitcoins

It became more user-friendly

Subreddits started to become more personalized and relatable to that specific category

CHANGES TO REDDIT

Instead of upvotes or downvotes, there used to be just “interesting” or “uninteresting”

Design has changed, but has always remained primitive

People mainly changed the site with new subreddits and add-ons

Their general goal and business plan has always remained the same

FUNCTIONS: WHAT IT’S FOR/WHY

It’s a discussion board where people post either educational, entertainment or news posts.

People from all over the world join this community in order to know, learn and update themselves.

Users post personal opinions of specific interests no matter what it is. It is very open speech.

Other than the obvious, people join the community so that they can feel involved and feel as though they are a part of something bigger

STRUCTURE

Categories on the upper page on specific interests available

Topics divided into subreddits where they are then put through an algorithm to sort them through popularity

Suggested topics available on what’s hot, new, rising, controversial etc.

Search engine and Log in information on the top right

FEATURES

Nothing significantly jumps out when you approach Reddit, it’s presented as a wall of text

Accessibility of the website does not need a Reddit account

You can not log in through any other social network except for Reddit

New users are often deterred by its’ simplistic and primal design, but it can be quite apparent with a bit of exploring and reading

It is extremely easy to share content but for the content to gain in popularity is something entirely different. You do care because you want to gain as many upvotes as possible on the content that you post.

IN COMPARISON…

Its easy to post and share content as long as you’re a Reddit user, but you must be registered

Reddit is unique, because people enjoyed its minimalist layout with non-intrusive targeted advertising

Unlike other websites, Reddit has unlimited user-created content and numerous categories

The list of Reddit’s guidelines and rules are very short and rarely enforced, censorship is at a minimum

Where other websites require various personal details, Reddit only requests that you give a username and password. At most, an e-mail. .But you can remain anonymous, for things such as confessions, embarrassing revelations, etc.

AMA…

AMA (I Am A): In an IAMA post, a person posts who they are, what they did or what they currently do. Other users can than ask the person questions that come to mind.

AMA (Ask Me Anything): In an AMA post, a person will answer questions about literally anything from Reddit users.

CELEBRITIES ON REDDIT

Not surprisingly, the biggest ever AMA to take place on the site was the one posted by Barack Obama, President of the United States on August 29, 2012. The AMA garnered almost 3 million page views on that day, with many more millions of page views following for the days after the AMA took place.

Rapper Snoop Dogg did an AMA on Reddit in December of 2012, which attracted over 1.6 million page views to the social news site just for that day. Reddit announced that it was the second biggest AMA to ever take place on the site.

Top celebrity on Reddit – Zach Braff

PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

Reddit as a website should work more on visuals and how the website is designed

It should be more organized in terms of setup

It should be broadcasted more and spoken about more

You should be able to post pictures without having to upload them online first by giving a link.

ALIEN BLUE

WILL REDDIT STILL BE POPULAR IN 2 YEARS?

Yes.

Thank You!