Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Happy 10th birthday to us

redditblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 108 posts

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#31

Post by Pxtl »

jedberg wrote: post #27
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #13

all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything

> Reddit, who was struggling at the time. This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

That's actually really surprising. I was part of the Digg exodus and I'd barely heard about Reddit at the time of the v4 debacle, while Digg was a pretty big brand in tech circles. Was it just better marketing while Reddit actually had a larger-but-quieter userbase at the time?

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#32

Post by hashberry »

jedberg wrote: post #27
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #13

all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything

> Reddit, who was struggling at the time. This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

I think people have this viewpoint because Reddit's popularity exploded after Digg v4 (August 2010):

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=digg%2C%20reddit&cmp...

It could be that Digg "power users" moving to Reddit helped it gain even more traction.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#34

Post by __z »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #13

all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything

Hardly. Before the v4 disaster almost everything posted on Digg's front page had a complaint saying "This was posted on Reddit yesterday."

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#35

Post by jedberg »

hashberry wrote: post #32
jedberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit, who was struggling at the time. This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

I think people have this viewpoint because Reddit's popularity exploded after Digg v4 (August 2010): https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=digg%2C%20reddit&cmp... It could be that Digg "power users" moving to Reddit helped it gain even more traction.

Using Google trends basically shows you the people who type "reddit" into their search bar increased. :)

I know that isn't entirely true, but yes, for the most part reddit's popularity in the press exploded afterwards because the press needed something new to write about.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#36

Post by jedberg »

Pxtl wrote: post #31
jedberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit, who was struggling at the time. This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

That's actually really surprising. I was part of the Digg exodus and I'd barely heard about Reddit at the time of the v4 debacle, while Digg was a pretty big brand in tech circles. Was it just better marketing while Reddit actually had a larger-but-quieter userbase at the time?

Digg spent a lot of money on marketing, while reddit spent none, so yeah, that was a big part of it. They had a lot of articles written about them because they had a fabulous marketing and PR team. One we were a bit envious of.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#37

Post by minimaxir »

jedberg wrote: post #27
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #13

all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything

> Reddit, who was struggling at the time. This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

Traffic didn't change much, but user behavior definitely did:

http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_score_reddit....

http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_comments_redd...

Source: http://minimaxir.com/2014/12/reddit-statistics/

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#38

Post by brador »

jedberg wrote: post #30
Someone1234 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did Obama's AMA impact the site's traffic? Aside from that AMA completely bringing the site down, it seemed to result in a longer term increase in users.

I'm not sure, I'd already left reddit by then. We tried to get him to do an AMA in 2008 but he wasn't interested. :)

How did you get that early traffic? Was it just google traffic?

What do you think made people stick in those early days without much happening on the site?

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#39

Post by DanBC »

Adirael wrote: post #15
meritt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more interested in how imgur survives since they serve up far more bandwidth that reddit does and their own advertising and community efforts are pretty young relatively, not to mention hotlinks bypass that entirely.

Bandwidth have been going down for years. I don't think they release numbers but the community in imgur is pretty active. There's a lot of people browsing imgur directly (they have a voting system, comments...) and know nothing about reddit. They have a lot of direct traffic to compensate for the cheap hotlinking.

Imgur is "bigger" than Reddit - at least, it has several tens of millions more uniques per month.

Re: Happy 10th birthday to us

#40

Post by drzaiusapelord »

jedberg wrote: post #27
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #13

all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything

> Reddit, who was struggling at the time. This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.

This is what I recall as well.

Personally, I don't buy too deep into v4 causing Digg's death. It certainly helped, but stuff like seeing "mrbabyman" and a dozen other power users controlling all the content became tiresome well before v4. Reddit was a little refreshing as I could post in a subreddit and have my content get a fair shake at being seen. That's still true today. My blog and my old webcomic have both been at the top of /r/comics and /r/android. The traffic and exposure was very nice and I think the upvote process is mostly fair. With sites like Digg or Slashdot there's zero chance my stuff would have gotten any exposure.

Post reply on HN