I really enjoyed this in depth look at Reddit's history. I never realized what an early member Aaron Swartz was, and found a lot of the Conde stuff pretty revealing. The competition and eventual victory over Digg also has some nice anecdotes to take away. And I'm impressed by this kind of journalism coming from Mashable, it'd be nice to see more of this.
Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
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Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#12I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#13I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
Yeah, my only gripe is his implication that Chris failed to pull off the punk look.
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#14I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
Yeah, my only gripe is his implication that Chris failed to pull off the punk look.
My only gripe was that he didn't use any quotes from the two hours I spent on the phone with him. :)
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#15I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
I agree (and also spoke with Seth for a little while) -- this is a great telling of the personal and market forces behind the org.
However, I would say this is only half of the story. The other half comes from the community of users who in Erik's words did "the hard part". I hope that someday we'll see as thoughtful a telling of those stories.
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#16This article only touches lightly on what I believe to be Reddit's primary weakness, namely the inability to elect moderators for various subs. If someone is able to do a Reddit-like site with a fair means for nominating and electing moderators they will have a good chance at eclipsing Reddit's success. Reddit could also implement this themselves, and given the sometimes questionable actions of some moderators (e.g.…
I couldn't agree more, the moderator problem is huge. I spend a lot of time on reddit, but it's still not clear to me how mods and mod policies are chosen, and more often than not I see the mods doing an absolutely terrible job.
For example, it's quite common to see a post on the front page that is based on a lie (e.g., the OP claims some content as his own). Everybody in the comments knows it. Why can't a mod step in and remove this garbage?
Another example, /r/pics is full of posts that break the community guidelines. Often the top comment will point this out, but the mods are either absent or they don't care, so the sub continues to get worse.
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#17This article only touches lightly on what I believe to be Reddit's primary weakness, namely the inability to elect moderators for various subs. If someone is able to do a Reddit-like site with a fair means for nominating and electing moderators they will have a good chance at eclipsing Reddit's success. Reddit could also implement this themselves, and given the sometimes questionable actions of some moderators (e.g.…
If you don't like the moderators of a subreddit, you can always start a new subreddit.
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#18This article only touches lightly on what I believe to be Reddit's primary weakness, namely the inability to elect moderators for various subs. If someone is able to do a Reddit-like site with a fair means for nominating and electing moderators they will have a good chance at eclipsing Reddit's success. Reddit could also implement this themselves, and given the sometimes questionable actions of some moderators (e.g.…
Reddit is a site with an incredible amount of diversity. You simultaneously have subreddits like /r/TwoXChromosomes/ and /r/pua (they hate each other) on the same website. Electing moderators plus entryism will kill this diversity - a large subreddit can direct it's members enter a smaller conflicting one and vote for moderators who will kill it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
Exit/competition is a better mechanism. If you don't like /r/atheism you can create /r/atheismplus.
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#19I'm surprised that no mention was made of the big rewrite. A lot of us early users were lisp/Graham followers and intrigued by the fact that the site was written in lisp. I seem to recall the rewrite being a big deal.
Re: Aliens in the Valley: The History of Reddit
#20I was interviewed for this article (as well as many of the other early reddit folks), and I think it turned out well. It's one of the few articles about reddit where the author actually spoke to any of us, and it shows in the depth and accuracy.
Not perfect, but it really was pretty damn close to 100% accurate.