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Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might get a few details wrong; but HN certainly was inspired by reddit. Reddit was originally written in Lisp. Paul Graham had actually written an article about how Lisp was his secret weapon when building his Yahoo-acquired Viacom. Reddit was one of the first YC companies so I assume their language choice was inspired by this. Soon after launch reddit had performance issues and was rewritten in Python. This improv…
I always wonder how HN works without cookies. Can you share some insights on that?
HN does actually use a cookie called "user" when you login to keep you logged in. But for page to page state it uses an id in the url. That's why a lot of the internal links have a "fnid" in them and why you can't share those urls.
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#33Can someone explain to me how PG funded Reddit when it was more like a HN clone?
I might get a few details wrong; but HN certainly was inspired by reddit. Reddit was originally written in Lisp. Paul Graham had actually written an article about how Lisp was his secret weapon when building his Yahoo-acquired Viacom. Reddit was one of the first YC companies so I assume their language choice was inspired by this. Soon after launch reddit had performance issues and was rewritten in Python. This improv…
> Soon after launch reddit had performance issues and was rewritten in Python.
The reason was explained here:
http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
I quote:
Emacs and SLIME are a killer combination, but I develop on a Mac, and reddit.com is a FreeBSD box. On my Mac, my choices of threaded Lisp implementations was limited to OpenMCL, and in FreeBSD it's CMUCL. Because of the low-level socket and threading code we had to write, reddit would not run on my Mac, and I was always tethered to our FreeBSD development server. Not being able to program offline is a pain.
If Lisp is so great, why did we stop using it? One of the biggest issues was the lack of widely used and tested libraries. Sure, there is a CL library for basically any task, but there is rarely more than one, and often the libraries are not widely used or well documented. Since we're building a site largely by standing on the shoulders of others, this made things a little tougher. There just aren't as many shoulders on which to stand.
Back in 2005 Common Lisp had a fragmentation problem: not all libraries would work on all implementation/os pairs and not all implementations would work on all operating systems (in fact iirc no open source implementation would work on windows, freebsd, linux and mac)
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#34"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”" I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after th…
Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands- on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.
That should be very frustrating. Were you tempted to break with Conde and start again or some sort or change on your agreement with them?
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#35Keep in mind that when Reddit got acquired, Reddit gold doesn't exist yet. So they were losing (more) money every month.
reddit gold may never have worked if it was sold without understanding that reddit was in trouble and couldn't grow without the support of it's users. If it had been an out of the blue proposal to slap charges for features then people might have kicked up a fuss.
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking for Techcrunch endorsements is so 2009ish. People who know and can reddit, are doing fine because it is possibly one of the last few places on the Internet where pseudonym and trolling is still alive. You feel gratified by people answering your comment given that you have most likely trolled at first. You eventually get a peace later on because the community kept you alive and kicking. Hence it has all the ri…
A while back I deleted my Reddit account and just recently I've created a new one under my real name. I decided that if I was going to post, I would do so as myself and not hide behind an anonymous name. I hadn't really done any trolling in the past, but I'd participated in discussions I certainly wouldn't have participated in if they could have readily been tracked back to me. But for better or worse, I decided to g…
Out of personal curiosity: compared to the trolling before, how does your karma do? (especially given that most 6-figure karma "stars" mostly post half-funny, hivemind-compliant one-liners.. cheap laughs without substance.)
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands- on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.
That should be very frustrating. Were you tempted to break with Conde and start again or some sort or change on your agreement with them?
My "change on my agreement with them" was to quit.
Including myself, three of the four reddit programmers came to that conclusion within the same six month period. (Props to spladug for keeping the flame alive!)
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Reminds me of when people say that IT work should be cheap because "you're just pushing some buttons." Gee, I sure am glad President Obama took some time to join us kiddies in playing with our computers!
Pushing buttons does nothing, it's the order in which those buttons are pushed that requires intelligence, skill and experience.
Yeah. You're preaching to the choir, though!
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#39"Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”" I may be remembering stuff wrong, but wasn't there more tension + conflict during the period right after th…
Conde rightly gloats about how, during The Sarah Chubb Years, they were hands-off about meddling with reddit as a site, but they're eliding over how, during that same time, they were extremely hands- on about preventing us from hiring people or buying decent computer hardware.
This may have been a good thing. Digg didn't have any constraints on buying new hardware and hiring new people, and we can see how that ended (they bought too much, hired too many people, and collapsed)!
Re: Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking for Techcrunch endorsements is so 2009ish. People who know and can reddit, are doing fine because it is possibly one of the last few places on the Internet where pseudonym and trolling is still alive. You feel gratified by people answering your comment given that you have most likely trolled at first. You eventually get a peace later on because the community kept you alive and kicking. Hence it has all the ri…
A while back I deleted my Reddit account and just recently I've created a new one under my real name. I decided that if I was going to post, I would do so as myself and not hide behind an anonymous name. I hadn't really done any trolling in the past, but I'd participated in discussions I certainly wouldn't have participated in if they could have readily been tracked back to me. But for better or worse, I decided to g…
Well, that's not a bad decision if it works for you well. But anonymity doesn't necessarily equal to the poster wasting time. I use reddit with pseudonym and I don't troll.
My pseudonym is my authentic identity on Reddit, just as it is here on HN. A while ago I was using one identity here on HN and for one reason or another, some people didn't like what I had to say (even though personally I was very authentic) so they down-voted me so much that my score went in to negative, and I ended up deleting my account and recreating a new one. I have still not given up on being authentic under pseudonym.
The point is that you have to believe in the conversation - gaining and imparting knowledge - and not worry about the fluff and the other distraction of the Internet. The trend to have real names on the Internet, the trend to have face on the Internet....these are all distractions as far as I am concerned.
As long as we are typing and reading each other through letters and words, we don't need to see each others' names and pictures. It would be a different matter when we converse through video and audio.