This is overdue, I know, especially considering today is Earth Day.
The last time I was in San Francisco, riding a bus out of the Haight, a group of six high school kids got on behind me. Despite not having been raised with younger siblings, I've gotten used to hanging out with young people. I feel quite comfortable around them.
Sprawled across the seats, this particular group looked just like an American Apparel ad: young, interracial, and apparently high. They were all clad in a colorful set of distinctly AA hoodies and shirts. Giggling, poking, pushing, laughing, they were all oblivious to the rest of us on the bus.
It almost felt voyeuristic, only I was in the ad with them -- wearing the same brand of sweatshirt. That, and I was definitely not high. But one out of two isn't bad.
So with all this lucidity, I couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed. Not just because I was sober, but because I liked American Apparel simply because they manufactured shirts here in the USA. And more importantly, they're not being manufactured in foreign sweatshops (presumably the working conditions here in the States are more humane -- sweatshops suck, where ever they are). All of our reddit shirts have been American Apparel for that very reason, even though it costs us a bit more.
Why is it that I don't know of any other companies doing it? Even mainstream business magazines have reported on American Apparel, so they must be doing well. We even parodied their ads on Gawker with a set of our own.
I chose to welcome spring this year with a daffodil (harder to draw than you'd think).
Steve surprised me with a link yesterday to a site called Octopz. Some of you may remember that we'd considered calling reddit "octopop". (The site would ironically have more than 8 popular articles on the front page.) As you know, we stuck with reddit, but we developed an affinity for all sites named octo-anything.
But not only is this startup -- which I know absoutely nothing else about -- named Octopz, it's also got an octopus for mascot.
Fake names are a violation of our Terms of Use. Facebook requires users to provide their full first name and at least one letter of their last name. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited. Nicknames are only permitted if they are a variation of your first or last name.
A while back, when Justin was just a guy wearing a camera (the feed hadn't gone live yet) they were looking for a logo. The fundamental part of any logo -- any website -- is undoubtedly the mascot. In fact, I think Emmett and Justin attributed the end of kiko to the absence of a mascot (c'mon, that calendar with only 6 days in a week was hardly a mascot).
So when they asked me to try making a gorilla mascot for their guerrilla tv campaign, I was happy to help (because I love puns). Once the logo was done, the emoticons had to follow. Now stop reading this blog and go watch Justin.tv!
(I got 20% equity for the design work!)
Well, we got rid of almost everything (and made $110 for TBTS in the process). There are still a couple futons and a computer chair left, but I was quite pleased to see that we helped furnish the homes of as many folks as we did. A top-10 redditor even dropped by and left with a few new (old) things. No karma-for-cash was exchanged in the process, don't worry.
He also had some good ideas for reddit's future, with the kind of perspective that the four of us on the "inside" could never have. Maybe we should do this sort of thing more often. We don't have enough furniture to do it again, but perhaps a bar/restaurant would be a more suitable location... or hell, maybe the Wired offices...
Since planning this sort of thing doesn't involve any programming, I guess it's my responsibility. Stay tuned.
A big thanks to everyone who turned out (or couldn't, but still sent an email lamenting not being able to make it to lovely Somerville, MA). I've gone ahead and matched the $110 we raised, which I donated to TBTS just a few seconds ago. Brain cancer's days are numbered.
These things are depressing as hell. I just remembered that after walking by one in the airport today.
It's like a terrarium with seating. Only it's full of smokey death. And there are no turtles. But there are a few really sad-looking people inside -- instead of really sad-looking turtles.
Don't smoke [cigarettes], kids. There are massive companies counting on you to help keep those plexi-glass cells full (really, I've seen the powerpoint slides; their customers have a bad habit of dying).
We had to vacate our beloved Davis Sq. apartment pretty quickly after we sold reddit, so we left all of our "furniture" behind. I type "furniture" because it's not exactly a collection you'd probably want to furnish your home with unless you were a few cheap recent college-grad startup founders. Nevertheless, we're trying to find a home for all of it so it doesn't end up in the dumpster. I'm going to be back at 265 Elm St., Somerville, MA (a block from the Davis T stop) this Saturday, April 7th, from noon to 4pm. Steve and I need to get rid of all our stuff, so we're asking that you name your price for everything.
We don't want the money, though, any cash we collect is going to be donated to the Brain Tumor Society. We hate brain tumors.
Steve's not going to be there, but you could be the proud owner of the cheap table he used to write reddit on, or the recliner he napped on! We've also got a fine street sofa that Chris, Steve, and I carried up three flights of stairs with the alcohol-enhanced strength from a long night at People's Republik (yes, the same sofa that newly Internet-famous Justin Kan used to pass out on covered in Sharpie). OK, so it's just the same crummy furniture you'd find at any open house. But I plan on having some beer there, too.
Anyway, it'd be nice to see some of our friends from the Boston startup scene, since we left too quickly to have a final rooftop party (maybe that was for the best...)
And to prove that I'm serious, I even put up a craigslist ad.
About a year ago, I started working on a bunch of design templates for the ill-fated infogami project. Aaron unfortunately stopped development before he could do anything with my html and they've just sat on my harddrive ever since. He recently reminded me of them, so I've cobbled them all together and uploaded them under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. My HTML and CSS is pretty rough, but this license means you can use them for anything (commercial or not) and only need to attribute them to me. It'd be cool if you emailed me, too, but I like surprises.
So have fun with them, I've been told enough times that I don't have any taste ;-) but maybe some of these can be a springboard for some great designs. Here are just a few of them, along with their hip, one-word titles [link to all of them].
Waited in line (why, oh why do New Yorkers say "on line") for a little over 2 hours to get one, but it gave me time to run a few Google BlogSearches on reddit. I came across this fantastically thorough (and aptly titled) review, "Reddit - Everything you ever wanted to know about it".
Maki did a splendid job with this -- so splendid in fact, that I was feeling guilty for how our own documentation pales in comparison. But before I sit down to overhaul it, I really ought to demolish Steve in a few rounds of WiiTennis...
The best feedback emails we get usually start with "I hate reddit..." (they also end with something along the lines of "...because now I can never get any work done.")
We take great pride in maintaining a site that makes a few folks just that little bit less productive. But alas, we can't take much more credit than that, since it's not like we're creating all that time-consuming content. Here is someone who did create something cool:
One redditor, Matthew Inman, wanted to procrastinate. In doing so, he created illustrations to represent the major social media websites. Steve IMed me the link and it got me giggling.
Corporate taxes are due at the end of the week (this was definitely quite a surprise the first time around) but don't worry fellow startup founders, they don't take very long to do when you don't have any revenue.
But we've got professional help now, so all I had to was fax over some signatures. I figured it'd be polite to include a cover sheet, since our accountant is undoubtedly quite busy this time of year. Certainly my copy of Microsoft Word 2004 for the Mac would have a suitable coversheet...
That's when I found "Whimsy". Really, they were all pretty ugly, but this one was something special (they even remembered Comic Sans and Curlz!).
Some of you may have noticed a rather homogeneous reddit front page a couple days ago. Nearly all the top stories were for a good chunk of the day somehow related to the impeachment of the President and VP of the United States. Fortunately, thanks to the nifty "hotness" algorithm Chris and Steve developed, the links cooled and fell off the front page (they won't tell me how it works, partly because they know I'd quickly divulge it under torture [authorized here in the States] and partly because I just wouldn't understand).
What I do know is that over the course of the day, links actually rise and fall on the front page. So the older a story is, the more up votes it takes to keep it "hot". It just happened to take a little while for the front page to cool off.
Anyway, Randall over at xkcd had an idea (I don't even know why I bothered to hyperlink that, since it's on the reddit front page every MWF). He setup a wiki for folks to continue the reddit activism.
His comic also happens to be why in today's logo, our SuperSoaker™-wielding mascot is petting a velociraptor covered in grape juice while standing in a pile of pure Colombian blow.
It was just a weekend getaway; I'd wanted to see New Orleans again ever since Katrina. And not in some voyeuristic way, although it certainly felt like that first, but like every American should want to see what progress has been made and help out as best as a tourist could -- with money. (Tourism was the city's #2 industry, not sure what it's ranked now). Then there was the guilt for only going as tourist, not as a volunteer. Fortunately, it's not that long of a flight from NY, so by the time we landed, I was ready.
What I wasn't ready for was the destruction that flanked the highway into the city. "Eighteen months later?" was the refrain in my head. It was never too muted, even during nice dinners in the French Quarter or smothered under fabulous beignets. Those sorts of indulgences can make you forget the whole thing ever happened. The downtown is just as it was five years ago when my parents took me. Except this time I'm allowed to go into the bars on Bourbon.
But I thought some of you might want to see the photos I took from my journey outside of downtown and maybe it'll motivate a trip down to N.O. Everyone we met wanted us to go home and tell our friends to come visit; the city, the people, they needed tourists to return and spend away (and if there's one thing we Americans do well...).
But folks were divided on the story we should tell. Yes, you could spend a weekend downtown, down a few Hurricanes (it's a potent drink) and maybe earn a few beads, just like always -- tell that story: things are great!
Or, tell them to get out and see the devastation for themselves, entire derelict neighborhoods -- even middle class neighborhoods -- with no power, no one coming home from work or going to school anymore. They ought to see that part, too, so they don't forget that eighteen months later hospitals are still closed and so many families are still living in doublewides. The scandal that this could be happening in this country, that part will never be on the postcards, but Americans need to know -- tell that story: things aren't so great.
So I thought I'd tell both. You can take my word on all the vices and delights of the downtown (they're all still there, I just wasn't foolish enough to upload any photos of me indulging in them). Here are some photos if you want to see proof of the rest.
This series was largely inspired by a movie I caught at Sundance called Chasing Ghosts. It was also during this weekend that I played the original Donkey Kong arcade game for this first time in ages. By the time I was hitting the arcades, DK was pretty antiquated, but I'd dropped a few quarters in it before. Sure, I'd dodged enough barrels to rescue the ever-in-distress damsel, Pauline (yep, I'd always that she was Princess Peach, too). Our heroic plummer has quite a history.
But back to the movie, which was quite good (and I imagine pretty enjoyable even for non-gamers). Lincoln Ruchti, the director, does a fantastic job retracing the lives of the 1982 Video Game World Champions from a group photograph they had in Life Magazine. Through interviews with a number of them, he brings us into the present -- men who have for the most part put down their joysticks, but still relish remembering the glory days. They really were ahead of their time, gaming long before the likes of Thresh and Fatal1ty came along and made lucrative careers with their l33t skillz. The movie runs just a bit too long, but it'd be a fantastic purchase (or download) for that special gamer in your life. Oh yes, it's a mighty geeky film, but it knows it. You'll be loling, you'll see.
Ok, enough of the plugging, I'm not even getting compensated for it.
On with the headers:
Some of you may have noticed yesterday's reddit logo in celebration of classic video games and Greek mythology. Remember kids, be careful with those wax wings.
Sorry, I had some free time on a long flight today and I just couldn't help myself.
Reddit was mentioned in a recent WSJ piece that featured profiles on a number of "The Wizards of Buzz," top submitters on a variety of social news sites. Although the folks at Time had big plans for trumpeting the people really driving this Internet movement (hint: it's not the alien-artists or the CEOs in the photo-ops) they didn't include any interviews with the actual user themselves. To their credit and with our full encouragement, both of the WSJ reporters on this story were very interested in profiling a sample of the users on these sites. On that note, a big congrats to anonymgrl, fedquip, and idyll. Sadly, I think my irony-meter broke after seeing your profiles in the WSJ.
For our part, the interview was pretty routine, but past lessons learned kept coming back. You always want to bring up those fundamental differences: "Well, reddit is a bit different, the "hot" page has links that are constantly rising and falling, so it's not as simple as just getting enough votes for a link to automatically appear at the top of the front page." While also answering questions: "Remove the stats page? We don't have any plans to. In fact, we added some extra daily awards a little while back and we're hoping to improve that whole page in the near future." And of course, explaining the site's origin: "Did we have a vision for the site? Not really. We just started, we didn't know what it would look like, we were just aiming to build a site where people could find all the newest and most interesting content online -- we didn't even have the up/down arrows when we started."
Funny, they never ask about the alien. Oh well. I'm still waiting for the inevitable "didn't you guys just steal that change-the-logo-idea from Google?"
But one you've hung up the phone, you're replaying everything you said and trying your best to be sure you remembered everything you wanted to say and avoided saying anything you didn't.
Then the article prints, you hold your breath and skim through...
On Reddit, one of the most influential users is 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer. At his desktop computer in his parents' home in the quiet northern Toronto suburb of Thornhill, Mr. Fuhrer monitors more than 100 Web sites looking for news on criminal justice, software releases -- and the Toronto Maple Leafs, his favorite hockey team. When Microsoft launched its Vista operating system this year, he submitted stories that discussed its security flaws and price tag, which attracted approving votes from more than 500 users.
Besides an electric guitar and an iPod, "my favorite thing in the whole world is my computer," says Mr. Fuhrer, who has lately also been studying for his bar mitzvah in June. In spite of a content filter his parents use to block him from viewing certain sites (including YouTube), he has managed to consistently make it onto the list of Reddit's highest performers.
When we left our hero over the weekend, it'd been "puckered" into oblivion.
