When we left our intrepid mascot, its deportation rocketship had crash landed on a distant moon.
The lone survivor, our deportee assess the alien landscape and takes a moment to regain composure.
And not "special" in the euphemistic way.
I've never been so happy to be bumped off a flight. Waiting in LAX with some spare time and my beloved evdo card, I hopped onto reddit and was so pleased with what I found.
Earlier today, pragma submitted a self post that directed redditors to keep the link at #25 on the front (hot) page. I know of no other sites that function like reddit in this regard -- stories are alway rising and falling on our front page, most never even make it to #1, or even the top five.
Go ahead, load reddit. Ten minutes later, hit reload and watch things shuffle around; perform this vigorously throughout the day, our advertisers will love it.
I suppose Steve and I benefited from our ignorance of the competition when we started reddit. We just did what made sense. The first time Steve pointed me to the site on our dev server, he had to explain to me just how the hotness algorithm worked. It involved basic arithmetic, so all I remember is what we'd agreed upon -- stories needed to rise and fall. What we simply thought was a better user experience turned out to be pretty unique.
I guessed it helped that we didn't know about any of our competition until a month after we launched.
The model you'll find everywhere else is easy to explain: once a new link gets X votes (say, 50) it jumps to #1 on the front page and will enjoy a hearty dose of traffic. The next new story to get X votes becomes the new #1 and the old one drops down to #2. It's like any blog, only those first X users are selecting the next story.
On reddit, links have to work their way up to the #1 spot, fighting their way up against down votes and time (yes, hotness involves time - stories that aren't getting votes up are always cooling off). If as a result of this neat experiment, you've figured out our algorithm, Steve has already promised to change it. Heh.
Perhaps we (read: I) haven't done a good enough job explaining this in the past. Thanks for giving me some encouragement today, reddit.
UPDATE: I've just landed and it's still the #25 story. Hurray.
Oh, and a clever redditor (danweber) did something awesome. Hopefully it'll never happen again ;-)
CORRECTION: Apparently, JelloShotz did it first. Props to you, sir.
Fry is without a doubt the hottest thing on reddit tonight. Who says you need to go out on a Fryday night to have fun?
(-25 points for me on account of that pun. I'm sorry.)
The other reason I flew out to L.A. this week was the offer to see the future a little before everyone else. I even got to play before those 10,000 school children stormed the L.A. Convention Center.
Instead of pummeling you with my entire report, I'll break it down into two more manageable parts. Think of it like splitting the Oreo in half. Well, it's probably more like a Hydrox. With that in mind, let's begin.
Kickass Kung-fu gave me the biggest workout I've had in years. Well, except that one time Steve and I played in a pickup basketball game near Davis Sq. The man who invented full court basketball obviously never tried running up and down a court for thirty minutes straight. Is that you, Dr. Naismith?
I rest my case.
Anyway, it basically involves punching and kicking air to fend off virtual attackers. I think I even saw them give the school children a 2x4 for a more potent swing. I was getting Streets of Rage flashbacks. If you can sneak a massive lead pipe in, you'll be all set. Oh, and they even included a Mortal Kombat uppercut. Nice touch.
The founder I spoke with, Ari, even thoughtfully listened to my suggestions -- fatalities and projectiles (there's nothing more embarrassing than trying to do a Hadouken and have nothing happen). I'd even settle for animalities.
He also took the above photo for me. Fortunately for me, he didn't capture my attempt at a Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku. I learned my lesson.
The other lesson I learned was even more obvious: Robots -- especially samurai robots -- are not to be trifled with. I've seen that Tom Cruise samurai movie; if human samurai could do that much damage to a gatling gun wielding army, imagine the destruction samurai robots would cause. They'd be unstoppable and anachronistic.
Sure enough, there was a samurai robot in attendance. Behold Kiyomori:
It walks and sits, eh? Cool, but why did you give it a samurai sword and body armor? Kiyomori wouldn't be walking around with a katana unless they were training it how to use it -- or it already knew.
We need to find Miles Dyson. Now.
"You are almost out of space for your Gmail account."
I never thought this day would come. There is no website I use more often -- no application more important to me -- than Gmail.
And now I've almost hit my storage limit. I never thought that percentage would get higher than 20%, or maybe 30%. But where we are at 97% and I'm getting a cold sweat.
My inbox is suffocating. What if Natalie (Portman) finally replies to my emails and they bounce back. If she decides to attach pictures, there's no way in hell I'll get them.
Get a hold of yourself, Alexis. Just delete all that spam, that's it.
OK, down to 93%. I can breathe again.
I hope none of you ever have to see this message.
If you have, or if you ever do, I'm here for you.
But not at this moment. I need to go lie down.
$30 million can be yours if you can be the first to land a robot rover on the Moon. This was the big X Prize announcement at NextFest today. What made it for me was the appearance of Buzz Aldrin.
Shaking the hand of someone who walked on the moon felt pretty much like shaking the hand of anyone, only this hand had been on the moon. Aldrin was cordial, and even entertained my question about whether or not it was all a hoax.
OK, that's not true. Not the part about him being cordial, that was true, I didn't ask him about faking the moon landing. (He didn't strike me as being a very good actor anyway.) Instead, I tried to make small talk and show him just how much we had in common.
Fortunately, I had my Young Astronaut membership card on me.
He didn't seem impressed.
A good friend of mine happens to be an aerospace engineer slogging toward his PhD. I keep telling him to join one of these space race startups, but he insists that finishing his degree is his top priority right now. And he has a point, his name is Huu. Having that PhD would indeed allow people (like me) to call him Dr. Huu.
Some things are better than landing on the moon.
At this very moment, NextFest is opening up to 10,000 L.A. schoolchildren. Geeks are an endangered species these days here in the States, so anything we can do as a society to encourage geekdom, the better of we'll be. We need future generations to keep buying that mint condition Star Wars memorabilia so my AT-AT keeps appreciating.
By getting them interested in math, science, and technology at an early age, we combat the inexplicable uncoolness of math, science, and technology. And hopefully we can correct the dearth of U.S. students studying it. As a country, we've long benefited from the immigrants who've come to our universities or our research labs. Many of them decided it wouldn't be a bad place to stick around and start a family. These days, I suspect fewer are applying to our schools, and those that do are less willing to stay.
It could just be because there is more opportunity back home, or living there is just more appealing, but given our pitiful international math & science ranking*, something needs to be done.
NextFest is obviously not the solution, but every little bit helps. A guy just flew in on a jetpack. You should have seen these kids' faces...
*Kids, the lesson here is that if the going gets tough -- quit,
It's officially news now, TechCrunch has written about it. As well as too many other organizations for me to type "a href" for -- even the BBC. Now isn't that the dog's bullocks?
I just wish more of them could have done the fine job that the SF Chronicle did by harnessing the power of histograms.
I hope that most folks would discern a difference in the reporting from Fox News and The Guardian*. Granted, I could have said the quality of reporting, but I'll leave that judgment up to you.
I've said it before -- I was told that if you say something often enough, it becomes fact -- so I'll say it again. Sites where "empowered readers determine the news" are only more efficient means for doing exactly what "editor-selected news" companies have aimed to do for years.
The news is business. I hope no one really believes social news means the downfall of society -- it's a better means of giving consumers (in this case, of news) with what they want. What's phase 3? Profit. (We're working on that)
This tremendous flow of relevant information feeds the Britney gawkers just as much as it feeds those of us Americans who miss habeas corpus. And some of us even miss habeas corpus just as much as we miss the old Britney.
*Oh, and perhaps I should also mention that The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust, a charitable foundation (read: it's not legally bound, nor is it actively trying, to make a profit). Coincidence? Yeah, probably...
Thanks to an article by Joe Strupp in Editor & Publisher, I found a recent study on social news sites from the esteemed Project for Excellence in Journalism. OK, I don't really know if they're actually "esteemed," but it sounded like it.
If Steve and I started another company, I think we ought to have the word "Excellence" somewhere in the name. It just oozes credibility.
Anyway, this study looked at a week's worth of news from three "user-driven sites" and compared them to the top stories on various mainstream outlets.
The results were shocking.
j/k!
"The result: online users gravitated toward different topics than those from traditional news outlets."
Citing the study, Strupp points out that "In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites--Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us--were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iPhone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth." Ouch. But the actual report is a bit more nuanced than Strupp would lead you to believe.
During that week, the immigration debate led the coverage, accounting for 10% of all news stories in the News Coverage Index. That was followed by coverage of a major fire near Lake Tahoe (6%), the failed bombings in the United Kingdom (6%), events on the ground in Iraq (6%), Supreme Court decisions (5%), the 2008 presidential election (4%), flooding in Texas (4%), the policy debate in the capitol over the war in Iraq (4%), U.S. domestic terrorism (3%), and the missing pregnant woman in Ohio (3%). In all, the top ten stories that week accounted for 51% of all the stories in the Index. Wow, if half the articles in an entire week were about one of ten stories, it explains that tingly feeling I get when serendipity drops a unique reddit link in my lap a couple times a day.So what do you think? If you're using reddit, you're apparently getting broader dose of news, but is that really the goal for building a better source for finding out what's new.
In the user-generated sites, these stories were barely visible. Overall, just 5% of the stories captured on these three sites overlapped with the ten most widely-covered stories in the Index (13% for Reddit, 4% for Digg, and 0% for Del.icio.us). reddit suddenly appears very mainstream... odd...
The immigration debate in Congress, the biggest single story of the week in the mainstream media, appeared just once as a top-ten story on Reddit, and not at all on Digg and Del.icio.us. Granted, reddit has a unique method for sorting its front page, so most of the stories will never get enough momentum (hotness) to rise all the way up into the top 10, but even with that aside, it's clear the reddit community is not mired in the popular-talking-point-of-the-week. Really, I watched CNN today, Britney is fat, I get it, but what about the immigration debate -- or has it been settled? Similarly, the war in Iraq accounted for 10% of all stories in the Index and seven percent in the Yahoo-user material. Across the three user-news sites, it amounted to about 1%. (bold text mine)
For the most part, there were no dominant [stories]. The only story with any real traction was the release of the Apple iPhone, and that was just on one site (it accounted for 16% of the stories on Digg that week)16% of an entire week? Yikes. OK, Britney, you've still got a few more days.
"Seven in ten stories on the user sites come either from blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news."WebMD? I have a feeling this is from bunch of del.icio.us users bookmarking herpes symptoms now that Paris is out of jail. See, I can make pop culture references.
"The three user news sites differed from one another in subtle ways. Reddit was the most likely to focus on political events from Washington, such as coverage of Vice President Cheney"I wouldn't really call it subtle. We certainly have days with lots of politics on the front page; I think it was that week that we learned Cheney neither belonged to the executive nor the legislative branch. Today doesn't happen to be one of those days, but I'm a little disappointed they didn't find any evidence of Ron Paul support on reddit. Heh, it's probably just more evidence of the anti-RP conspiracy...
"Digg was particularly focused on the release of Apple’s new iPhone"I hear it's a popular phone (it can save lives! Use the "911" widget). I guess it was also a slow news week...
"Del.icio.us had the most fragmented mix of stories and the least overlap with the News Index [of mainstream news outlets]"Hmm, this appears to only be reinforcing the fact that Del.icio.us is indeed not intended to be for news. I'm sorry for belaboring this, but I think I've found a solution.
In all seriousness, it's great seeing the PEJ showing interest and researching this. Don't settle for my synopsis, read the entire report at Journalism.org. I only hope they avoid including Del.icio.us in future studies regarding social news sites. And if they want to study social bookmarking, I can save them the time and cost of conducting the survey by saying that Del.icio.us has no competition there.How is it possible that I learned about this video only twenty seconds ago? And now I can't... stop... replaying...
I've had this shredder for a couple months and didn't notice this warning label until I was boxing it up for the move last week. I can't imagine what those Brooklyn movers were thinking while they saw me snapping this close-up.
Actually, I can imagine what they were thinking: What a stupid warning; who would be foolish enough to allow a bear -- let alone a bear cub -- near their new cross-cut paper shredder? (Cross-cut for added security, just ask Oliver North).
Even as cubs, these creatures are known for their ferocity. I've seen Grizzly Man, these beasts hate office supplies. You think those guys in Office Space did a number on that fax machine? Imagine how a grizzly would react to the imminent threat of a machine that slashes 10 sheets at a time.
But really, why the teddy bear? The only reason I stopped trying to drink the bleach in our laundry room is because my mom put those "Mr. Yuck" stickers on it. Then my dad started putting it on anything in the fridge that he didn't want me to eat or drink.
Where is the "Mr. OMFG MY HAND IS A BLOODY PULP OF GROUND CHUCK!"?
That would keep the kids away much better than a cute teddy.
I'm in L.A. this week as a prop to sell some ads on reddit. Today was my first presentation to folks interested in buying ad space (much less pressure than pitching to people you want to buy your company) and I feel pretty good about it. But I knew this week was going to go well as soon as I checked into my hotel.
I have a remarkable skill for forgetting simple things like my keys, days of the week, and hotel room numbers. I'm the guy you see jabbing one adjacent room after another with my keycard, muttering Klingon cursewords. And that's sober.
Last night, when I was handed my key and told my number, I smirked. This I wouldn't forget -- jetlag and all.
In early August, I admitted to having run out of ideas for reddit logo doodles (although some may argue that this happened a while ago). It was back in July 2005, shortly after Steve and I started reddit, that I began copying this Google logo tradition. Coincidentally, Dennis Hwang (current Google doodler, but then-intern) was asked by Larry and Sergei to do his first doodle on the same holiday that I did mine -- the 4th of July.
alien applies for citizenshipAnd it was labor day weekend, so I was feeling patriotic. That, and it provided a nice segue into this week's series (also reader-submitted). This is going to be an epic reddit logo series. The Iliad can't touch this.
He's getting tired of alienhood, so he applies for citizenship. He tries to join the USA but gets caught up in the American immigration quagmire. Red tape everywhere. He gets deported, has to wait around in Heathrow airport--a citizen of nowhere. He finally ends up in the open arms of a welcoming Tuvalu, only to find his new home country uninhabitable due to a rising sea-level. By the end of the week, he's happily omnipresent again. The hassles of citizenship outweighed any benefits.
There was much discussion on reddit today about the latest Osama bin Laden film. It wasn't about the content (if he's not announcing his participation in next season's Dancing with the Stars, reddit doesn't care). Discussion was about the noticeable difference in his beard.
While redditors were speculating, I did a bit of Googling and uncovered the explanation.
You're not going to believe me, but I thought about this photoshop gag even before I read clevershark's comment. Nonetheless, a tip of the hat to you, sir, you are truly a clever shark.
How dare they deport breadpig. He's not even an alien. Plus, he's delicious.
I found this gem while picking up old boxes from the neighborhood liquor store (I'm moving, not cardboard-obsessed). I can't believe I've never tried this vodka. Man, those French really know how to sell some liquor.
Jacque: "We need something, ehh, bold, for our new vodka brand."
Pierre: "Per'aps we should try polar bears."
Jacque: "No, no, you fool, those are godless creatures with souls as cold as the climate in which they live."
Pierre: "Pizzly bears?"
Jacque: "I would fire you, Pierre, but you know that would be against the law. Instead, let's go get lunch."
[[4 hours later]]
Pierre: "What if the bears were cuddling?"
Jacque: "Clumsily falling over one another like awkward, Balinoff vodka-enriched college co-eds?"
Pierre: "Oui!"
Jacque: "Great. It's already 4pm anyway, let's go 'ome."
-- fin --
8 bonus points to anyone who has actually tried this stuff and can confirm that this vodka lives up to its box's awesomeness -- that's what blog comments are for.
I was surprised by more than a few inquiries about "my next startup" after it was mentioned in Saturday's entry.
In case you missed it:
I was diligently researching for my next startup last night and came across an entry on The Free Dictionary.Not that I don't appreciate the wholly undeserved attention on my startup ambitions (I am, after all, an only child) -- I just figured folks would click on the link and appreciate the reference (hint: it was a link to an entry on cuttlefish).
I enjoy local bookstores for the obvious reasons: the nerdy patrons, the chance to say that I support local bookstores, and to ogle book covers.
The last one is probably just pseudo-designer part of me that likes quietly judging these illustrations that the old adage demands we ignore.
A week ago, a particular book cover caught my eye: The World Without Us. It even appeared on reddit a few days ago and it's apparently been selling quite well (undoubtedly because of the slick cover). It turned out the stuff inside the book was pretty interesting, too, but I did really like the cover art.
In fact, I liked this design so much that I bought a shirt with it about a year ago from Threadless. Well, kinda (mine is orange). Here's what it looks like.
And now I'm confused.
What do you think? It could just be a coincidence (in fact, it probably is) and even if it's not, we all need inspiration, right?
I just want to see André da Silva Cruz (the designer of the above shirt) get recognized for his labor (or maybe just some "props" for having come up with the general idea first) -- after all, today seems like an appropriate day for it.
Either way, at least now I finally have a matching shirt and book.
UPDATE: My intention was not to start a witch-hunt. I just hoped a few people would buy André's shirt (the aforementioned "props"). And maybe a few others would buy the book, too, since it goes so well with the shirt. Just try to finish the book within a few days or your friends/co-workers will start worrying about your hygiene.
I was diligently researching for my next startup last night and came across an entry on The Free Dictionary.
The good folks at Farlex, Inc. (who evidently like their company name so much that they include it in the logo?) aggregate a bunch of reference sources from around the web and place their ads next to them.
At the bottom of each entry is the ubiquitous set of icons -- only much bigger. That, and something else is atypical...
They had the bad timing of ganking our logo on one of my more creative days (I know, changing the logo is a total Google rip-off, but hey, what I lack in originality, I make up for in quantity and randomness).
It's particularly amusing considering the distinction we've made in the past between "reddit" and "rabbit." They may sound similar, but they're very different organisms. I even went so far as to create an instructive shirt to enumerate the differences.
Remember:
I don't get enough comments on this blog for me to think comments on blogs are worthless. But Joel (and Dave) emphasize an important point about the consequences of anonymous commenting.
Even the most innocent and thoughtful discussions can quickly get derailed, or never even get started (see YouTube commenting). Without accountability, it's easy for me to go around trolling or just hurling random obscenities and LOL!!1!s
Although I've heard this passes for discourse on some sites.
Plus, who's to stop me from flooding every Lisp blog as "spez" with obscenity-and-"LOL!!1!"-laden comments about the lack of widely used and tested Lisp libraries? He already has enough enemies on those blogs. And it'd be especially tragic considering the thoughtful and articulate explanation of Lisp's shortcomings (and strengths) that he already gave on our dev blog.
He doesn't need any more angry letters or death threats -- I'm the one who opens his mail.
It's with this in mind that I finally upgraded my Blogger template last night (oh boy, 2.0!) and installed Disqus for all future posts. It's a means for universal discussion across blogs and website in general.
Your identity (and reputation) follow you around and you've got a nice aggregation of all past conversations. If it gets the mass adoption they're aiming for, I suspect it would go a long way toward solving Joel's (and Dave's) problem.
Now let's get meta and discuss Disqus in the new Disqus comments.
I walked away from World of Warcraft shortly after hitting 60. I'm only human. That, and I was actually a human paladin, which should explain why the game stopped being fun.
I'll never forget when I finally discontinued my subscription, because a benign questionnaire asked me my reason for quiting. In this country, we put a lot of emphasis on not quitting. I think this makes us try harder to come up with a good excuse to quit -- hence the multitude of options for why I'd be canceling my WoW subscription.
I don't remember the exact wording, but after passing up "Financial difficulties" and "Military service," I settled on "Addiction."
Make no mistake, I wasn't addicted, but it seemed like a good answer. Certainly better than "Finally got a girlfriend."
Anyway, after submitting the form, I was comforted with an apologetic message from Blizzard telling me that they sympathized with my problem. And they offered -- only when I was ready to balance my "WoW life" with my "real life" -- to gladly take me back as a member. Sweet.
That was over a year ago. Imagine my surprise when I found this in the mail last week:.jpg)
I never did get to play Burning Crusade... ride a flying mount... hit 70...
Oh Blizzard, you're good -- too good.
I was born into a football (American) household, so please allow me this philistine indulgence. No matter how hard I try to carry around books, like technology, and use the word philistine -- I'll always succumb to gameday Sundays.
Through chance, I became a fan of the Washington DC team with an unfortunate name, because it was the only NFL team near the town where I grew up. It was my dad's favorite team and thus it became mine. Football was a bonding thing, and it still is today (to give you an idea, upgrading dad's nosebleed season tickets was the first thing I did last Halloween).
I caught a preseason game two weekends ago and was reminded by a fellow fan of a sad fact: "In 1961, the Redskins were the only team in professional football without a black player."
The team's owner, George Preston Marshall, was an avid bigot. Incidentally, he'd also been the man who changed the team's name from the Braves to the Redskins. Integrating the franchise of our nation's capital turned out to be quite an ordeal, as the above ESPN article details.
Sitting there, watching the starters take the field, I couldn't help but wonder what the team would look like if ol' Marshall had his way. So as part of this thought exercise, I thought I'd list the starting lineups as they are and as they would be without black players.
Needless to say, it be pretty hard to fill a roster these days with such narrow guidelines (although it could be done, the team wouldn't likely be going to many Super Bowls). On that note, fans would be quick to point out that Washington was also the first team with a black quarterback (Doug Williams) to start the Super Bowl (they won, by the way -- Williams was named MVP). Ironic, no?
Granted, coaching staffs are still remarkably homogeneous on most teams, but even this is finally starting to change as we get blatant reminders about how immaterial race is to winning (see Tony Dungy). Everyone from the owners to the fans just want to win. Except Eagles fans. I think they actually enjoy losing.
Now if only we could divert all this attention (and money) we spend following football to something more productive or meaningful...
Because I really want folks to see this photo from Chris & Kristen's wedding (congrats again, you two) here's a copy of today's entry from our dev blog.
As most of you know, Chris (KeyserSosa) Slowe got married this past weekend.
A few of you remain skeptical. To prove that not only did Chris say "I mod up," but that all 4 of us were in fact there, I've been asked to provide a photo.
OK, a photo can't really prove he said "I mod up" (it was a Greek Orthodox ceremony after all, so he could have said anything) but he is on a honeymoon right now with Kristen, so it's safe to say he answered in the affirmative. Anyway, here's the pic.You'll notice we're even standing in the proper left-to-right order of our alien manifestations in the above logo.photo credit: Liz
Oh, and before the bride and groom's first dance we did in fact hear the opening of the Star Wars theme. It was pretty fantastic.
As a service to you all who couldn't make it, here's the MIDI to help you experience the wonderful event like we did.
Now just click play, close your eyes, and imagine you're stuffing your face with beer and cake.
The offer they make to not wash towels is a solid appeal to anyone's inner treehugger, but sitting next to that imported bottle of H2O it feels a bit hollow.
I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought if I hadn't seen this article on reddit a while back: "1 liter Bottled Water uses 26 Liters Water + 1 Kg Fossil Fuel + 1 Pound CO2."
Yikes. I won't bother summarizing; you pretty much get the gist of it from the headline.
I'm a big fan of what I call "passive activism," because it makes me feel slightly less guilty about all the negative repercussions of my existence with a minimal amount of effort.
So when I'm given the chance to "help conserve the Earth's vital resources," I'm happy to oblige -- I just wonder if the Fiji Water company knows it's paying for ironic product placement.
According to my friends in Williamsburg, irony is very in right now. Maybe they even paid a premium for it.
UPDATE: Alexis still prefers drinking his Brooklyn tap water (through the filtered water pitcher in his fridge). If the Brooklyn Water Management, Co. would like to reach Mr. Ohanian for a product endorsement, please contact him via email (alexis@reddit.com).
Less then two weeks after championing cuttlefish as the new medium of Internet expression, Cute Overload has found the saddest cuttlefish ever.
This should be seen as a call to arms (all eight of them) -- send some cuttles, folks.
We're clearly not doing enough as a movement, so despite all the recent allegations of inappropriate Wiki-editing, I've gone ahead and updated the Cuttlefish Wikipedia entry.
Let us rally behind this sad, sad cephalopod and further the global pro-cuttlefish agenda.
UPDATE: Curses! Those Wikipedians work quickly. My addition was deleted within five hours on the preposterous grounds that it was "self-promotion." Pfft.
Let me assure you all that I am not, nor have I ever been, a cuttlefish.
*Tip of the hat to ikirigin for finding the above pic.
An email last week first reminded me of it and a blog entry from the weekend prompted me to finally write this entry. The earlier email was from a startup that isn't called Kirk about how we could discuss potential opportunities to work together. The sell included an offer to match real names with reddit user profiles to show what articles they've "bookmarked." This isn't the first time the site has been thought of this way, and it's a misconception we've been working on clearing up for a while.
We've struggled with how to describe reddit ever since we started it. Paul had suggested "a front page of the Web" and it was up to us to figure out what the hell it'd look like and how it'd work.
Del.icio.us/popular was an interesting -- albeit minor -- part of the site's functionality. You could see the most popular links being bookmarked, a byproduct of the site's purpose of storing, sharing, and discovering bookmarks.
This is social bookmarking. Delicious got it right and a bunch of other sites with similarly bizarre names emulated it.
But reddit is about new and interesting content, not reference material. True, we added the ability for users to "save" links, but it's never been an important part of the site. Instead, we wanted fresh content -- any kind of online content -- to rise and fall on the front page. News, but not News.
The words "social bookmarking" may have bumbled out of our mouths here and there, but we tried to avoid it. The New York Times likes calling sites like ours "news aggregators," but that sounds a bit too mechanized; Techmeme is a splendid news aggregator, as is GoogleNews. But we heart our users (most of the time) -- they make reddit everything it is -- so it only seems fair that it's reflected in the description.
"Social news" didn't make sense to anyone back then. I'm not sure it does now, but people sure are using it a lot more. So I guess we're a social news website.
Flipping through an issue of Newsweek today (I'm OK with admitting that) I found a scathing article by Sarah Kliff entitled "[Facebook]... And Why I Hate It."
On the surface, it may not appear to be about me at all, but look a little closer and you'll find an unconscionable attack aimed squarely at me.
She didn't even wait until after the subtitle to launch her assault: "The site nurses my worst self-indulgent instincts. Does anyone really care that I love penguins?"
Kliff must have known that I was the creator of the "I Heart Penguins" facebook group.
I've cultivated a thoughtful community of unabashed penguin lovers who have bonded to proclaim their love for these adorable birds. We've even collected 12 penguin photos and started thoughtful discussions like "what's ur favourite penguin? why do u like penguins?"
And yet Kliff has the audacity to declare we might be missing something in the "real world" with all the time we waste on facebook.
She even dares to erect the straw man claiming we spend time "debating whether penguins or bagels are more respectable."
Debate? There is no debate -- unless perhaps Sarah would like to start an "I Heart Bagels" facebook group.
Bring it on, Sarah Kliff.
I was amused when I read this entry lambasting reddit, "Five reasons why I don't use reddit for social bookmarking." And not because I hoped he'd use del.icio.us -- after all, reddit isn't a social bookmarking site (but that's for another blog post). I enjoyed the nice photoshopping of our respective logos: +10 points for using the under appreciated dead alien logo.
Florchakh enumerated his 5 reasons and even aided the reader with the subtle visual cue of ALL CAPS. Spoiler: the 5 reasons are "reddit is UGLY, CONFUSING, SLOW, MESSED UP, and BORING."
Fair enough. I was a bit confused when I read "SLOW," as I know how adamant Steve has been about keeping the site snappy, but it turned out Florchakh was just having trouble getting caught up in our submission rate-limiter. Incidentally, it's something we use to keep down spammers.
As long as he still thinks the site loads quickly.
After digesting the feedback, I thought this was the last time I'd be seeing this entry, but I was wrong.
It turned out one of the reddit loyal, Jon Holato, decided to refute him. His entry, "Why Reddit Is Better Than Digg: My Reply To Florchakh’s Anti-Reddit Post", certainly has a catchy title. He even used one of my pieces of reddit propaganda: +11 points.
I'm not going to say which of these posts I agreed with, but Jon did use a nice analogy involving Google and Yahoo.
Anyway, before this escalates (when geeks fight, everyone looks like a loser -- trust me) I'd like to step in and offer each of you reddit shirts. If you'd like a shirt to wear (Jon) or burn (Florchakh) email me and I'll gladly mail one out to you.
Today is supposed to be a happy day, Chris is getting married, so hopefully this reddit-shirt-wrapped-olive-branch will be accepted and I can get back to liveblogging the wedding.
The guys had been quite isolated while building our commenting system, so I didn't see it until shortly before it went online. During development, I just trusted Steve and his assurance that "it'll be cool."
Little did we know that this then novel method for voting up and down comments (and ranking entire threads based on things like hotness/newness/top-rated) would take off like it did. The idea of rating comments was nothing new (Slashdot is the first that comes to mind) but I certainly had never seen anything like the now ubiquitous up/down arrows (or thumbs up/down) unveiled that day.
It must have been quite validating for the guys to see this replicated in commenting systems across the web, and now YouTube has followed suit.
It's a good thing too, considering the level of discourse you normally find. But I wonder if it's going to make any difference...
Oh well, at least I can finally vote down those ALL CAPPS!!11 abominations.
According to a recent piece of LinkedIn mail:
Fact: Adding 5 connections makes you 3.7x more likely to receive a job offerOh boy! With odds like that, I'd be a fool not to make 5 more connections.
Fact: Telling people about my blog (redditAll.com) makes you 3.8x more likely to get your startup acquiredBecause 3.7x just wasn't good enough.
You don't find signs like this every day. It's a shame, life would be so much better if more companies incorporated catbutt into their logos. I wonder how the web 2.0 version of this logo would look...
