Monday, June 20, 2011

Global reddit Meetup Day will be this weekend in over 160 cities in 35 countries. Be there.

This Saturday, June 25th, redditors will be meeting up in more than 160 spots all over the world. Below is a full list of the current cities that are listed on the redditgifts meetup section. You can also find meetups listed here in the /r/meetup FAQ.

To ensure that all the shenanigans are adequately documented and shared, MrGrim at imgur has set up a special event based gallery for the Global Meetup.

There are 3 ways to submit photos to the gallery.
  1. Tweeting: Simply tweet the photo with the hashtag #redditmeetup.
  2. Emailing: Email images as attachments to redditmeetup@imgur.com. This method accepts zip, rar, and plain images.
  3. Submitting: The last method you can use is a general submission form on imgur.com. Here’s a step-by-step guide to using the link generator.
Next week we will feature the best photos from the gallery on the reddit blog, so make sure to rep your /r/city and add yours.

If you're in the Bay Area, make sure you stop by the SF meetup at Golden Gate Park. Most of the reddit admins will be there, and our friends at Singha even hooked us up with some tasty beer to share. Hope to see you there.

Also in honor of Global reddit Meetup Day radio reddit will be switching all streams to play a mix of the top voted songs for each stream's genres. Listen to music by redditors while partying with redditors - perhaps you'll even run into some of the 2,000 or more reddit musicians at your local meetup. Check it out here.
**Check your local reddits for GrMD events if you don't see them here**
---

Friday, June 17, 2011

All good things...

It is with great difficulty that I find myself writing this post. After 4+ years with reddit, today is my last day with the company. It is now time for reddit (inc.) and me to part ways. Unfortunately for y'all, reddit will still be a huge part of my life, and I will still be a heavy participant. I will just be a civilian now.

reddit has been the driving force in my life for a long time now. Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is check all of reddit's critical systems. Then do the same thing again every night, and many many times in between, even on vacation, or my honeymoon. Just ask my wife, who refers to reddit as my not-so-secret mistress, and would agree that it was the cause of many arguments between us! It will be hard getting used to sleeping until the alarm goes off and not reaching for the monitoring page when I first open my eyes. Luckily, the new team of folks is ready to take the reigns. I have every confidence that they will carry the torch and carry it well. I have no doubt that they will stick to the philosophies that we all hold so dear as a community, and make reddit far greater than it already is.

It's been a really wild ride these last 4 years. There are far too many awesome things to list them all, but here are some of the highlights for me. It started with me joining Steve, Alexis and Chris as the first employee of the company, and then helping move the entire datacenter from Boston to SF (all 8 machines!) just a few weeks later. Then we did our monthlong press tour, where we got just as excited about meeting well known redditors like raldi as they were about meeting us. Then we open sourced, which was great for us and hopefully the python community at large. I got the chance to meet famous people like Ron Paul to film his interview along with Hueypriest, as well as Felicia Day and Peter Norvig. I've been immortalized in drawings and fan art. My friend made me a reddit wedding cake when I got married last year. We created the biggest gift exchange in the world. I was redditor of the day. I did a (now horribly out of date) AMA. And then there was the rally, where I literally got to give a dedicated redditor the shirt off my back. At the same time, reddit's traffic has grown like mad. When I started, we had 1.3M uniques and 40M pageviews in a month. In May we had 18.8M uniques and 1.228 billion pageviews.

And I got to be a part of all of it, keeping those servers running so that people could do all these amazing things. That is really what got me to commute more than 2 hours every day for this job -- the thought of the people behind the computers who I was enabling to communicate and interact with each other. That, and the 100's of postcards on the office wall.

I am also amazingly proud of the good that this community has become known for. Raising money for charity and just generally helping people. One of my most salient memories is when two strangers met on reddit and helped a grandma in need in Japan after the earthquake. I tell that story to people all the time when they ask what keeps me motivated.

So what's next for me? Well, I don't actually have anything lined up just yet. My newfound free time will enable me to pursue a lot of projects that I've been wanting to work on for a while, like advising startups at Year One Labs and Dishcrawl. Or perhaps focus more on my writing. Or if you have any interesting leads on something, you could let me know. Once I do land something, there are myriad ways to keep up with me Twitter and my website, which I will finally have some time to update, are good places to start.

It seems someone has begun to cut onions here, so I shall leave with these parting words: Each and every one of you is awesome in your own way, and that is what makes reddit so great. Thank you all for your amazingness these last 4+ years.

In honor of the occasion, Zach Weiner, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has graciously provided a comic to sum up this blog post.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

reddit Levels Up with Three New Programmers

We're almost halfway through 2011, and it's already been a big year for reddit. We've grown from 13.7 million unique visitors in January 2011 to 18.8 million this May (37% growth). We've grown from 999 million page views in January 2011, to 1.228 billion in May (25% growth). During this period our average time on site has remained steady at an impressive 15 and a half minutes. The reddit community has also been making news and creating awesome new reddits at an increased clip. Not too shabby considering reddit's only had one magical programmer for part of 2011.

The rest of 2011 is looking extremely bright, and we're ecstatic to announce three new programming hires who will help reddit continue to grow and improve. Please help us in welcoming these new admins! We'll let them introduce themselves:

Logan Hanks (intortus)
I grew up in Virginia (and graduated from Virginia Tech). I've been in California at Google for the past six years. I'm really into open source (the last few years at Google were working on http://code.google.com/hosting). Maybe some of you would recognize "xmms-shell."

Keith Mitchell (kemitche)
I'm absolutely thrilled to be joining reddit! It's been almost 3 years since I first discovered reddit (Thanks xkcd!). At that time, I was a humble student at Colorado School of Mines. Since then, I've ridden a bike from SF to LA (three times), graduated, learned Python, built an installer for Solaris, ditched a WoW habit, participated in a gigantic Secret Santa exchange, and more. As an avid user (of reddit ಠ_ಠ), I want to see the site do well as much as the rest of you and will be doing all in my power to make it a better place.

Brian Simpson (bsimpson)
Hi everyone, I’m really psyched to be joining reddit. I just moved out to San Francisco from the Boston area, where I’d been in grad school and then working for the past 6 years. I’m a chemical engineer by training but switched over to programming through work in scientific computing and mathematical modeling. Working at reddit will be an exciting change for me, and I’m looking forward to helping improve the site.

Thank you to everyone in the reddit community who made these new hires possible — be it in the form of submissions, community moderation, brand sponsorship, t-shirt-ownership, adblock-not-doing, sponsored-link-buying, or reddit-gold-subscribing. It's a very exciting time here at reddit HQ, and we are extremely grateful for your support.

Monday, June 13, 2011

A Shout-out to the Sorcerers:

Here at reddit, we're built on top of a ton of ridiculously awesome open source technologies. In the three years since the original open source release (the 3rd anniversary is on Friday), we've been surprised and delighted by the myriad projects powered by reddit and using the reddit API.

Over the past few months, Neil (spladug) has been hard at work updating, documenting, and migrating the open source reddit project to a new home, thanks to our friends at GitHub. GitHub makes collaborating and contributing to reddit easier than ever.

reddit open source


Lately, we've been seeing (and discussing) a lot of your cool ideas for features to add to reddit. We'd like to remind you that if you have an idea, we're listening. Additionally, if you're willing to experiment, the best thing you can do by far is pull down the source code and start exploring.

When new engineers start here, the first thing we do is set up a local instance of reddit, and you can too, thanks to Neil's handy install script. Once you're finished, come join the community on reddit and IRC!

So, got a cool idea? Let's discuss it with the community over in /r/ideasfortheadmins.

Got a code question? Post it to /r/redditdev or #reddit-dev.

Found a bug? Please post it with clear instructions on how to reproduce it to our issue tracker.

Finally, ready to get coding? Fork our git repository and send us a pull request when you're done. We're happy to work with you to get it into the codebase.

Looking for Smart, Talented, and Well Informed Candidates? Run a Free [For Hire] Ad on reddit!

We've seen an increase of employers using our self-serve ad platform to find candidates for their open positions. We've also seen an increase in the posts and responses on the job related reddits: /r/forhire, /r/jobs, /r/freelance, /r/work, & /r/resumes (view them all as a multi-reddit HERE).

We think redditors are some of the smartest people out there, so we want to help employers get their attention. For the month of June, any employer looking to advertise an open position, can run a free $100 targeted [hiring] ad. Just sign up using our self-serve ad platform, email krispykrackers at kristine@reddit.com, and reddit will freebie your ad up to $100. Based on our current rates, that would mean several hundred thousand redditors will see your ad. You can even target it to a relevant reddit, like /r/programming or /r/gamedev, or target it to a regional reddit like /r/atlanta. Either way, you're bound to get a lot of valuable candidates looking at your open position for free!


"I'm a tech recruiter in the Seattle area as well as a Redditor. One day, after exhausting my sourcing tools like Monster, Dice, LinkedIn, etc., I thought to myself, 'If I were a developer or engineer, where would I be?' Bingo. Not only have I found valuable, qualified candidates that my clients adored and hired, I have had the honor of providing a few fellow Redditors with employment opportunities. To be honest, I play favorites and try to place my Reddit sourced candidates before others because they are part of a community that I am incredibly fond of and feel a bond with. Today you, tomorrow me."

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Which Cities & Countries Have the Most reddit Addicts?

Early in May, more than 100 /r/NYC redditors gathered for our bi-weekly reddit meetup — just another normal Tuesday night. The redditors of /r/SanDiego and their host badandy80, even issued a challenge to redditors of New York City — one that /r/NYC humbly accepted.

As the largest city in the United States, NYC has a distinct advantage in amassing a reddit army (not your personal army) to drink and be merry — but looking at reddit's traffic for the most active cities shows that there is potential for reddit armies in a number of other locales:


Most active cities by total pageviews (reddit's Google Analytics, Jan-May 2011):

New York
: 9.5M
Toronto: 5.4M
Los Angeles: 5.3M
Chicago: 4.7M
San Francisco: 4.5M

Seattle: 4.3M

London: 4.1M
Austin: 3.7M
Vancouver: 2.7M
Houston: 2.6M

I have heard that a number of cities are looking to dismantle r/nyc from its "largest meetup" throne — London, Sydney, and San Francisco all come to mind as front-runners for GrMD events, or Global reddit Meetup Day. Then again, communities like r/TwinCitiesSociala contender for Best Little Community of 2010 — or your own city could surprise us all.

I am a huge fan of r/nyc, however on GrMD I will be lending my support to the chaps of
r/LondonSocialClub. I found these good fellows through their meetup posts on r/meetup and redditgifts.com. I strongly urge you all to find (or even create) a meetup in your area. GrMD is sure to be a great day!

Stay tuned for more information about redditors IRL this week. But in the meantime, chew on this: Canada wins the most addicted country to reddit (measured by the number of
pages per visit) with the United States a close second.

Most addicted/engaged countries by avg. pageviews per visit (
reddit's Google Analytics, Jan-May 2011):

Canada: 15.72

United States: 15.46
Denmark: 13.99
Norway: 13.81

Sweden: 13.34
Netherlands: 12.89

United Kingdom: 12.86

Ireland: 12.57

Belgium: 11.98

Finland: 11.27