Tuesday, August 30, 2011

From Aberystwyth to York, Update on the Grow a College Subreddit Competition.

Earlier this month we announced our first Grow a College Subreddit Competition to see which college could cultivate the best subreddit. When we announced the contest, we had a list of 50 schools. That list is now up to well over 200. If your school is still not on the list, please add it to the wiki or reply to this thread.

The competition officially began on August 26th, but based on feedback we have decided to extend the deadline to October 24th at 10am PST, and we changed one of the prizes (#2) to account for different semester schedules. We also saw some college subreddits asking their members to subscribe and unsubscribe to help their numbers. Any subreddit found doing such subscriber manipulation will not be considered for the contest.

Here are the revised prizes and categories:

Prize 1: Best Percentage Growth
* School colors on reddit front page for a day with mascot as reddit alien
* Large box of mascot designed alien stickers
* Large poster customized to your school
* Large box of school’s subreddit QR code stickers
* Possible meetup hosted at your school by a reddit admin(s).

Prize 2: Best Absolute Growth
* School colors on reddit front page for a day with mascot as reddit alien
* Large box of mascot designed alien stickers
* Large box of school’s subreddit QR code stickers
* Possible meetup hosted at your school by a reddit admin(s).

Prize 3: Admin Choice Award
* School colors on reddit front page for a day with mascot as reddit alien
* Medium box of mascot designed alien stickers
* Medium box of school’s subreddit QR code stickers
* Possible meetup hosted at your school by a reddit admin(s).

The popularity of a college subreddit will be assessed in three ways:
Absolute Growth: traffic growth (50%), activity growth (40%), and subscriber growth (10%).
Percentage Growth: Growth in number of subscribers to college subreddit in ratio to the school's undergrad enrollment and number of days since fall classes started.
Admin Choice Award: will be given to the college subreddit community that the reddit admins enjoy the most. This can be through design, content, activity or even just one amazing post that will make us all laugh.

And in the interest of full disclosure, here's the list of the reddit staff's schools.
  • alienth - University of Alaska, Anchorage
  • bsimpson - Johns Hopkins University
  • chromakode - Portland State University
  • hueypriest - Tulane University
  • intortus - Virginia Tech
  • jenakalif - Michigan State University
  • kemitche - Colorado School of Mines
  • krispykrackers - University of Central Florida
  • paradox - University of Utah
  • spladug - University of California, Santa Cruz
  • pixelinaa - California State University, Los Angeles
Let the contest begin!

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Putting reddit to good use during a natural disaster



The following is a special guest post from former reddit admin raldi (nobody ever really leaves reddit)

As Hurricane Irene travels up the U.S. East Coast, I've been trying to follow along from California. It's frustrating, because the "person on the street" information I'm looking for just isn't showing up on mainstream news sites. We've got a lightspeed global information network with YouTube and Flickr and imgur and blogs, but we're not harnessing it when we really need it.

I realized this is exactly the sort of problem that reddit is great at solving, so I wrote to the team about an hour ago and they enthusiastically supported the idea of creating a reddit to cover the Hurricane Irene story as it happens. There are probably ten million of you in the path of the storm, and a good number are going to have tales to tell, warnings to share, and possibly even critical information (e.g., "Get the hell off the beach!").

Here's the link: /r/irene

Note: Please don't ignore evacuation warnings just to score reddit karma.

Image credit: NASA

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

reddit acquires redditgifts.com to support Secret Santa '11, more gift exchanges, meet ups, and beyond

We are excited to announce that reddit inc has acquired redditgifts.com and that Dan McComas (kickme444) and Jessica Moreno (5days) will now be able to work full time on redditgifts.com.

Dan & Jessica started redditgifts in response to a community call for a massive gift exchange for the 2009 holiday season. Since then they've grown redditgifts into a way for subreddits to hold meet ups and gift exchanges like the Secret Santa exchange at any point in the year. To date, if you combine all the exchanges, 42,771 people in 106 countries have spent $1,458,891 on gifts! That is a lot of holiday cheer.

We long admired what Dan & Jessica and the reddit community created with redditgifts, and we've supported it from the beginning with house ads, free server space, etc. However, when talking to them earlier this year it became clear that what had started as a fun project had mutated from a fun nights & weekends project into a demanding 24/7 project. 2011 Secret Santa is on pace to potentially have 30k+ participants, and there's no way Dan & Jessica could continue to run redditgifts.com as a volunteer project. We wanted to see redditgifts grow, and we wanted Dan & Jessica to be able to invest even more time and energy into making redditgifts even better. So, we figured out a way to bring them inside the reddit family proper.

Here's Dan & Jessica's take:
We are really happy to be joining Reddit! The reddit team has been
very supportive of us since the beginning so it feels like a natural
progression. Being able to devote ourselves to redditgifts full time
is an amazing opportunity that will allow us to do things we have
wanted to do for years but not had the time for. We can't wait to get to work!
In general, not much will change except that now Dan & Jessica will now be able to work on redditgifts.com full time. Like all things reddit, we try to be as open as possible, so here's our plan of what will and what won't change:

What will change:
- Dan & Jessica will have more time to devote to improving redditgifts.com and managing gift exchanges
- Dan will now be the product manager of redditgifts.com and Jessica will be the community manager of redditgifts.com
- Registering on redditgifts.com will be much easier (soon)
- redditgifts.com will become open source (ASAP. no date set)
- Eventually we may integrate redditgifts meetups into local subreddits, but no current plans

What won't change:
- Dan & Jessica will remain in charge of redditgifts.com
- redditgifts.com will remain a separate site, and Dan & Jessica will be focused on redditgifts.com and not working on reddit.com
- Your profile on redditgifts won't be linked from your reddit profile. We may change this in the future, but if so it will be optional and opt-out by default of course
- redditgifts will remain free to use

We are excited that we are able to support the growth of reddit gifts, and as with all things reddit, we wouldn't be able to do this without you. Thank you for your support!

Now that redditgifts is a part of reddit what would you like to see next from gift exchanges, meet ups, and Secret Santa?

Relevant Links:
For more information on reddit gifts and how the gift exchange works
For images of gift exchanges in all their glory go here
See the redditgifts stats!
Sign up for the next gift exchange here

Thursday, August 04, 2011

Celebrities at Comic-Con Sit Down For Quick AMAs

I was on hand at Comic-Con 2011 to ask celebrities questions from you, the reddit community — all thanks to a sponsorship by Bing. We grabbed celebrities from the WIRED Cafe and had them answer your AMA questions.

We shot for three questions from each celebrity. However time was tight, so some videos contain just one answer (and we gave them their choice of which of the three questions they would answer). We used the best questions from the general Comic-Con AMA thread:
  1. What has been the strangest fan encounter so far at this Comic Con? from TheToadKing
  2. If you could go back in time and tell your childhood self one secret to living what would it be? from LeAnte
  3. If you were to dress up for Comic Con, who (or what) would you dress up as? from defenestr8
There were many highlights — from Adam West making a Jersey Shore reference to Matt Smith and Karen Gillan of Doctor Who fame swapping roles momentarily. Many thanks for those that submitted questions for these. Below are the interviews we were able to confirm with enough time in advance to get custom questions:

Adam West



Doctor Who



Zach Weiner



Plus check out more interviews from:
To top off all the revelry, Zach Weiner, the Cyanide & Happiness trio, a bishop or pope of some sort, and redditors from all over converged in the midst of the Comic-Con madness on Seaport Village in San Diego for some hobnobbing on Friday night. Thanks to the folks in San Diego for the warm welcome and for introducing us all to the wonders of the California burrito (it has french fries in it)!

Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Grow A College Subreddit Competition

A guest post from reddit's summer intern Josh Irwin (jamsbyjosh)

As summer comes to an end, some of us return to our daily lives of surfing reddit while in class back at school. This summer, I have had the privilege of interning with the reddit team out here in San Francisco, assisting with marketing, sales and what ever else was needed; luckily no coffee runs. My main project this summer was to design a College Marketing Campaign that would help spark the college subreddit community. Although many schools already have fully functioning subreddit communities, there are several that appear to be dead, or worse, fail to exist at all. Some schools have developed communities rallying behind their sports teams, others simply oriented around the student body, and while not every school has a top 20 athletic team, every school does have students, and all students have something to say, so why not get them on reddit.

Check the current list of college subreddits here, and add yours or PM hueypriest to have your school added.


We are launching a global wide competition to see which school can grow their college subreddit community the most. The old school users may remember when reddit did a similar contest for subreddits. The prizes will be awarded to the top three schools that gain the most in popularity over the allotted contest time on three different scales.

Prize 1: Best Percentage Growth
  • School colors on reddit front page for a day with mascot as reddit alien
  • Large box of mascot designed alien stickers
  • Large poster customized to your school
  • Large box of school’s subreddit QR code stickers
  • Possible meetup hosted at your school by a reddit admin(s).

Prize 2: Best Absolute Growth
  • School colors on reddit front page for a day with mascot as reddit alien
  • Large box of mascot designed alien stickers
  • Large box of school’s subreddit QR code stickers
  • Possible meetup hosted at your school by a reddit admin(s).

Prize 3: Admin Choice Award
  • School colors on reddit front page for a day with mascot as reddit alien
  • Medium box of mascot designed alien stickers
  • Medium box of school’s subreddit QR code stickers
  • Possible meetup hosted at your school by a reddit admin(s).
The popularity of a college subreddit will be assessed in three ways:

Absolute Growth: traffic growth (50%), activity growth (40%), and subscriber growth (10%).

Percentage Growth: Growth in number of subscribers to college subreddit in ratio to the school's undergrad enrollment.

Admin Choice Award: will be given to the college subreddit community that the reddit admins enjoy the most. This can be through design, content, activity or even just one amazing post that will make us all laugh.

Any school may enter the competition. To do so, anyone that goes to a specific school must post the school name and link to the subreddit to HERE. On August 26th the number of subscribers for each subreddit will be logged as the starting point for the competition. The competition will go from August 26th at 10:00 AM PST until September 30th 10:00 AM PST.


Promote your reddit page any way you please… make flyers around campus, send out facebook messages, hire/borrow a blimp, and do what ever it takes, because we all know everyone wants their mascot & school colors on the front page of reddit.

Let the games begin! And lets see who can become…the top college subreddit.