Friday, June 21, 2013

Welcome new recruit Victoria, Keeper of the Tapes.

Ahoy. We are ecstatic to announce a new member of the team - Victoria Taylor (/u/chooter). Victoria is a new employee, but she's been an advocate and supporter of all things reddit for years (seriously, she can't stop talking about reddit). Diving right in, Victoria will be joining us as the Director of Communications where she will connect reddit far and wide. Here’s Victoria in her own words...

"I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and just moved to New York by way of Los Angeles. I love cats. My middle name literally means cats.   Not to get too philosophical, since we’ve just met, but I think reddit is like the ocean... everything online, in some way, shape, or form, begins here and ultimately returns here. My favorite subreddits include /r/OneTrueGod, /r/aww, /r/IAmA, /r/LosAngeles (I'll miss you guys!) and /r/badmovies. I love anyone who loves American Ninja 4, Troll 2, or 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain, or any bad movie with a number in the title...and I'm always looking for recommendations. I'm beyond honored to be joining the team in New York and can’t wait to further educate people on what reddit is all about."


Please join us in welcoming Victoria, and as always, ask her anything in the comments! 

Thursday, June 20, 2013

4th Annual Global reddit Meetup Day

This past Saturday thousands of people in hundreds of cities all over the world gathered for the fourth annual Global reddit Meetup Day. Whether it was smashing a Snoo piñata in San Diego, cleaning up an adopted highway in Delaware, giant board games in Central Park, eating magical Jāņi cheese in Latvia, playing Upvote, Upvote, Downvote (reddit version of Duck, Duck, Goose) in Detroit, arm wrestling in Seoul, or just hanging out with food, drink, and apparently lots of Cards Against Humanity, fun was had. We've pulled just a few of the amazing photos from the meet ups into a gallery below. As always, we were impressed and humbled (and still a bit hungover) by all of the amazing work that people in these local communities do to organize meetups. If you attended a meetup and had a great time, be sure to thank the organizers and folks involved.

Remember to submit great meetup photos to /r/about.  If you missed out on GrMD or are looking for more meetups in your area check out this wiki to find your local area subreddit.

Also, if you are looking for a more serious reason to meetup, /r/RestoreTheFourth is organizing pro-privacy protests around the US and beyond. Check out the growing list of local protests planned here.

Global reddit Meetup Day V will be on Saturday June 14th, 2014.


/r/amsterdam
/r/sanfrancisco
/r/argentina /r/elpaso /r/Chennai/
/r/berlin /r/columbus /r/latvia
/r/perth /r/mumbai /r/miami
/r/paris
/r/atlanta
/r/detroit /r/ireland /r/hongkong
/r/nyc/  /r/foxvalleywi/ /r/alaska
/r/indianapolis /r/sandiego /r/tunisia
/r/delaware
/r/malaysia /r/houston/ /r/orlando
/r/winnipeg /r/southdakota /r/losangeles

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Bringing more benefits to reddit gold members


reddit gold has always been a great way for redditors to get more awesomeness out of their experience while simultaneously helping to support our site. Initially, we used it as a platform to give our monocle-clad members new features, like comment highlighting and your own personal butler, but a few weeks ago we started expanding into the new territory of offsite deals and sweet offers.

Current gold members should already be familiar with our recent introduction of gold partners, and the response was so impactful that we’ve been steadily hearing from more and more companies who want to give gold members new perks. We’ve handpicked the best ones, and we’re looking for feedback on what you think. That brings us to...

/r/goldbenefits

Introducing /r/goldbenefits! It's the best way to keep track of all of the latest and greatest features, partners, suggestions, and discussions about all-things reddit gold. Admins and gold members alike can create posts and comment on existing topics, while all users are free to subscribe to the subreddit to see what’s new and cool with reddit gold. We really hope we’ll get a lot of solid feedback from the community, so we can continue to shape reddit gold into something worth loving .

The new partners deals are already up, so if you’ve got gold, check them out here. But here’s the quick list:

Backblaze - 3 months of unlimited backup and cloud storage from our World Backup Day buddies.

Urbilis - $10 off any $50+ purchase. Elegant gardening solutions, and some radical obscure stuff, too.

Empire Mayo - 15% off all purchases. This is mayonnaise fit for the royalty of reddit gold. Seriously, who doesn’t want a BBLT?

Goldbely - $20 off any $50+ purchase. Goldbely is all about sending legendary local gourmet food straight to your door. They will literally ship you edible, gold-plated bacon.

Uniqlo - We’re trying something interesting for this one. Once a week, a randomly-selected reddit gold member will receive a private message (so keep an eye on your reddit mailbox) in the form of a “Golden Tikkit”. (See what we did there?) That user will have 24 hours to claim their prize, which will always be something really cool and totally free. This week, Uniqlo is offering a small token of their appreciation to one lucky goldie, but we won’t know what it is until they get it! (Hopefully they'll post it to /r/goldbenefits!)

Our main goal is to give our honored gold members some extra, but completely optional stuff. This list is just getting started, and we’re really excited to bring you guys some real-life benefits to your golden membership. But we want your help! Give us feedback on our current features and deals in /r/goldbenefits, and tell us what you want out of reddit gold in the future. You guys rock, and it’s our job to make sure you keep loving reddit gold.



PS: Have you all activated your multi beta yet? For anyone who missed the last blog post, you seriously need to check out multireddits. /u/chromakode has been way too modest; multis are unfathomably awesome, and have completely changed the way I’ve been using reddit. This is definitely the biggest evolution to reddit we’ve seen since subreddits, and totally worth checking out.

Friday, June 07, 2013

Browse the Future of reddit: Re-Introducing Multireddits

This post is about a new reddit feature, multireddits. If you'd like to join the gold beta test, head to /r/multibeta for more info.

reddit is vast.

Unfathomably, mindbogglingly vast. There were over 71 million unique visitors last month. Yesterday, there were 5,487 active subreddits. We'll probably hit 5 billion pageviews a month later this year. How did this happen!?

Scale can be the life blood of a diverse and vibrant community, but it can also be its worst enemy. The evolution of reddit is a story of walking this line carefully. Being big isn't inherently bad; it's a challenge for sure, but it also presents huge opportunities for us to make our collective voices heard and to share ever more specific, meaningful communities.

Yesterday was reddit's 8th birthday – the anniversary of Alexis and Steve's accounts being created in the database. At its start, reddit was a singularly close-knit and focused community. This community grew to the point that its members had differing desires for what it should be. Then subreddits were born, which gave everyone the ability to create an entirely new reddit community with whatever focus they wished.

However, as reddit continues to grow, it's becoming more difficult to organize and keep track of all the subreddits you're interested in. It's getting to be time to take another evolutionary step for reddit as it stands today. Multireddits (or "multis") are a tiny first move in that direction.

If subreddits give you the power to create your own reddit community, then multireddits give you the power to create your own public reddit front pages, each with their own selections of subreddits. We have reached the point where one front page can't do reddit justice. So let's make 9000! This functionality has been around for years in the form of creating custom URLs like /r/space+nasa+astronomy, but the goal is to make these distinct slices of reddit as ubiquitous and powerful as subreddits. In the process of curating and sharing these different front pages, there lies the potential to breathe life into smaller, more specific communities, because you can now participate in an order of magnitude more of them.



Getting there will be a long road ahead, and it's one we've only just embarked on. The first step is simply making it easier to create and share your own custom reddit front pages. For the past 6 months, we have been building this, and it is now available to to try out in /r/multibeta.

We can't do this alone. It is our hope to directly involve the community in building and exploring these new tools for structuring and browsing reddit. What we have been working on is only version 0 of multireddits. There are tons of missing features and missed opportunities that will be evident in the first release. And as we hack our way towards version 1, there will be many more betas to take part in.

Currently, the beta is open to all reddit gold users, and we hope you'll support us in testing these new features and giving us feedback. Gold users get early access to our limited beta server resources, and help ensure that we can keep building reddit by and for the community. You don't have to pay to try out multis though; just send us a postcard.

We'll also be releasing our beta code as open source whenever reasonable (just like the rest of the site), so if you want to see how it works or fix a bug, follow the reddit open source project.

If this excites you as much as me, come join us in /r/multibeta. It's a future party in there, and you're invited.

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

What's Snoo?

Snoo, if you didn’t know, is reddit’s alien mascot.  Initially created by /u/kn0thing as a doodle whilst at UVA, Snoo underwent several revisions (and got its name) in its transformation from hypnotic-eyed sketch to grinning internet emblem. Genderless, timeless and digit-less1, Snoo now appears throughout reddit in various flavors.  Staff avatars, masthead logos and as the mascot for thousands of different subreddits. Here is but a smattering:


/r/MECoOP /r/dailydraw /r/longboarding

/r/IRenderedAPic /r/linguistics /r/asceticism

I have been so impressed by the sheer variety that I have undertaken the rather epic quest to collect as many flavors of Snoo as possible.  You can read the full details of the project, including how to submit your Snoo, here. In a nutshell I am asking moderators to submit their subreddit’s Snoo in vector format in a gargantuan effort to create something like this (but with less Digletts, obviously). If a subreddit you frequent has a Snoo you like, message the mods and see if they’ve submitted it.

If a subreddit you visit or mod doesn’t have a custom Snoo, maybe now is the time to create one.  You can download the base files here.  Alternatively, you could ask one of the many art oriented subreddits if they might be able to give you a hand, like /r/redditlogos. /u/chromakode has created this handy sheet to assist in the creation process.

And finally, some wise words for alien artists found deep within our art repo.  Penned by /u/kn0thing, they offer insight into some of the finer points of alien scribbling:

The alien has two ears. I don't know what they're for, exactly, but they're the most often forgotten part of the alien's body.

Less is more. Take a look at these alien doodles through history and notice that it rarely gets extra details beyond eyebrows and modified hands. Always working with a small canvas, drawing more just meant more mess.

When the alien needs a special hand (like to wield a sword) try to stick to basic shapes and avoid drawing every individual finger, it creeps me out a little to see the alien with fingers. Don't let any more of these images haunt me as I sleep.

The alien's eyes are #FF4500 (aka, orangered); don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Happy Snooing.