Monday, March 31, 2014

headdit - a revolutionary new way to browse reddit

On the first of April many companies indulge in some japery that plays off their core product, simultaneously lampooning their own image while demonstrating their creativity and bonhomie.

But not all of you are fools, and as you no doubt know: reddit is serious business. As such, we are using this day to furnish you with an experience that will figuratively make your facial muscles sore.

snoo animation by megan & nathaniel

Using revolutionary hand equivalent action detection, headdit allows you to upnod, frownvote and navigate your way around reddit. There is also cat mode. So sit back, relax and enjoy headdit.

To activate heddit, visit reddit.com and click the headdit icon at the bottom right of your screen.

headdit is calibrated for the following actions, plus a couple not listed here. We challenge you to find them.

dishing out upnods
opening links with surprise
enabling cat mode
administering frownvotes
closing links with ob
navigating with nods
unfair to dogs

headdit utilizes this facial detection library https://github.com/auduno/clmtrackr and cat mode is based on https://github.com/harthur/kittydar.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

How to use reddit.tv and a sampling of the most popular videos and channels to get you started

reddit.tv was first launched in 2009 to help you speed through all the video content on reddit. It allows you to easily flip through the hottest videos of the day and see what’s going on in your favorite subreddits or what’s popular on reddit from your favorite websites and platforms. The last major update to reddit.tv was in 2011. /u/mustardhamsters with /u/excuses created a new reddit.tv layout with an HTML5 player, bigger video screen, and a longer and more dynamic video stream showcasing upcoming videos.



How to use reddit.tv 
When you visit reddit.tv, you’re seeing a stream of the hottest videos posted to reddit from /r/videos. If you scroll down to the thumbnails, you’ll see a list of channels (videos, music, etc.) that allow you to watch the hottest videos from a subreddit of your choice. We’ve found the subreddits with the most video submissions and most general appeal and put them there by default.

You can customize your reddit.tv channel experience by creating channels or seeing the most popular videos from your favorite site. To do this, click the first thumbnail that reads “add channel.” From here you can type in a subreddit name (ex. /r/space) or site (ex. pbs.org) and click “save.” That channel will appear within your channel list and you can start watching hours of video content.

Feedback 
Even though reddit.tv has been around for 5 years, reddit.tv is back in alpha. It’s a great way to watch video online, but it’s still finding its way. There are bugs we plan to address and improvements we plan to make. We’d love your feedback around any issues you run into. Please share your thoughts in /r/reddit_tv.

Top videos, channels, domains/sites, and the countries that spend the most time per visit

Top videos on reddit.tv in the past month:
  1. A DJ mixing vinyl - 79 minutes http://reddit.tv/#/r/slowtv/1wu02c 
  2. Daft Punk-Lose Yourself to Dance played against an old Soul Train video http://reddit.tv/#/r/redditpicks/1wosg3 
  3. Will It Crush? http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/208s9t 
  4. IED in First Person POV http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/1zyy7a 
  5. The makers of the self-stabilizing spoon thank us and are now fundraising for people with hand tremor. http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/20b9d7 
  6. Fuck Steve Harvey http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/20fdac 
  7. This is how languages sound like to a non-speaker (made-up sentences), http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/1zgwte 
  8. Singer flustered after realizing crowd is singing the band's lyrics during their debut. http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/1zy542 
  9. Everyone Knows You’re High and You’ll be Stoned Forever - The Onion http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/1zjszp 
  10. Dog not allowed on bed - Hidden camera captures his defiance http://reddit.tv/#/r/videos/20k58y 

5 of the top videos you may have missed from reddit.tv this year:

Top reddit.tv channels from the past month:

 Some popular sites/domains on reddit.tv to check out:

Countries that have the longest average visit duration on reddit this year so far:
  1. Iceland 47:31 
  2. Japan 46:39 
  3. Slovenia 43:30
  4. Norway 37:41
  5. Finland 34:30
  6. Mexico 31:31
  7. Malaysia 30:20
  8. Denmark 30:00
  9. Australia 29:29
  10. New Zealand 28:33 

Create your channels and let us know what channels and videos from reddit.tv you think should have made these lists. We’re sorry if you don’t get any work done for a couple of hours.

Friday, March 07, 2014

Welcome Lilly, Nicole, Chris, Ismail, Erica, Cynthia, Max, and Chris!

It’s our pleasure to announce 8 new reddit employees! It's been 5 months since our last announcement, and since then we've grown to 39 employees. Please join us in welcoming these new additions to the reddit team. As per tradition, we’ll let each new hire introduce themselves to you individually:

Lilly Oh (/u/hellohobbit), self-serve ad sales & support 
I was on reddit a lot in college and now I work here! I guide anyone who wants to promote something on reddit in the right direction, with the ultimate goal to make ads better for all of us. I grew up in Southern California, went to school in Northern California, and now live in NYC, where I think a lot about what it's like to live in a place with four distinct seasons. When I’m not on reddit I make art, eat a lot of cheese, and try to cook dinner every night. If you have any suggestions for life-changing recipes, send them my way! My favorite subreddits include /r/food, /r/happycrowds, and /r/morbidreality.

Nicole Clark (/u/taxidermyunicornhead), HR generalist
Hi reddit, I am the new HR Generalist. I am a native San Franciscan, I studied Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphics in college. I love to bake, crochet, and am currently reading as much magical realism as I can get my hands on. I have a cat named Cannoli, and we are mutually obsessed with each other. You can check her out on the redditpets multi (/m/redditpets) and also become obsessed with her. I look forward to supporting the amazing reddit staff so they can focus on the reddit community and making reddit more awesome.

Chris Khosrovani (/u/ckk524), sales associate 
Hey everyone, what an honor it is to work at reddit. Over the past few years reddit has become like therapy for me, and I’m so grateful to the community for the amazing and thoughtful content. Before reddit, I was working at a large ad agency and like so many people here, browsed reddit more than actually doing my job, so when I saw the post on /r/nycjobs, I had to apply. When I’m not ogling smoked meats on /r/bbq or yelling at tourists on /r/nyc, I like to ride my bicycle around the city and explore places that normal New Yorkers wouldn’t go. I'm also a huge Beatles fan and recently started collecting their vinyls. I’m really looking forward to helping the sales team continue to grow.

Ismail Jadun (/u/pinwale), doing all things international 
Hi reddit! It's so awesome to be here at reddit! I'll be helping to make reddit grow & become better at serving our international redditors. Did you know that you can help translate reddit into your language at /r/i18n? Also, check out /r/tldraroundtheworld for some pretty interesting international threads! So holla at me and you might get a pinwale datagram!

Erica Carter (/u/liltrixxy), customer service representative 
Hi reddit. I'm an aspiring old cat lady who was originally drawn in to reddit by cat gifs and hilarious user comments. I'm an enthusiastic redditgifts participant who is also lucky enough to be helping others enjoy the exchanges and Marketplace through my work with reddit. In my free time, I can usually be found playing video games with my family, watching Mr Show, or taking photos. My three cats are Captain Cheeseburger, Doctor Donut, and Professor Pickles. My favorite subreddits are /r/secretsanta, /r/buffy, /r/aww, and /r/askreddit.

Cynthia Hickson (/u/bluemoon3689), New York office manager 
Hello everyone. I’m the office manager for the New York office. I’m extremely happy to be here. I’m a native New Yorker, and my job will be working with the WeWork building management team and on a bunch of other office related tasks and special projects. No two days are the same, and I like that about reddit. Every day I’m here, I learn something new. So far my favorite subreddits are /r/horror, /r/AskScience, and /r/AskReligion. Once again, HAPPY TO BE HERE. Great staff at reddit.

Max Green (/u/maxgprime), Salt Lake City office manager 
Hi reddit! I am the Office Manager of the Utah office. I was born and raised in Utah. I’ve worked in politics since I was 15. After 10 years of public life I decided to try something new and joined the redditgifts team. For the last two years, I worked for the largest gay rights policy and advocacy organization in Utah. Part of my job will be to guide us in our efforts to be more connected to our communities here in Utah, and to actively participate in important conversations like Utah’s civil rights issues, and our archaic liquor laws. I’ve played the piano since I was 2 (23 years), I am a thin mint addict, and I’ve never been skiing or snowboarding even though I am a life-long Utahn. I am very excited to be a part of this great team!

Chris Dary (/u/umbrae), frontend engineer 
Hey folks! I'm umbrae and I'll be joining the engineering team, particularly working to add more features to reddit with chromakode — product and frontend stuff. You may know me from /r/serendipity, a bot driven subreddit I created to find new interesting subreddits. I've been thinking about communities and reddit particularly for many years and I'm so psyched to be able to work full-time on the thing that's been a big part of my online life. Favorite subreddits: /r/fantasy (Nice work, contributing authors who post there regularly!), /r/woodworking, and /r/daddit.

If you’d like to work at reddit, we have openings! Check out /r/redditjobs and redditgifts.com/jobs for the latest. If you’re looking for a job in general (not just reddit), consider reading our best practice feedback based on the resumes we’ve received in the past. None of this is possible without the support of you, the reddit community.

The reason we’re all here is because of you, the community. We love the work we do and feel very privileged to be part of a site and community that you have shaped. Thank you for your continued support of reddit!

Tuesday, March 04, 2014

Staying Gold

It's been a few months now since the last couple of blog posts related to reddit gold (#1 and #2), and today we have a few more updates about the program to share.

Gilding submissions

The ability to give people reddit gold for comments that you particularly appreciate (by "gilding" their comment) was added in November 2012 and there are always tons of excellent comments being gilded all over the site, but it hasn't been possible to do the same thing for submissions... until now. Gold can now be given to the user that submitted a link or self-post, in much the same way as for comments — click the "give gold" link below the submission.

However, one difference for submissions is that gilding can only be done from the comments page, and the gold star showing which submissions have been gilded will also not be visible from listings such as your front page, /r/all, or the subreddit or multireddits that the post is shown in. This is to avoid having gilded submissions receive more attention solely due to being gilded.

Custom saving categories

Users with reddit gold already have access to a slightly better "save" feature than normal — they're able to save comments as well as submissions, and also able to view their saved items based on which subreddit they came from.

Today, the ability to save comments is moving out of the gold feature list and becoming available to all reddit users, and gold users are getting access to another tool for organizing their saved items. When saving something, they can now choose a custom category to save the item into.

So to commemorate saving comments becoming available to all, here's the current top 10 comments saved the most number of times by gold users:
  1. /u/johnnywebber in "What is a skill someone can learn in 6 months that will impress employers on a resume?"
  2. /u/A_I_D_A_N in "Which websites do you usually visit when you are bored of reddit?"
  3. /u/ryans01 in "I just don't care about myself."
  4. /u/_shnazzy in "24 Awesome Skills to Learn for Free Online"
  5. /u/PEE_ALL_OVER_ME in "What is something I could teach myself in 5 minutes or less that would benefit me the rest of my life?"
  6. /u/mrsclause2 in "What are some meals that are simple to make, but easy to impress people with?"
  7. /u/coconutwaters in "What is a subreddit you think everyone should check out at least once, and why?"
  8. /u/tritter211 in "What is the biggest way people waste money?"
  9. /u/brother_dean in "If I have FIVE hours everyday dedicated to becoming more fit, what should I do?"
  10. /u/gabrielle1106 in "Writers of Reddit, what are exceptionally simple tips that make a huge difference in other people's writing?"
reddit gold "gift codes"

We also fairly recently added the ability to buy a gift code for reddit gold, which will give you a short code that can be redeemed for gold by someone else (or you). These are mostly useful if you have a friend/relative who you want to buy gold for, but you don't know their reddit username (often because they don't want to tell you, surely because you would be consumed by jealousy about all the witty comments they post).

Gold partner updates

reddit gold partners were introduced last June, and since then we've slowly been expanding the deals available to people with reddit gold. Here are some of the newest offers we've added from some awesome companies, including our first "international" partner with WeTransfer (based in Amsterdam):
  • Barkbox - 20% off a subscription to have monthly dog goodies delivered.
  • Bridgford Jerky - 20% off various meat jerky.
  • Lyft - $30 off your first ride.
  • SparkFun Electronics - $20 off over $50 orders of electronic components.
  • WeTransfer - 50% off a WeTransfer Plus membership for transferring files.
Remember to keep an eye on /r/goldbenefits to find out about new partners as they're added, which is always accessible from the "gold perks" tab in the sidebar on your front page if you have gold.

Edit: thanks for the gold!

And as always, thanks for helping support reddit by buying gold, both for yourselves and for others. We've managed to hit our daily gold goal quite often, which means that lots of our servers are adopting names chosen by gold buyers, and things are overall just looking very positive about making those darn green and red lines finally meet up, even despite recent decisions involving giving away a bunch of money.