Thursday, April 30, 2015

Change reddit’s appearance with reddit themes & other new gold benefits

reddit themes is a new feature for our premium membership program reddit gold, that allows you to re-skin reddit. If you have reddit gold and want to dive right in, you can enable themes in your preferences.

Featured reddit themes

We reached out to a few redditors you may have heard of - folks who have made incredible subreddit styles already - to see if they'd be interested in contributing. Luckily they were, and the results blew us away.

Click the theme images for more screenshots







Many thanks to these creators who have done some incredible work getting their themes ready for this feature. If you want to give them a shout out or leave some feedback, come on over to /r/reddit_themes.

We’ve also added the ability for reddit gold members to toggle individual subreddit themes on and off. You can read more about these features, including protips, in the feature launch post.

If you don’t have reddit gold, you can sign up below or make a witty/insightful/idiotic comment and hope a kindly passing redditor gilds you. Having a reddit gold membership gives you access to unique features and special deals as well as supports reddit directly.

buy reddit gold buy creddits

Your Gold Dollars at Work: Supporting reddit by purchasing reddit gold allows us to try experimental new projects like the upvoted podcast. In recognition of this, we post an ad-free, early access edition of upvoted each week in the reddit gold lounge - come and check it out.

Snoovatars updated

In January, we announced the launch of snoovatars for reddit gold users. We recently made an update that allows you to customize the color of any snoovatar item, allowing for an even more personalized snoovatar. You can view and edit your snoovatar here. Read more and make suggestions for future items at /r/snoovatars.

And finally, bragging rights

We’ve also added the option to display how many months of reddit gold membership you have remaining on your userpage. Now you can be fittingly conspicuous in your gold consumption. Enjoy!

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Calling all redditors to help Nepal earthquake victims

We were saddened to hear of the more than 3,000 5,000 people killed and the many more injured in Saturday’s devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake. We want to help, and we know you want to help, too.

We’ve done some research[1] and found two non-profits that contribute 99% of their donations MAP International and Direct Relief. We worked with Direct Relief to bring reddit contributions of over $185,000 directly to Haiti in 2010. We’re scheduling AMAs with the teams at MAP International and Direct Relief to share more information about how they work and what they’re doing to help.

Here are some additional resources for information: /r/Nepal’s longer list of non-profits, reddit’s live feed with ongoing real-time news updates and images, and Google person finder for found and missing persons.

Let’s try to raise at least as much as we did for Haiti to help earthquake victims in Nepal. There has already been an outpouring of support from redditors across the world, so consider this blog post a request to funnel that energy into impact. We’ll be working with these partner non-profits to bring you all as many updates as we can about how your donations are being used to help all those affected by this disaster.

Just like we did five years ago after the Haiti earthquake, we’re kicking off this initiative with a donation from reddit inc. for $2,000. Time and time again, the communities that make up reddit have risen to the occasion and we have every reason to believe that you all will do it yet again. Let’s help the people of Nepal with more than just our upvotes (but if that’s all you can afford, spreading the word about this fundraiser is a good place to start).

Edit: One of MAP International's donors has committed to matching contributions up to a total of $30,000 through Saturday, so keep going!

[1] Charity Navigator ranks both as 4-star, their top rating. Map International scored 99.94 with 99.2% of contributions going directly to aid, and Direct Relief scored 99.71 out of 100 points with 99% of contributions going directly to aid. Importantly, both received scores of 100 for transparency.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Announcing Upvoted Weekly, a new (opt-in) way to enjoy the best reddit content you may have missed during the week

It's been three months since the launch of our official podcast, Upvoted, and we couldn't be happier with the results. So, after much work I'm excited to announce the launch of our first ever, opt-in weekly email newsletter called Upvoted Weekly (we're not very creative).

Upvoted Weekly will be a human-curated (edited by yours truly) collection of the best of reddit from the last week that you may not have seen on the frontpage, sent on Sunday mornings so you can enjoy it with a nice cup of coffee, tea, or bacon. Anyone is welcome to sign up; you don't need a reddit account to subscribe, and if you have one you'll still need to opt-in here (and then accept the confirmation email). The first issue goes out Sunday, April 19th.

We've never had any official reddit emails, so we wanted to make sure we're doing it right from the start. To us, that means producing something you'll actually appreciate receiving and making sure that it meets our privacy standards. Upvoted Weekly is 100% opt-in and we include a 1-click unsubscribe link in the footer of every issue. Edit: And to be crystal clear -- if you didn't click that link to our privacy policy -- we've updated it to show that we're using a third-party service to store these email addresses in order to focus on building reddit.

Upvoted is about spreading your amazing stories and content to an even wider audience, beyond the bounds of reddit itself. Given how much you've enjoyed our podcast, we felt an email newsletter was a natural next step.  

If you’re already convinced, please sign up here. And then check your email to confirm your subscription!

GIF credit: u/EditingAndLayout
If you’d like to get a better sense of what you’re in for, here’s a look back at the last three months of the podcast, as well as our twitter & facebook accounts. We’ve already surpassed 600,000 downloads since we launched just a few months ago and we haven’t even done a story on r/TheButton (yet). The thriving community at r/upvoted reminds me of the early days of reddit -- lots of constructive discussion and helpful real-time feedback.

We’ve covered a range of stories: caught up with James Erwin about his life since “Rome, Sweet Rome”; discussed women in STEM and robot overlords with the three MIT computer scientist PhDs; had an emotional interview with Double Dick Dude; heard from a redditor who turned to r/swoleacceptance when coming out as transgender; and just two weeks ago we heard the life story of the vacuum repair man behind u/touchmyfuckingcoffee.

 
Maybe you’re hard of hearing, you're at work, or you just hate the sound of my voice -- we’ve got you covered with transcripts of every episode. (thanks, Unbabel!)

Also -- and this is super exciting -- if you have reddit gold you can come over to the lounge, and listen to new ad-free versions of our episodes a day early on Wednesdays starting at 7p ET / 4p PT. Instead of ads, I thank the users who've made this content possible by buying reddit gold.

Finally, we have a survey for the Upvoted podcast, so if you're a listener, please fill it out here. If you haven’t done so already, please help us out by answering these 15 questions. Thank you!

My cat would also like to thank you. If you didn’t fill out the survey, this kitty is not for you.
 
As always, please let us know how we’re doing with the Upvoted podcast and weekly newsletter. Don’t forget to sign up for Upvoted Weekly and subscribe to r/upvoted to let us know your thoughts.

Full-disclosure: this newsletter will not tell you what happens when The Button's timer runs out.

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

the button

dramatization

reddit,

When this post is 10 minutes old, a button and timer will become active at /r/thebutton. The timer will count down from 60 seconds. If the button is pressed the timer will reset to 60 seconds and continue counting down. Only users logged into accounts created before 2015-04-01 can press the button.

You may only press the button once.

We can’t tell you what to do from here on out. The choice is yours.

visit /r/thebutton