Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Happy 10th birthday to us! Celebrating the best of 10 years of Reddit

Wow. Here we are, ten years later.

Here’s how Reddit looked minutes after Steve and Alexis flipped the switch in a small rented apartment in Medford, Massachusetts, ten years ago. And after Steve promptly downvoted Alexis’ first post. That’s right, the first ever submission to Reddit was downvoted.

To be specific, here we are after:

  • 10 years, 0 months, 0 days
    • (ok, fine, technically it’s 9 years, 11 months, 30 days, 22 hours, and 16 minutes at time of posting this at 10 am PDT)
    • (also 5,258,776 minutes, 87,646 hours, 3651 days, or 521 weeks)
  • 16,063,942,290 upvotes
    • (and 2,563,574,752 downvotes)
  • 1,715,454,785 comments
    • (.36% of which mention cats)
  • 334,626,161 monthly page views per Reddit engineer
    • (also 7,637,686 unique monthly visitors per engineer, at 30 engineers—we're hiring more!)
  • 190,227,552 posts
    • (36% self posts vs link)
  • 36,136,190 user accounts
    • (26,222 of which include some variation of “pm me” or “don’t pm me” requests)
  • $29,559,467.54 spent on 877,218 presents for RedditGifts exchanges
    • (in 201 gift exchanges)
  • 1,867,184 months of Reddit Gold purchased
    • (804,952 of which you’ve gifted to someone)
  • 853,824 subreddits created
    • (9,601 of which were active yesterday)
  • 213,078 lines of code total
    • (1,081,873 lines of code added and 868,795 removed in 10,128 commits since Jan. 23, 2007, the second complete rewrite of Reddit)
  • and 1 genderless, raceless, time-traveling alien from the future named Snoo.

(All numbers in this post are as of June 21st, 2015.)

(If you want to make something prettier than this, you can find all the data to play with over in r/redditdata.)

If we were a country, our current active users would make up the 8th largest population in the world, just after Nigeria and larger than Russia, Japan, and Mexico.

But enough boring statistics. Let’s get to the good stuff. Let’s talk about the best content on Reddit.

Most Upvoted Reddit Posts

(See the rest here.)

Most Gilded Reddit Content

In order to get to the most gilded Reddit post ever, we must first discuss the most gilded comment ever, which is also the single most gilded anything on Reddit ever.

It’s this comment, from an AMA by TSM Bjergsen in the League of Legends community.

But the reason it’s been gilded so much doesn’t have as much to do with that comment specifically, and more with this one:

Comment from discussion TSM Bjergsen - AMA..

And… it happened.

So the most gilded post in Reddit history? Yup, you guessed it. A video by 3hoho5 titled “Me eating a bull’s dick for 400 gold on a single comment.” It is exactly what the title describes. Enjoy.

So, now that we know Reddit’s priorities, let’s move on to the other most gilded posts and comments on Reddit:

Most gilded postsMost gilded comments
Me eating a bull’s dick for 400 gold on a single commentArebel asks TSM Bjergsen all the questions
[Text] Soon I will be gone forever, but that's okay as long as someone reads thismach-2 discusses racism in America and on Reddit specifically
EMSK why the “Red Pill” will kill you insideThe best wingman ever helps his friend get laid
Upvote this: Buy no gold until Pao Resigns!Edward Snowden talks about how to bring NSA spying back to the forefront in politics
A sad day indeed - the original Rick Roll video has finally been taken down from YouTube from a copyright claim.How to start caring for yourself and have “no more zero days”
Removing harassing subredditsCalvin’s last talk with Hobbes, at the very end of his life
TIFU my whole life. My regrets as a 46 year old, and advice to others at a crossroadA little girl tells Santa she wants her daddy to die for Christmas
Jack, the Worst End User, Part 4A discussion on rape allegations and the dark side of the feminist movement
"Don't bother sending a tech, I'll be dead by then"2days finds LASunFun’s missing father
TotalBiscuit discusses the state of games journalism, Steam Greenlight, ethics, DMCA abuse and Depression Quest.EthErealist talks about racism against Asians on Reddit

Most Viewed Reddit Posts

Most Saved Reddit Comments

Sorry, everyone, we really tried hard to pull the top saved Reddit posts, but u/drunken_economist repeatedly broke things trying to run that query. You’ve saved too many things. Since saving posts has been around almost since the beginning of Reddit and saving comments has only been available site-wide since March of last year, you’ll have to be satisfied with the most saved comments on reddit instead.

Also, you REALLY like free things. In the top ten saved comments, we had two sets of almost identical comments, so in the interest of sharing more cool things, we’ve combined those duplicates into one spot in the standings. There were also a couple deleted comments that have been omitted because it’s no fun linking to nothing.

Most Commented-on Reddit Posts

These are a few of our favorites from the top. You can view the larger list in r/redditdata here.

Doing Good—on Reddit and in the World

Aside from all the fascinating and hilarious content they create, redditors are also unbelievably generous. Together we’ve donated over $1.8 million to Extra Life, Haiti, teachers, and Nepal. We donated another $827,659.49—10% of our 2014 ad revenue—to the top 10 charities of your choice. You’ve also donated a huge amount that we can’t begin to track through individual subreddit campaigns and spontaneous events like this.

We’ve also organized for causes you care about, even earning a thank you from President Obama for our action on net neutrality.

And there are countless thousands of stories of redditors who have helped save(1) someone’s(2) life(3) (not to mention the amazing work r/suicidewatch, r/depression and other similar communities do), gotten them desperately needed(1) medical care(2), provided emotional support, and so, so much more.

You guys really are amazing. Thank you for making the last 10 years of Reddit amazing too.

Here’s to the next 10 years.

PS(A): If you liked the content in this blog post, you'll probably also like Upvoted Weekly, our newsletter that highlights some of the best content from Reddit each week. You can check out last week's issue here, and sign up here if you're interested!

Monday, June 08, 2015

the button has ended

And so it ends.

After 1,008,316 presses and more than two months since it launched on April 1st, the button has ended. In this time a lot has happened. There were factions, religions, revolutions, weather forecasting, a prophet who renounced their status, and an allegiance with the undead to name a few. Confused? You can read up on the button here.

The most awe-inspiring part of the button was the creativity of the reddit community. We wanted to take a moment and celebrate some of the amazing things that you came up with as a result of a 60 second timer and a button.

The button cared not who you were; all were judged for the time they pressed, regardless of fame:

It also became a source of real life change for some. It helped a redditor with MS get a motorized scooter so they could go on rides with their daughter, prompted one marriage, might have ended another, and helped tworedditors get sober.

Other than providing the simple rules in the announcement blog post, we tried to not interfere with the button wherever possible. The /r/thebutton community immediately began creating a detailed lore with myriad religions and factions, all spawning from the act of pressing or not.

Some redditors took it upon themselves to document this lore so others might be educated about its intricacies—do you know the difference between a Red Guard and a Knight of the Button?

Button pressers and abstainers alike worked together to scrape as much data about the button as possible. Some incredible tools emerged to track button presses. Most notable was The Button Snitch by /u/treyjp based off initial work by /u/jamesrom. /u/Chr12t0pher created a website full of various button stats as well as /u/TheButtonStatsBot that kept everyone updated on the passing of significant button milestones. Special mention to /u/emtes for their work on the Button Stats API.

redditor /u/mncke created The Squire a browser extension that would coordinate presses between those who wished to sustain the button for as long as possible. He also created The Necromancer, a program that harnessed the presses of long dead ‘zombie’ accounts to prevent the coming of the after-timer. Ultimately, however, the undead proved to be unruly.

Despite this spirit of collaboration, there were some redditors who sought to mislead others into pressing erroneously. Most notably, /u/MrFunderthuck’s delicious ruse involved creating a chrome extension that purported to automatically press the button at a time of the owner’s choosing but instead hijacked their precious clicks.

/u/jophuds and /u/Drunken_Economist of the reddit data team looked into how redditors interacted with the button:

The crazed early days where 60% of eligible viewers would press the button quickly subsided. By the fourth day only 10% of viewers were pressing; after two weeks only 5% of viewers were pressing. This was the equilibrium for the button.

All devices fell to the button. Final counts showing 66% of presses from PCs - more than three times that of Mac. Cellular platforms were also lain to waste, 11% of presses coming via Android and 3% from iPhones.

The button brought all redditors with it regardless of their tenure. The distribution of year of account for 1 and 60 second flair shows little difference.

click image to enlarge

As promised, we’ve also released an anonymized list of timestamps for every button press. Check out the /r/redditdata post to get a hold of it. We can’t wait to see what the reddit community makes of this data set (looking at you /r/dataisbeautiful).

We’ve also open sourced thebutton github repo, for those who enjoy such things.

But who was the last redditor to press the button? “The pressiah,” as the /r/thebutton community decided they would be called, whose coming would signal freedom from tyranny or the end of existence, depending on who you asked. At 2015-06-05T21:49:53.069000, a humble user named /u/BigGoron pressed the button. It was never pressed again.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the button. It was a success only due to the creativity of the reddit community. Tune in to this week’s Upvoted podcast to hear an episode about the button. (Update: Listen to the episode below!) For those wishing to reminisce on the highs and lows of the button, check out /r/ButtonAftermath.

More incredible things emerged from the button than we could have anticipated. This blogpost is just a smattering—I encourage you to share your favorite button moments in the comments.

The experiment is over?