Merry Christmas or What-Have-You from all of us at reddit

We here at reddit would like to take a moment to wish all of the community a Merry Christmas-slash-Whatever.

Since we want to do our part to de-commercialize of the holiday season, we're going to skip the usual consumer products and give the gift of art instead -- tiny digital trophies, lovingly assembled one pixel at a time by licenseplate. They're going out to all of you who have given back to the reddit community this year.

For instance, if you donated time, money, and / or lodging to send two of your own on a monthlong, continent-crossing adventure last fall, we'd like to recognize you as a "Fantastic Voyager".

Honorees include: 77or88 draynen arunan askedrelic cdawzrd darthnut deserted doubleD fortheloveofthesong hiS_oWn hueypriest jrkp karmanaut kickme444 LastThought licenseplate obizuth oilytheotter P-Dub pteridine Saydrah stilesjp Talking_Head tbarlow13 Xfocus Xyre Yossarian42 ZanshinJ zmann

Voyagers, we salute you. There's a little something special waiting in your stockings trophy cases.


Next up, our Calendar Girls -- the ladies of reddit who starred in our 2010 charity calendar. Plus heartfence, who's a dude but helped put it all together. The calendars have been selling like the proverbial hotcakes, and a lot of good charities are benefiting. (It's not too late to get one, BTW)

A round of applause (and trophies) for:

• jessicalbarry (Cover Girl)
• nixg (Ms. January)
• HiFructoseCornFeces (Ms. February)
• INTPLibrarian (Ms. March)
• MaryjaneBrewington (Ms. April)
• animalcrackers (Ms. May)
• aennil (Ms. June)
• Saydrah (Ms. July)
• lalinoir (Ms. August)
• blindingstars (Ms. September)
• sundogdayze (Producer / Ms. October)
• krispykrackers (Producer / Ms. November)
• nerve (Ms. December)
• danpark (Ms. January 2010)

Finally, and most timeliestly, hats off to everyone who helped us blow away the record for the largest secret santa exchange ever held. Once again, this was something you came up with, you organized, and you pulled off. Way to ****ing go, everyone!

We don't have the final list of winners for this one yet, and this blog post is already approaching a length at which one might declare its verbiage so excessive that perusal becomes untenable (a.k.a., "ve;pu"), so we're just going to hand these trophies out as the data rolls in and post the complete list later, when it's finalized.

Whether you participated or not, we heartily recommend you should check out the gift gallery: it's great fun to browse through photos of all the cool stuff redditors sent each other.


Merry What-Have-You to all, and to all a night of some sort!

We've updated (and hopefully improved) the messaging interface.

Ever since we added self-post replies to everyone's inbox a few months ago, we've realized that there is a need to better organize the inbox. We don't want to punish users by making their inbox completely unusable for 24 hours just because they made a particularly interesting self post or comment. So, for starters, we added this to the top of the inbox:
Unfortunately, for the moment, "post replies" from before this patch are going to still appear in the "comment replies" tab (we had to make some changes to our data model to accomomdate the new organization which will be expensive to back-compute).

Since the new tabs aren't of much use if everything is marked as read as soon as you view your inbox, we've added a "mark as unread" button below comments and messages you want to save for later, and we've added a new preference:
This preference will remain enabled by default, so if you're not interested in the new tabs, nothing will change about the behavior of your inbox. When you disable this checkbox, messages will stay as unread until you click on them (anywhere). The majority of the time a message in your inbox needs to be replied to, so responding to it, or voting on the comment seemed natural triggers to to use for marking the message as read. Errant clicks or reassessments can be fixed with the "mark unread" button.

This is the first in a round of updates for messaging that we're hoping to get out as they are finished (threaded messages and multiple recipients anyone...?), so treat this as a work in progress.

Overview for people who like the inbox exactly the same as it is now and are worried about the whereabouts of their cheese. We added a subtle gray background to unread messages and "mark as unread" to read messages. Please forgive us.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich Answers Your Questions

United States House Representative for Ohio's 10th congressional district Dennis Kucinich shared some of his busy schedule to answer your top 10 questions.

Congressman Kucinich also has an important question for the reddit community at the end of the interview. Watch the full 28min interview in HD here or on youtube. Below the embedded video are all the questions, where you can also go directly to the Congressman's responses for each question. Thanks for being patient while we got this interview up. The next ones should get turned around much quicker.



1. sfsdfd
As has been apparent in the healthcare "debate," the current state of politics is heavily skewed by corporate lobbying. How do you feel about the magnitude of this influence on our political system, and what can be done to reduce it to a more acceptable level?
View Response

2. GoatTnder
Do you plan to run for President again? And should you run, considering how most media networks gave you a much smaller presence than their "front-line" candidates, what steps will you take to ensure your campaign is given the attention it deserves?
View Response

3. SquirrelOnFire
Congressman Kucinich,
Republicans recently proposed a constitutional amendment creating term limits in the House and Senate -- How do you think this would affect the Congress?
I am specifically curious how you think term limits would change the relationship between donors or lobbyists and Congressmen and what ancillary or unintended effects such a change would have.
Thank you for taking the time to talk with us.
View Response

4. rightc0ast
Congressman,
Explain how you can vote for gun control, and advocate banning handguns after keeping a handgun yourself because of death threats during your term as mayor in the 70's. I'm sorry, but with all due respect ... despite your fresh and intelligent take on so many things, this reeks of do as I say and not as I do.
View Response

5. evilangela
Given that our current plurality voting system is very poor as far as voting schemes go, and practically guarantees a two-party system because it creates more incentive for a voter to vote against a candidate instead of for one, do you think there may be possibility for significant voting reform in the future? There are many other systems out there, such as approval voting or instant-runoff voting, that will give more voice to each voter by making their vote richer in meaning, while eliminating even the concept of "throwing your vote away". What do you think might be the best possibilities for raising this discussion on the national level, and even, perhaps, starting to see proposals for a better and fairer system?
View Response

6. rjvir
What is your take on Alan Grayson's tactics and rhetorical style in addressing the Republican party, and what do you think he does for the current Democratic party?
View Response

7. kavalec
Congressman Kucinich,
What can be realistically achieved in the arena of defusing the power of lobbies and special interests?
And how can we help?
G. Kavalec.
View Response

8. ricecraka
If you were made the absolute dictator of the U.S. for one day, what are some of the things you would do?
View Response

9. rjvir
How do you feel about the "Blue Dogs" in Congress? Would it be worthwhile to plant more progressive candidates in their districts and risk losing to Republicans?
View Response

10. stardawg
Would you consider leaving the Democratic Party for a new third party?
View Response

Congressman Kucinich's question to the reddit community. View

You're busy, so TL;DR is a daily update reporting on the best of the entire reddit network

We realized long ago that qgyh2 spent more time on reddit than the entire reddit staff combined. At the rate reddit is growing, we can hardly keep up with all the reddits and all the great content on them. Enter TLDR.reddit.com (that's "Too Long; Didn't Read"), an editorial reddit run by qgyh2 with daily highlights from around the reddit network.

tl;dr: Add tldr.reddit to your frontpage and never miss the best of reddit.

Got a burgeoning reddit of your own? Find a great story that deserves some attention? Send him tips!

self serve advertising on reddit is now open for business!

After having our new sponsored link program in beta for the last 3 weeks, we're happy to announce that we've worked the bugs out (famous last words) and are opening it up to all users. To get started, simply click on the new "self-serve advertising" link in the footer on the front page, or, for the lazy, go here.



All you need to get started is $20, a credit card*, and some time to skim our ToS (which can be summed up with: be nice, don't be sneaky, and don't try to advertise anything illegal). Ads require about 48 hours for processing and approval, so if you place an ad today (Wednesday) it can be live on reddit by Friday. You can include a thumbnail and can even elect to turn off commenting (but where's the fun in that?). Reddit will also provide you with traffic information for your ad:



We also hope that this will provide something that typically doesn't come along with other ways to advertise: feedback. The community can comment on your ad, providing the sort of feedback that would require most traditional advertisers to arrange for a focus group. If we have anything at reddit, it's strong opinions...

We're very excited to see what the community does with the sponsored link program. From the beginning of reddit it has always been about the content and conversations that made reddit the site we all love. We wanted to find a way to make advertising reflect this philosophy too, so we like to think of self-serve ads as advertisements by redditors, for redditors.

We'd also like to extend our thanks to our beta testers. We're glad to have been able to work with such an understanding (heroic?) bunch of users in situations where actual money was involved, and their feedback has been invaluable.

So don't take our word for how great this new self-serve advertising system is, here are some testimonials from beta testers:

"We don't normally do paid advertising (almost all of our clients are word of mouth referrals), but we'll be purchasing more ads on Reddit for sure...I almost didn't post this, because I want to keep the competitors away" -- subigo

"Advertising on the Reddit homepage is a great way to get social traffic to your site fast without having to play the social voting game. The program is still in beta but it’s definitely worth a shot once it launches"-- TJantunen

"The people who came to the site, actually signed up and spent some time over there, leaving a few reviews." -- filmaster

*Sorry, for legal reasons we are currently only accepting US credit cards.

we added a safe for work option

Seeing as we don't want anyone to get in trouble for browsing reddit while at work (well, at least not get into any extra trouble...), we've added a user preference to disable thumbnails on posts that are labeled as NSFW.


All existing accounts have had this preference pre-set to "off" (i.e., you won't see any difference), but it will default to "on" for new users and non-logged-in visitors.

We've also taken a page from the people at /r/pics and added a little CSS to label NSFW posts. This should either help stop you from stepping on a landmine, or help to optimize your browsing experience (whichever floats your boat).


EDIT: please read jedberg's comment for the answer to a question that I know you are all dying to ask... ;)

redditor, TV Host (Catch It Keep It & Punkin Chunkin) MIKE SENESE Answers Your Questions

Mike Senese, co-host of Science Channel's Catch It Keep It and longtime redditor (user gtj ) answers your questions below. You can also watch the video here.



He answered these questions from the rowdy midst of the 24th Annual Punkin Chukin World Championships, which he was hosting for Science Channel. You can also watch some videos of Mike (and pumpkins) in action here.

Note: We replaced the audio on one of the questions with text, because the question was inaudible. We blame punkin cannon shockwaves.