Monday, December 31, 2012

Top Posts of the Year and Best of 2012 Awards


from best of /r/Photoshopbattles

2012 has come to a close, and it's been an amazing year for reddit. We've had approximately:

 • 37 Billion Pageviews
 • 400 Million Unique Visitors
 • 4 Billion Votes
 • 30 Million Posts
 • 260 Million Comments

Here are some highlights from the year.




Top Ten Posts of 2012 (by total pageviews)

1. I am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA (5,598,171 pageviews)

2. What's your "picture you can't see without laughing"? (2,450,140 pageviews )

3. What's your favorite picture on the whole Internet? (2,148,400 pageviews)

4. reddit, what do you look like before and after makeup? Is there a real difference? (2,142,071 pageviews)

5. Today, a homeless looking man handed me $50 and this note. Do any of you have any idea what it means? (1,756,748 pageviews)

6. What GIF makes you laugh every single time? (1,749,185 pageviews)

7. I've been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result. (1,651,956 pageviews)

8. I am South Korean Singer, Rapper, Composer, Dancer and Creator of Gangnam Style PSY. AMA (1,514,034 pageviews)

9. What's your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out? (1,482,935 pageviews)

10. I'm Snoop Lion! Ask me anything!! (1,467,071 pageviews)

First Post of 2012 - reddit, what mistake do you regret that didn't turn out so bad, yet you still regret it anyway?

Last Post of 2012 - (will be updated once determined)

Best of 2012 Awards
This year we decided to do something a bit different and have the glorious multitude of subreddits host their own Best of 2012 awards. Here are some highlights of the results from /r/Bestof2012:


/r/TrueBestof2012 is also holding community awards, and there is still time to vote for:
And just for fun, here are some stats on admin voting patterns during 2012

Happiest Admins (Highest ratio of upvotes to downvotes)

      • krispykrackers
      • kirbyrules
      • kemitche & chromakode (tie)


Unhappiest Admins (Highest ratio of downvotes to upvotes)

      • rram
      • reostra
      • bitcrunch


Thanks for an outstanding 2012. Looking forward to what you all come up with in the new year!

Thursday, December 27, 2012

You Decide reddit's Best of 2012

As we wrap up another amazing year, communities across reddit are voting on their favorite posts and comments of 2012.

Head on over to /r/bestof2012 to discover and vote on the best of reddit's past year.

What's the best news story of 2012? The best question on /r/AskScience of the year? Or the most thought-provoking post of TwoXChromosomes? Want to find the best of /r/MaleFashionAdvice? The coolest data visualizations of the year? Perhaps you'd like to nominate a teacher for UniversityofReddit's awards.

Also, check out the community run /r/TrueBestOf2012, where you can vote on categories like the Best All-Around reddit Hero or Best New Community.

Winners of community best of contests will receive reddit gold and other cool prizes. If you moderate a subreddit, it's not too late to run your own best of 2012 awards. See /r/bestof2012 for the details, and use the new contest mode to hold blind voting threads.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Happy Holidays from all of us at reddit!



Cheers to everyone this holiday season. Whether you are celebrating with loved ones, curled up by the fire, or escaping family with some quiet redditing, we wish all of you a very joyous midwinter celebration.

If you are feeling bored or a bit down, here are a few stocking stuffers from the reddit community.


Peace on Earth & The Twelve Dimensional Multiverse,



alienth
bitcrunch
bsimpson
chromakode
cupcake1713
dacvak
5days
hueypriest
intortus
jenakalif
kemitche
kickme444
kirbyrules
krispykrackers
pixelinaa
powerlanguage
rebeccalyn
reostra
rram
slyf
snoo
spladug
weffey
yishan

Friday, December 21, 2012

58,504 Santas in 126 Countries Spread Joy Through redditgifts



This year is the 4th Secret Santa exchange from redditgifts and the holiday generosity and creativity has now spread to almost 60,000 participants in almost every corner of the globe, making us a shoo-in for another Guinness World Record. Here's the stats so far for the 2012 Secret Santa and Holiday Greeting Card Exchange:

  • Almost 2 million dollars spent in gifts & shipping
  • Almost 11,000 people in 90 countries participated in the greeting card exchange

Here are a few of the highlights from this year's magical gifts:



This year many Santas chose to donate to charity in the name of their recipient. Here's one example from a Danish Santa who made a donation on behalf of his recipient to UNICEF, which funded a survival package for two children in Angola, containing blankets, mosquito nets, water treatment tablets, nutritious food and life-saving vaccines.

One of the best parts of Secret Santa is the good-natured stalking that Santas do to find just the right gift for their recipient. This Santa was quite the detective, and was able to deduce the perfect, and "potentially life-changing gifts" including a artificial sunlight lamp that can help with seasonal depression.

Some of our favorite gifts this year were ones that Santas sent to their recipient's kids. Here's one that send a Radio-Fyler big wheel and another that sent an awesome telescope to introduce a 7-year-old to science.

This year we also had some impressive food gifts, including a massive slab of bacon and 22 pounds of potatoes

We had some beautiful and funny greeting cards sent in the card exchange, but a card from a sick child in the hospital and a card that's made for ants were our favorites (so far)

This year we also introduced the redditgifts Marketplace to make it easier for redditors and secret santas to find great presents and as a way for small (or large) companies to get their glorious wares in front of other redditors. It's brand new, but we are devoted to making the marketplace the best destination on the internet to find upvote-inspiring gifts for everyone. Check out the top products and make sure you check out the reddit store in the marketplace.
We also have a classy limited edition snoo embossed journal from Miro that just came out (get it now, there's only a handful left!).  
TL;DR: 58,504 santas, 126 countries, & 22 pounds of potatoes.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

WW1 Books, LennyBot, Zombie Jesus Pizza, Confronting Procrastination, and a Good Roux: the most saved comments and posts on reddit.


A Dream Visualized by Delivery_of_Rule_34
For many redditors, the comments are the best part about reddit.  Earlier this month, we introduced a new feature, which allows users with reddit gold to save comments. It's only been a month, but here are the comments which have been saved most frequently. As always, you did not disappoint.


Note: We should probably put these in a shitty slideshow with a bunch of pics like all those other websites do, but we're not that smart.



The Top 20 Saved Comments on reddit in the Past Month

While we were digging through the crates...
The Top Ten Saved Posts of All Time   
You too can join the comment-saving ranks with reddit Gold

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Now is the Time... to Invest in Gold

Over the last couple years, reddit traffic and usage have continued to grow by leaps and bounds in October 2012 alone we were up to over 3.8B pageviews and more than 46 million unique visitors. Our server costs also continue to grow, so we have a choice to make: we can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through reddit gold. Advertising will probably always be a part of our revenue, but we want to be ultimately beholden to you, the users.

reddit gold was started a couple years ago to great initial success. While many people have continued to purchase gold, gift reddit gold to each other, or send in postcards, we’ve never really promoted the program, so a lot of active redditors don’t even know about it. Today we want to announce a recommitment to reddit gold, a program we’d like to expand and promote.

So what are we doing to make reddit gold better? First, for those who’ve never heard of reddit gold, here are some existing benefits:

  • Highlight unread comments since the last time you visited a thread
  • See up to 100 subreddits on your frontpage
  • View your karma per subreddit
  • Turn off the display of ads
  • Access to a special members-only lounge that may or may not exist
  • ... and more!
We’re also launching some new things:
  • An oft-requested feature: comment saving and filtering saves by subreddit
  • Ability to give gold to other peoples' comments you really like (we call it “gilding”)
  • Some upgrades and fun stuff in the members-only lounge that may or may not exist
  • We might add a remote-controlled office robot you can drive. Under construction.
We don’t always intend to make these features gold-only — in cases where it would be beneficial for everyone to have them, we’ll eventually migrate the features to the whole community. But for reddit gold members, you get first peek.

We also want to make reddit gold a membership that confers real benefits that are worth what you pay for it, so we’re talking to some reddit-friendly companies to provide special perks or access to stuff for gold members. Stay tuned for more.

And, we’re looking to hire a generalist engineer to help build out these features faster. If you think you’re the one, take a look at the job description and join us to help make reddit better, more golden.  


Finally, we would like to thank all our current reddit gold members. You're the ones who first made reddit gold possible and allowed us to run a site backed by its community rather than catering primarily to advertisers. We hope you enjoy the new stuff!

"The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Introducing Three New Hires

Ahoy!

We are super excited to introduce three new members of the reddit team. Please join us in welcoming these outstanding new admins, and as always, ask them anything in the comments!


David A. Croach (/u/Dacvak) - Community Manager 
What's up, reddit? I'm Dac, a humble gamer from the wondrous land of Pittsburgh, PA. After spending most of my adult life in various parts of the gaming industry, I shifted focus to the enigma that is reddit, and applied to become the Community Manager. A week after being offered the job, I was unfortunately diagnosed with leukemia, which put me out of commission for 8 months. But now that I've punched cancer in the face, I'm back in full swing. (But damn - I sure have a lot of work to catch up on!)


Lesley Brownlee (/u/weffey) - Programmer (redditgifts)
Hi! I'm from Canada's capital city, but made my way here to Salt Lake City via Seattle's eastside. As many of you know, I've been involved with redditgifts and /r/secretsanta for a while now, first as an award giver in the gallery, starting last fall I joined the mod team, and successfully lobbied for a yarn exchange earlier this year. When I'm not at the computer, you can usually find me with a ball of yarn and knitting needles or my spinning wheel. I'm really excited to have joined redditgifts full time, we've got some really fun things planned for the future.


Roger Ostrander (/u/reostra) - Programmer
I'm a 33 year old programmer from Georgia, Michigan, and Maryland (in that order).  My hobbies include making games in my spare time and writing novels every November.  I've been a redditor for years, but figured I'd create a new account for admin duties. Aforementioned admin duties include helping out with the anti-spam efforts. I'll thus be working on the non-visible backend portions of the site, so chances are you won't see me a whole lot.  I do lurk in /r/ideasfortheadmins and /r/theoryofreddit and occasionally even comment, however!


We'll likely have a few more job openings to announce this year, so if you're interested in joining team reddit, keep checking out the blog. As always, these new additions would not be possible without your continuing support. We deeply appreciate it and are working hard to keep improving reddit for you.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Join us to play games and heal kids - Extra Life 2012

I am happy to announce that reddit will be participating in the 2012 Extra Life gaming marathon to raise money for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

Last year we had a small gathering in the office to participate in the marathon. With that group of 10 people playing games for 24 hours, we raised $2,740 for our local hospitals. Together, Extra Life participants raised over $1.2 million to help kids. This year we'd like to go much bigger.


What is Extra Life?


The Extra Life marathon works a lot like other charity marathons. People sign up and get their friends and family to sponsor them to raise funding towards a cause. But instead of running or biking a marathon, we play a marathon of games for 24 hours.

Children's Miracle Network Hospitals is a non-profit international organization that treats sick kids, regardless of a family's ability to pay. CMN is a very reputable charity program, and has been rated highly [charitynavigator.org] by evaluating agencies.

How to participate


To join, go to extra-life.org/team/reddit (or another team of your choosing) and click "Join This Team". During the sign-up you will choose which CMN Hospital you will be raising money for. Follow that up by spreading the word and asking friends and family to sponsor you for the marathon. Also, visit /r/ExtraLife to chat with your fellow teammates.

On October 20th at 8AM your local time, sit down (or stand, if you're into that) and play games for 24 hours. You can play anything you like, be it console, PC, board games, or tabletop. Play from your home, or meetup with others. If that specific day and time doesn't work, you're welcome to marathon when it is convenient for you.

We'll also be live streaming from the reddit office during the event. Take a peek at our hallowed dungeon while watching us fight off sleep and otherwise embarrass ourselves.

As a thank you for participating, any member of team reddit that raises over $100 will receive 2 months of reddit gold for free. Any team member raising more than $300 will get a free reddit t-shirt of their choosing.

How to donate


To donate simply choose a player from the team roster and click "Support Me!". Please note that each member chooses the specific hospital that he or she is raising money for.




Further Info

About Extra Life
Extra Life FAQ
About CMN Hospitals

Team reddit
/r/ExtraLife
reddit office livestream


Thursday, September 20, 2012

reddit Dedicated Day of Service (rDDoS) — This Saturday, September 22nd

/r/clarksville service meetup

On Saturday, September 8th, a group of intrepid, paintbrush-wielding redditors in Clarksville, TN woke up at the ungodly hour of 8 am to renew Vivian House, a single family home that provides shelter for mentally and emotionally disabled adults. 

This week redditors all over the world are planning to serve their local communities by organizing potluck fundraisers for local charities in Northern Virginia, a charity concert in Houston, TX, a beach clean up in Savannah, GA, and more! 

What are you going to do to serve your community? This is the perfect excuse to join up and meet new friends, do something fun, and give back to your community. Beer tastes even better after doing something awesome for your community. If your local subreddit missed out on organizing something for this weekend, just pick another weekend that works for your community. Share your pics and stories on redditgifts.com or your local subreddit. We have a pile of reddit gold to give out to participants. 


or


In case you are on the fence about earning IRL karma, redditors across the globe are going AFK to meet other redditors in their local areas. redditors back on school campuses from The University of British Columbia to Utah State University met other redditors outside their classrooms as part of the College reddit Meetup Day.


Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Internet 2012 Bus Tour - A Campaign to Promote the Open Internet


On January 18, 2012, the reddit community & tens of millions of Americans defeated SOPA & PIPA, two bills that threatened the Internet, one of the healthiest parts of the American economy. Now we’re making sure our government understands just how important the Open Internet is to all Americans.

This October reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Erik Martin (reddit GM), other reddit staff, and some entrepreneurs are taking a bus* (literally half red, half blue) through the Midwest to rally reddit and the larger Open Internet community and campaign for the Open Internet during the Presidential & Vice Presidential debates.

This isn’t just about Silicon Valley and big web companies. Start-ups, local governments, small businesses and web savvy individuals across the country are using the platform of the Open Internet to start new businesses, learn new skills, earn extra income, and make their budgets go further. If you have a story like this, please post it to /r/Internet2012. The Internet 2012 Bus Tour will collect, document and share these stories from the American heartland. We will have 10 journalists from major outlets on the bus, as well as our own documentary crew to capture and tell these stories.

We need your help to make this happen. reddit is covering the hard costs of the trip (gas, bus, driver etc), but we need your contributions to get a proper graphic wrap for the bus, host events across the country, and properly document and share the stories we find with the whole Internet. Please consider participating in our Fundraiser on IndieGoGo. We've got some great perks like a DRM-free documentary of the whole campaign trip, a chance to have your face inside the bus, a sentimental postcard or even an equally sentimental drunk-dial. You'll also be part of a fun and powerful project to protect the Open Internet. If you can't contribute, please help spread the word. We've already gotten awesome tips and connections from redditors at /r/Internet2012 and we'll be updating /r/Internet2012 with details and stories from the road.

Here are a few examples of the types of stories we're going to highlight:

Local Motors: The Internet 2012 Bus will be escorted by the Rally Fighter from Local Motors, a badass rally car designed online and built in the USA. Local Motors is an example of new Internet fueled business models in traditional sectors.

AgLocal: AgLocal is a start up based in Kansas City that makes it easy for anyone to buy or sell locally raised meats. An entrepreneur from AgLocal will be joining us on the bus, and we'll be visiting some farms and restaurants that benefit from their service on the tour.

IndieGoGo: Not only are we using IndieGoGo to raise funds for the tour, but we're also going to be visiting individuals, small businesses, and organizations along the tour that were able to thrive based on the crowdfunding platform.

Here is the partial Bus Tour Itinerary:

October 3 - Presidential Debate watching event - Denver, CO
October 4 - TBD - Boulder, CO
October 5 - Event at Raikes School, UNL & Event with Hudl.com - Lincoln, NE
October 6 - Event with Dwolla on The Future of Civic Engagement - Des Moines, IA
October 7 - Startup Weekend Demos - Iowa City, IA
October 8 - Event at Kauffman Foundation on The Future of Entrepreneurship Kansas City, MO
October 9 - Start Louis Tech Meetup at TREX - St. Louis, MO
October 10 - Event with Fark on The Future of Local Communities - Lexington, KY
October 11 - VP Debate watching event - Danville, KY

There are many details to come. If you are in one of these cities or an area in between and have a story about how the Open Internet has helped you or your community, please share it in the tour's main subreddit /r/Internet2012. We will also post event details and tour updates in /r/Internet2012 (as well as local subreddits). Hope to see many of you at tour events!

The Open Internet is about the freedom for Americans to help themselves, and it's an enormous engine for economic growth. Let’s make sure both political parties, media everywhere, and local governments recognize it this Fall!

TL;DR: reddit is launching a bus tour through the Midwest to campaign for the Open Internet. Be a part of it by contributing HERE, and subscribing to /r/internet2012.

*Fun Fact: The bus is the same vehicle that John McCain used as the Straight Talk Express in 2008.

Friday, August 31, 2012

POTUS IAMA Stats

Without any fanfare ahead of time, The President of the United States spent 30 minutes answering questions from anonymous users with no mediation on a website run by 20 people, and in a forum that was organically created by volunteers. Tens of thousands of people actively participated by voting and/or commenting and millions watched, and The President even broke some news in the Q & A (by suggesting a new amendment for the first time). Did it go perfectly smooth? Nope. Is this the absolute perfect format for politicians to answer questions? Nope. But it worked, and it was a big step, not just for reddit, but for online communities everywhere. No matter how you feel about the IAMA, reddit, the President, or politics in general, we hope that what took place this past Wednesday will inspire other online communities and start-ups, and encourage other politicians to seek out more ways to talk directly with their constituents. We thank the President and his team for making this happen.

Key figures from the IAMA:

  • 2,987,307 pageviews on the day of 
  • 5,280,441 pageviews so far in total (as of 9 AM PT 8/31 -- not accounting for stats lag).

In the first five minutes, there were 37 comments. By the ten minute mark, redditors had made 278 comments. Within half an hour that number jumped to 5,266 and was over 10,000 by the end of the first hour.

The only link in recorded history to have surpassed the front page. 
At any given time, the front page of reddit (http://www.reddit.com) has around 15-20% of active visitors. An extremely popular submission may have 2-5% of visitors at any given time. In the recorded history of reddit, we’ve never had one single submission get more visitors than the front page at any given time, until the Obama IAMA. The Obama IAMA received over 30% of all visitors to reddit at its peak.

 /u/PresidentObama 
 The President’s account was given 5 years, 9 months of reddit gold! (Suppose someone will have to figure out how to declare virtual gifts if they haven’t already).

PresidentObama's user page received 428,004 pageviews on the day of the IAMA.

As many speculated, the username /u/PresidentObama was not actually publicly available. That user deleted their account a while ago, so when this event arose, we made the username available for the President. If you are not a current or former head of state, don’t ask us for a deleted username.


The whole site 
There were 865,092 unique visits during the first hour after the IAMA began -- up from 518,312 before it started. At peak, Google Analytics showed 198,000 active concurrent visitors.  At the peak of the IAMA reddit was receiving over 100,000 pageviews per minute.

Map of Barack Obama AMA traffic by City and Hour - August 29th 2012 

Technical bits
In preparation for the IAMA, we initially added 30 dedicated servers (20%~ increase) just for the comment thread. This turned out not to be enough, so we added another 30 dedicated servers to the mix. At peak, we were transferring 48 MB per second of reddit to the internet. This much traffic overwhelmed our load balancers which caused a lot of the slowness you probably experienced on reddit. This IAMA gave us a lot of information on what we need to do next not only to handle the next megathread on reddit, but also to make reddit faster in general. We’re going to redesign our load balancer system to be more flexible under this kind of load, and we’ve got a bunch of things we need to do to make our code more efficient for giant comment threads. Both of these improvements should make day-to-day reddit use faster as well.

Monday, August 27, 2012

New Fundraising Options Designed Just for redditors


We're constantly impressed by all the big and small altruistic fundraising campaigns that the reddit community has supported. For a while now, we've been trying to help encourage some additional tools for redditors to be able to collectively raise funds. For nonprofit projects in particular we wanted to find some low or no fee options so that as much of redditors' money goes to the cause and not to payment processing and other fees. We also wanted to see more built in accountability and fraud checks, so that redditors can be more confident that their money is going where they think it is. Additionally, we wanted easier ways for mods to integrate fundraisers into their subreddits.

We now have two new and promising tools that should help make it easier and more reliable for future fundraising and charitable giving.

reddit.Crowdtilt.com - You may have already seen this one in action for the /r/breakingbad fundraiser or others. Crowdtilt has set up a special version of their site based on redditor needs. Some of the main benefits of their tool:

  • Worldwide. People can contribute from all over the world. 
  • Good for nonprofits: Crowdtilt provides tax-deductible receipts to donors and disburses funds to verified 501(c)(3) non-profits directly. 
  • Safe. Anybody with a U.S. bank account can receive money (more countries coming soon), and Crowdtilt will help verify beneficiaries of campaigns. Beneficiary can not be changed/hidden. Any fundraiser with "verified 501(c)(3)" status means that the recipient of funds matches IRS info for the same non-profit.
  • Low fee. Crowdtilt is waiving their fee for this collaboration, so only a 2.5% fee for secure credit card processing applies (less than PayPal and other sites). 
  • Can also work for various groups or other campaigns that are not official non-profits to collect funds for meetups etc.
  • Event driven with finite time frame.

See a live example at reddit PUNTS Cancer or radio reddit's Best of Campaign . To start a campaign with Crowdtilt go https://reddit.crowdtilt.com/

Dwolla & Stripe (redditdonate.com) - This one is brand new. Dwolla (online payments company) and Stripe (payment system for developers) teamed up to create redditdonate.com. This allows for non-profit fundraising where you can pay with Dwolla, or any credit card (through Stripe). Some of the main benefits of their tool:

  • Easy to use for mods. Subreddit moderators can drop a donate button into their sidebar allowing redditors the ability to donate directly to the nonprofits, no third-parties holding the money. 
  • Safe. Limited to verified 501(c)(3) non-profits who have to confirm accounts. 
  • Open ended time frame. 
  • Low or no fee (Dwolla: $10 and under = free to send/receive money, $10 and over = flat fee of 25¢, Stripe: 2.9% + 30¢ for any transaction).
Here's an example of what their tool looks like in a subreddit:
/r/TwoXChromosomes (she's the first)
/r/Programming (girls who code and hackNY)
/r/assistance (goods for good and united way nyc)
You can see all the nonprofits currently available and how to use this in a subreddit you moderate at /r/redditDonate

These two tools are each a bit different and will develop further based on feedback from the reddit community. We hope they make awesome fundraising projects easier, less expensive, and more secure. We're still talking to other companies on your behalf as well. Let us know what else you would like to see!

Monday, August 20, 2012

University of reddit - Explore any subject that interests you

Imagine a university where you have the freedom to take whatever class sounds interesting. Imagine being able to choose freely from courses like Hindi 101, Algebraic Topology, 17th Century Italian Fencing, Abelton Live, The Art and Science of Making Great Beer, Neural Basis of Cognition, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Starcraft II Strategy. Now imagine not having to worry about attendance, grades, tuition, sharing personal information, or anything else but learning for learning's sake. Teachers and potential teachers: imagine being able to explore any subject that interests you and imagine having complete freedom to plan your curricula and carry out your class.

University of reddit strives to be just such a community. University of reddit is a community project that has grown organically over the past few years into a place for anyone looking to learn or teach. It was created by redditors for redditors. It now features a variety of classes spanning Art, Computer Science, Fun & Games, General Studies, Language, Mathematics & Statistics, Music, Philosophy, Science, and Social Sciences. Thousands of students have participated and many people have dedicated their free time to teaching something they are passionate about.

If any of this tickles your learning fancy, there are many ways to get involved with University of reddit.
University of reddit is still new and growing, but it's amazing what the community of teachers and students, mods, and admins there have built. Join the project and consider enrolling or teaching today.

Vastatis tempus sapienter!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

On reddiquette

reddit is like a busy community park. There’s a lot going on, being run by a lot of diverse groups. Some people are having BBQs, there’s a company picnic, and there’s probably a few people smoking something somewhere. In the “reddit park,” subreddit moderators are like the group organizers, and the site admins are like the groundskeepers (you can get a better description of the roles mods and admins play by reading up on “How reddit Works”). And like the park, when you’re having fun on reddit, you should be respectful of others, you should follow the “park rules,” and — if you want to go that extra mile — you can do things like volunteer to clean up the park.

On reddit, “being respectful” involves doing things such as upvoting good content, downvoting irrelevant content (but don’t downvote good discussions just because you disagree!), marking your submissions as NSFW if they might get someone else fired for viewing at work, and so forth. And don’t litter — that is, when you submit something, it should be because you think that it is genuinely interesting, not just because it’s something you made. Many subreddits prefer that you submit stuff that’s NOT yours, while others prefer it if you only submit items that you’ve created. You should always make it clear whether a submission is your content or someone else’s — don’t try to pass off someone else’s work as your own!

All of the above are just guidelines. How strongly the guidelines are enforced depends on the specific community and moderators of the subreddit in question. Some are strict, some are more laissez-faire, some are contrarian. Many of the more common guidelines are codified into reddiquette. These guidelines are created and monitored by other redditors — not the admins — and reading over them is a good way to learn how to be a better redditor.

Beyond the guidelines are the “park rules” — a small number of cases that we, the admins, reserve for stepping in and taking immediate action against posts, subreddits, and users. We don’t like to have to do it, but we’re also responsible for overseeing the park. Internally, we’ve followed the same set of guidelines for a long time, and none of these should be any surprise to anyone. For the sake of clarity, we’ve put that list in one place. If you’re too lazy to click (really?), here’s the short breakdown:

  1. Don’t spam
  2. Don’t vote cheat (it doesn’t work, anyway)
  3. Don’t post personal information
  4. Don’t post sexually suggestive content featuring minors
  5. Don’t break the site or interfere with normal usage of the site for anyone else

If you’ve been here a while, you’ll know that number 3, “No personal information,” can be a recurring problem. So let this serve as your annual reminder that posting of personal information is NOT COOL. Even if that redditor’s neighbor is destroying puppies using the one ring’s power, there are more appropriate avenues for reporting such offenses (1-800-GANDALF). Remember, you’re probably not getting the whole story and mistakes can ruin the lives of the innocent.

Friday, June 29, 2012

redditors Assemble in Over 300 cities for GrMD III & Announcing rDDOS

/r/paris meetup

This Saturday was the 3rd Annual Global reddit Meetup Day and by our non-scientific estimates, there were over 350 different meetups in 70 countries, with approximately 10,000 attendants, which is roughly double last year's turnout. 

To commemorate the glorious day, redditors made special outfits, nail polish art, cocktails, Piñatas, tacos, desserts, cocktails, Jenga towers, portraits, aluminium castings, various snoo art, and yes, even fire tornados.

Check out all the amazing pics, videos, and DailyDot's coverage. Big shout out to our "horrible" friends at Cards Against Humanity for sending out cards to a lot of the meetups. Big thanks to everyone at /r/SanFrancisco, /r/Chicago, /r/NYC, /r/Houston, /r/LosAngeles, /r/LondonSocialClub, /r/LasVegas, /r/Portland, and /r/Alaska for showing us admins a good time. We must note however, that we were concerned by the number of horsehead masks. Seriously, you all are going to open a damn vortex if you aren't careful. 


/r/halifax meetup
If you missed out on the fun or want to start planning for next year, Global reddit Meetup Day IV will take place on Saturday June 15th, 2013. Hopefully this date will work better for the redditors celebrating midsummer. We are already looking forward to next year! 


We also want to announce a new global meetup event — reddit Dedicated Day of Service (rDDoS), which will be held on September 21, 2012  September 22, 2012. It'll be just like GrMD except replace the drinking with cleaning up local rivers, blood drives, fixing up computers at local schools, or whatever else makes sense in your community.  We'll have some various fun contests and things to encourage participation, but we'll leave it up to local communities and the mods of the realms to figure out what a "dedicated day of service" means in your area. Find your local subreddit HERE and discuss.

/r/singapore
We are all inspired by the wide variety of altruistic projects and events on reddit. The altruistic fundraising events tend to get the most press attention, but /r/assistance, /r/random_acts_of_pizza,  /r/RandomActsofPetFood/r/RandomKindness/r/MeetAndEat, /r/Favors/r/mmfb, /r/mentors, /r/techsupport, /r/Proofreading, /r/PlayItForward,  /r/stopsmoking and many others have built vibrant communities around helping each other in big and small ways every day. We hope rDDoS will help spark similar offline awesomeness and some new friends.


See you September 22nd, 2012 for rDDoS and June 15th, 2013 for GrMD!

/r/washingtondc meetup

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Global reddit Meetup Day III - This Saturday, June 23rd

/r/brisbane
In the spring of 2010, a user had the inspired idea to designate a specific day as Global reddit Meetup Day and encourage redditors around the world to organize meetups in their respective cites, towns, hamlets, fishing villages, and moonbases. A couple years later, there are over 380 events planned in over 60 countries for this Saturday.

Find an Event Near You

For all the easy jokes about having to actually go outside, or the meme of people being socially awkward, or the fear/desire of hearing Call Me Maybe dupstep remixes, reddit meetups are pretty amazing. Seriously. Over the years, reddit meetups have spawned fun, friendships, businesses, bands, marriages, and yes - plenty of hangovers. Based on our admittedly biased experience the people that actually come out to reddit meetups are a welcoming and friendly group.  Check out a local event (or start one in your area) and meet some new folks.  

Remember to upload photos and/or videos from your meetup on redditgifts. There will be trophies. Also, if you'd like your meetup photo to be featured in the new about page slideshow, don't forget to submit them to /r/about!

/r/washingtondc
Huge thanks to all the local subreddit moderators, meetup organizers, and everyone else who is making these events happen.  See you all on Saturday.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

reddit is Hiring! Positions: redditgifts programmer and Controller (finance)

Check out these new reddit jobs!

Controller (Finance):

Dear finance redditor,

We're looking for someone who can keep our books in order, and help develop the financial infrastructure that supports reddit. For the past few years, our accounting and finance were handled by our former parent company.  Now, we’ll be doing it all in-house. We want to run a tight ship and be responsible and conscientious with our finances (and minerals!) .  Are you someone who can help us do this?

We’re looking for someone who understands all manner of financial and accounting systems and processes.  You should be familiar with how “big company accounting” works, because we still sometimes interface with our former parent company, but just as comfortable doing things differently for a tiny company.  You should be comfortable with high level financial strategy as well as willing to take on tasks like data entry.

Your work will include but not be limited to the following:

  • Accounts Payable: You will be posting invoices and expense reimbursements, making check runs and managing vendors.
  • Accounts Receivable: You will be issuing invoices, making collections calls, working with the sales team and maintaining contracts.
  • Accounting: You will be handling bank reconciliations, journal postings, and will be maintaining the General Ledger.
  • Reporting: You will handle the preparation of monthly actual versus budget reporting – and handling monthly closes.
  • Payroll: You will be processing payroll and maintaining employee information.
  • Finance Leadership: You will be working with banks and auditors.
  • Record-keeping: You will maintain files and manage data as necessary.

You must have a degree in accounting and have experience with accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger accounting. Experience in payroll will also be required. As an added bonus, it would be great if you had experience with administrating benefits, options and company records. There is a lot of work to go around.

The position is a full-time job in San Francisco’s fantastic, sunny South Park neighborhood.  We offer great benefits and competitive compensation in both cash and equity.

To apply, send a cover letter and resume -- along with, optionally, a pithy and/or humorous and/or poetic statement about why you are perfect for the role -- to controller-job@reddit.com.

We would greatly prefer to hire from within the reddit community, so if you love reddit and might be a good fit, please let us know!


redditgifts Programmer:

Dear redditgifts enthusiast,

Join us in our quest to make people smile and bring happiness to an increasingly angry and cynical world! Here at redditgifts we started on this quest a little more than two years ago and we have already succeeded in creating record-setting Secret Santas, organizing donation drives, and massive meetup gatherings. We are only scratching the surface of what we can do and how many people we can reach but in order to get there, we need your help!

When you join us we will have all sorts of fun engineering work for you to do. We’ve got a lot of interesting work around the gift exchanges.

For example, can you figure out the most optimal way to match up redditors across the world so that everyone gets matched with someone they will be most likely to give an amazing gift to? Can you invent novel ways to increase participation? Have you ever done payment processing or built a storefront? We even have a new project that could really use your expertise and will be really fun for the reddit community. Your work will require knowledge and mastery of the full web stack. You should be able to set up servers, write (or learn) Python and django, design beautiful, interactive web apps using modern HTML, CSS and Javascript, and when required, you should be able to delve into the internals of Python. We need new ideas and you should have them! We know that is a lot to ask but we also know how skilled you are and we believe in you. Additionally, we hope you've been a redditor for a long time and maybe you've even done some redditgifting.

Now, on to where you will work... redditgifts will have an office in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we hope you will join us there. If you write back soon enough you'll even get to help us find this office and pick the right furniture. It will be fun! If you'd rather work in San Francisco, that is also an option. Most of the reddit team works in a really cool office in SOMA and would be happy for you to join them there as well, but we would prefer that you join us in Salt Lake City.

We hope to hear from you very soon and we hope that reply with enough information about you that we can tell you really want to join us. What do we want exactly?

  • You must reply to this in letter form (to the email address provided below). If you can fit some humor into your letter, we would really like that. It’s important to laugh, especially while you work.
  • Please tell us your favorite gift from our gift gallery and explain why it’s your favorite.
  • Please tell us your favorite holiday and explain why it is your favorite.
  • Please provide a resume or a link to your linkedin profile.
  • Please provide a link to your redditgifts profile.
  • Complete the programming challenge described below, where your task is to write a matching process for participants in a redditgifts gift exchange:


When participants sign up for a gift exchange on redditgifts they specify two properties that are used within our matching process:

  1. Shipping Country (string)
  2. Shipping Preferences - whether or not they are willing to ship internationally (boolean)
Your program needs to find the best possible way to match participants such that:

  • Whenever possible, the participants shipping preferences are adhered to.
  • Whenever possible, participants who send a gift to a country other than their own are more likely to receive a gift from a country other than their own. Participants who indicate that they are willing to ship internationally typically wish to receive internationally, so amongst those who are willing to ship internationally, maximize the number of people who receive a gift from a country other than their own.
  • Whenever possible, participants should not receive a gift from the same person they send a gift to.
  • Every participant must be matched.
  • The matching process should runs efficiently, meaning the execution time is short.

Your program should take 1 parameter as input, a list (array) where each item is a list (array) that represents a participant and has these three elements:

  1. unique id of participant (integer)
  2. shipping country of participant (string)
  3. willing to ship internationally (boolean)
Example: [[234, ‘US’, True], [235, ‘US’, False],]

Your program should return a list (array) where each element is a 2 item list (array) containing:

  • Unique id of participant giving the gift
  • Unique id of participant receiving the gift
  • Example: [[234, 235], [235, 234],]
Your solution should be representative of how you program. You should be able to explain the program and understand its strengths and weaknesses. You may write this program in any language you’d like to, but it needs to be executable (no pseudo code please).

For your reference, here is a spreadsheet containing numbers from Secret Santa 2011 of participants from each country and their shipping preferences. You can use this to generate a dataset that you use for testing.

Send your solution and anything else you think might help show us how rad you are to jobs@redditgifts.com! We like github links, we love reading code, we LOVE seeing examples of previous work, especially if you tell us what you did and why it's a good (or bad) example. Please email us at jobs@redditgifts.com and we will get back to you!

Sincerely,

kickme444 and 5days