blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: 2013

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Happy Holidays From All of us at reddit

Cheers & Happy Holidays, all you filthy animals! Whether you are celebrating with loved ones, curled up by the fire with friends, or singing the 12 days of solstice, we wish all of you a very joyous midwinter celebration. If you are bored and doing some quiet redditing, here are a few stocking stuffers:

upvote tree from newgg78

Looking for inspiration for Christmas dinner? Look no further than /r/foodporn

/r/Askreddit Xmas Day MegaThread

Lots of Game Threads and trash talking over on /r/NBA

Christmas music stream from /r/christmasmusic & reddit.tv

Star Wars Holiday Special complete with 1978 commercials

/r/RandomActsofCards makes holidays special for a user's mother who is facing surgery

Looking for a good holiday movie to enjoy? Here are some recommendations from /r/movies

Join in on some holiday cheer at /r/RandomActsOfChristmas/

Peace on Earth & The Twelve Dimensional Multiverse!

Monday, December 09, 2013

Promote your crowdfunded project on reddit — for free!

Seasons greetings, reddit!

In the past, we’ve enjoyed donating free adspace to some deserving groups groups of people, who would benefit from some promotion on reddit, such as small businesses and Nonprofits. We do it to show our appreciation for their hard work and entrepreneurial spirit, and to recognize the amazing services and products they offer.

After a short hiatus from our past ad donation campaigns, we're once again opening up our self-serve advertising platform to another group who deserve our recognition and support — crowdfunding projects!

We'd like your help. If you or someone you know has a crowdsourced fundraising campaign (ie. Kickstarter, Crowdtilt, Adopt-A-Classroom, etc) that they'd like to advertise to the world's best internet community, please send them our way.

To claim your free ad:

Create an ad using your reddit account:
- You can choose "link" or "text". These work like organic reddit posts — a link ad will link externally to your projects URL.
- A text post will link to the comment section with your text sticked in a box at the top. The text box provides space for describing your project or including other information with your link. Fill out the two boxes, then click "next".
- When you've done the above, and clicked "next", you will arrive at your dashboard.
- Stop here! Don't set dates or pay.
Email us the link to your dashboard with the subject line: "Free Ad!"
Lastly — and VERY IMPORTANTLY — in the email, give us a time frame when your project will run, so we can make sure your ad is live while people are still able to donate.

We’ll review the emails and give 100,000 impressions each to the first 250 folks with deserving crowdsourcing projects.

We have reached our goal! Thank you for all who participated!

These ads will appear on the front page of reddit throughout the month of December. Even if you don’t have a project to advertise, keep an eye out for any projects you may be interested in helping!

In the meantime, we’d love to plug some projects that are near and dear to reddit’s heart:

redditdonate.com
Chosen and embedded by subreddits, the donate button allows reddit communities to raise awareness and channel donations directly to like-minded 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
reddit’s own crowdtilt
a redditor fundraising heaven, where Crowdtilt and reddit staff have teamed up to build one group funding platform for everything from a $100 meetup to a $100k fundraiser–and anything in between. Check them out for your next fundraiser!
And don't forget to check out /r/crowdfunding and /r/crowdfundingprojects!

Friday, November 29, 2013

Watch reddit's Livestream Black Friday show & Things For Which We're Thankful

We're bringing the chaos (& deals) of Black Friday to you. You don't even have to leave the house.

reddit is livestreaming 8 hours of QVC-style mayhem from the bowels of midtown NYC. We'll be featuring some of the amazing vendors on the redditgifts marketplace, including lots of deals and giveaways. Our fabulous comedian hosts and special guests will help soothe away your hangovers and shopping/family related traumas. Here are just a few of things you can expect during the livestream today:

Arnold Schwarzenegger (/u/GovSchwarzenegger) doing a motivational segment with his tank
Fundraising for classroom teachers through DonorsChoose with the Help of Stephen Colbert
Improvisational pianist Bernie Katzman playing holiday requests
Joel Hodgson (from MST3K) conducting a very special holiday song
Mike Rowe reprising his role as QVC host
In-studio musical performances by YC The Cynic, Kiah Victoria, CharlieRED, and more
A special appearance by reddit co-founder /u/kn0thing
Shout outs to all the brave souls working retail on Black Friday from /r/TalesFromRetail
An apology to /r/DetroitLions
A /r/trees inspired 4:20pm segment that may or may not include a Hoffman's Two-Toed Sloth

Watch the broadcast on redditgifts.com or HERE. Live show starting at 12pm ET and going until 8pm ET.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we also each want to take time out to some of the parts of reddit we're thankful for.

/u/chooter

/u/5days

/r/AnimalsBeingDerps makes me happy every day. I'm thankful that people post pictures of their goofy-looking pets caught in awkward moments. They're the best.

/u/hellohobbit

reddit allowed for this massive collective act of catharsis to happen.
/r/IsolatedVocals
/r/polandball
/r/forhire, which helped me get an amazing job (this one) after graduating in "this economy" with a humanities degree. Thank you reddit!

/u/dehrmann

I'm thankful for the mods. They put an incredible amount of work into keeping reddit awesome. And the community team. They deal with more shit than I can imagine.

/u/youngluck

This small sub, and the actions witnessed thereof, quite literally changed my life: /r/favors.

/u/highshelfofsteam

/r/writingprompts. It keeps my creative juices and novel aspirations flowing — even though I don't spend nearly as much time there as I should.

/u/freedomthebucket

I'm thankful that reddit is used to expose everyday awesome situations that wouldn't otherwise be known about, except for a few people.

I'm also thankful that reddit is used to shed light on really important situations that other forms of media simply wouldn't cover.

Some of the videos in /r/happycrowds make me extremely happy.

/u/kemitche

I'm thankful for "anti-hype" as information. redditors correcting misleading titles and articles gives me the context to enjoy and understand news, science and technology much better than just the source material.

/u/cupcake1713

I'm thankful for all of the educational subreddits like /r/askhistorians and /r/askscience. The moderators there are amazing, and the contributors always make it a worthwhile read whenever I find myself over there.

Also also, I found my job via the blog!

/u/bitcrunch

I'm thankful for the /r/gaymer "mom" - /u/Diogenes71. She first posted last year, and has "adopted" gaymers who can't come out to their parents.

I'm also thankful for the mods at all of the "random acts of ___" subreddits and the mods of /r/suicidewatch, who are some of the most kind, caring, and wise individuals I've ever seen.

/r/RandomKindness
/r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza
/r/randomactsofchristmas
(and so on, they're listed on the sidebars of each)

/u/jenakalif

I'm really thankful for /r/askhistorians. This post blew my mind: I'm a typical college student in America and I'm going to a party. What should I expect if I was in the 1920s, 40s, 60s and 80s? What were the differences/similarities?

/u/krispykrackers

I'm thankful that, after 2 1/2 years of working here, when I find free time, I still really enjoy casually browsing reddit. That's how awesome this site and its community is. It's like working at a restaurant, eating every meal there, and still enjoying the food and company.

/u/aquilafiera

I'm really grateful for the /r/SecretSanta community. They've been really patient as we've turned the entire site upside down and have really been the superstars of our push for 100k Secret Santas.

/u/mrefish

I am thankful for the subreddit communities and their members who are willing to teach and contribute their expertise to anyone willing to learn.

/u/kirbyrules

I'm thankful for /r/Music and /r/ListenToThis, for sharing their favorite songs and providing me with excellent reddit.tv channels to listen to while redditing at reddit. One of my favorite discoveries from here includes the Of Monsters and Men version of "Kids". I'm also thankful for the /r/FoodPorn community for sharing their restaurant recommendations and recipes! Yumm....

/u/spladug

I too am thankful for /r/AskHistorians. In particular, this thread was really really good: What in your study of history has most humanized the past and its people for you? Sappymode: I'm also thankful for all the new friends reddit has brought me (including all of y'all!)

/u/garyjense

I am thankful for /r/fitness and /r/cocktails. Without the first, I'd feel a lot more guilty about the second.

/u/hueypriest

I am thankful for /r/LongDistance for helping me while my fiancée and I were thousands of miles apart. I'm thankful for /r/neutralpolitics and their difficult but important mission of discussing politics in an even-handed manner.

/u/pixelinaa

I am thankful for shareable links on reddit, because my husband sends me links every day to let me know he's thinking about me.

/u/iamapillow

As corny as this is, I am truly thankful for all of you. I admire how hard everyone works, and I love that I work for a company where each and every employee is so unbelievably passionate about what they do. (Also, I found my job on /r/forhire so definitely thankful for that subreddit!) I'm also thankful for /r/dadjokes, and now /r/dadjokesinhistory. Never fails to make me laugh and bring a smile to my face.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

This Nov. 29th, reddit's 1st Livestream Brings the Black Friday Chaos to You

On Black Friday 2008, a retail employee was stampeded to death when a mob of shoppers broke down the doors of a store in Valley Stream, NY.

On Black Friday 2011, a savings hunter in Porter Ranch, California injured 20 people when she doused her fellow shoppers with pepper spray.

On Black Friday 2012, an argument about a parking space in Tallahassee ended with two shoppers being shot.

On Black Friday 2013, experience the Black Friday chaos and adventure from the safety of your own dwelling with the redditgifts shopping network.

Black Friday is absurd.

The day after thanksgiving has mutated into a disgusting, crowded, and sometimes dangerous national holiday in the US. It's the manic lovechild of a /r/Murica, /r/wheredidthesodago, and /r/hailcorporate threesome after one-too-many Watermelon martinis one night at Olive Garden. It's become an increasingly hyped and sprawling holiday ritual, but there's still some magic in a cultural tradition spending time with family, no matter how crass the motive. Unless you work in retail, that is. In which case, welcome to Hell.

In the face of such perversion we have decided not to turn our noses and hibernate, but rather to embrace the commercial chaos head on.

On Black Friday, we are hosting an EPIC 8 hour livestream on redditgifts.com and our youtube channel. It's going to be part home-shopping-network, part old-school-holiday-variety-show, part fundraiser telethon, and part Muppets Take Manhattan. We're going to be featuring amazing small merchants from the redditgifts marketplace, dynamite musical acts, hilarious comedians, appearances from celebrity redditors, and of course a Hoffman's two-toed sloth.

We know from traffic graphs during previous Thanksgiving holidays that many of you are stuck at home on Black Friday, rightfully scared to venture outside, and bored with family.

This year, while we can't save you from all the madness of the holiday season, we promise that from 12pm ET to 8pm ET we're going to do our best to entertain and amuse and bring some of the Black Friday spectacle to the safety of your own living room/bungalow/yurt/bunker. Consider this our grand experiment to put just a little humanity back into the soulless empty big box holiday.

Our show will be hosted by some of NYC's (and Toronto's) finest comedians, including:

Casey Jost - actor and comedian who is the head comedy writer of "Impractical Jokers" and a member of UCB's Harold Team "Good Girl")
Lisa Kleinman - actress, comedian, and lady person based out of Brooklyn. She is currently an actor on the UCB Maude Team Beige.
Benny Pearson - funmaker who has had multiple pursuits in the music industry, and he hopes to use his platform on RGSN to play with something sharp.
Sasheer Zamata - actress, writer, and comedienne living in NYC. She has a new web series called "Pursuit of Sexiness".
Yoni Lotan - actor, improviser, writer, and filmmaker living in New York City. (Just like every single person in NYC).
Nat & Marie - Writers, podcasters, and hosts of Canada’s longest running Internet trend barometer show.

You can see some of them in action in the preview below.

We will have in-studio musical performances by YC The Cynic, Kiah Victoria, CharlieRED, and others. We also have MNN's Jay Miller presenting a very special "Midevenings" from our studio, video submissions from CollegeHumor's Pat Cassels and Jeff Rubin, Jake & Amir, Pee-wee Herman (via telephone), Joel Hodgson (from MST3K), /u/GovSchwarzenegger, and many more.

We are especially honored that Mike Rowe, one of our touchstones for the show, will be participating. Before Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe was a host on QVC and made comedy gold out of selling trinkets to the late night masses. His mischievous graveyard shift work is an inspiration to this project.

We'll be raising funds for classroom projects for DonorsChoose.org with the help of none other than Stephen Colbert. We'll be highlighting some great bitcoin deals from Bitcoin Black Friday, including a deal on reddit gold. We'll also have some surprises and special contributions from the reddit community like this moving collaboration from /u/indiefied and /u/Poem_For_Your_Sprog:

Sometimes, when I'm sleeping, I dream of it yet -
That day in November I'll never forget.
The sounds as they rushed and they crushed and they fell -
Their faces; their fury; that vision of Hell.

- The Ballad of Black Friday

See you all on Nov. 29th from 12pm - 8pm ET on redditgifts.com and youtube.com/reddit, and we will weather this storm together.

Friday, November 08, 2013

A Server By Any Other Name

Not too long ago, we said that we wanted to find a way to thank everyone who helps us meet our reddit daily gold goal. As you may know, reddit runs on many hundreds of servers - you can see a bit of this by loading up reddit.com and looking in the far lower right corner and mousing over the “pi” symbol (a reference to one of the greatest cringe-worthy early movies about the internet). This will cause some data to appear about what server rendered that page:

The far-lower-right of your reddit.com window

As a small token of thanks, every day we exceed our gold goal, we will let everyone who bought gold or gilded someone band together to pick a name for one of our servers. To kick things off, we solicited a few server name suggestions from current gold members, and named the first few servers in this resplendent server naming ceremony:

Going forward, we’ve created a special subreddit for naming servers at /r/NameAServer. We’re still working out some of the kinks, but it’s been running all right for a couple nights now, so here’s how it works:

Click here to buy reddit gold

Each night, if we reach 100% of our daily reddit golden goal, everyone who bought or gave gold that day will be invited to a special thread in /r/NameAServer to submit nominations, curate suggestions, and collectively decide on a name. These names will go into a naming queue and every time a new server is brought online, it shall have a name from that queue bestowed upon it.

Over time, as the servers are named, you will be able to see these names show up in the page rendering data on the bottom, and you can also show off your named server to your friends/mother (or name them after your friends/mother).

Finally, we’ve released another gold feature - remember what links you’ve visited across computers: never click a link twice again! If you visit a link on one computer, it’ll show up purple across your other computers. Handy for those of us who use reddit while at work!

As the holiday season approaches, we want to thank all of you for continuing to support reddit. Lastly, don't forget to sign up for redditgifts Secret Santa! Last year in 2012 we set a Guinness World Record with over 44,000 people across 130 countries to participate in the largest Secret Santa Gift Exchange. Let's crush that record this year!

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Be a Frontend Engineer at reddit

We are seeking a talented developer with frontend skills to join us in San Francisco.

reddit is a cultural center of the internet, and the frontend is its ambassador. Many of our goals now and on the horizon are deeply rooted in the frontend, such as improving the experience of discovering new subreddits and facilitating meaningful and diverse community discourse.

At reddit, we have a notoriously small team of engineers (currently 10) who develop the core site. Engineers enjoy a large amount of autonomy and independence in how they solve problems. As a consequence of that, we are looking for someone who can wear many hats and approach the frontend from many angles. This is a challenging job, and requires a rare combination of traits:

Full-stack development expertise; expert-level HTML5/CSS/JS + strong backend programming skills.
Interest in designing user interfaces and experiences.
Experience architecting and implementing elegant technical solutions on the frontend.
Understanding of web development and its many layers: HTTP(S), servers like HAProxy and nginx, and web app programming environments like WSGI frameworks.
A deep passion and curiosity for online communities.

You'll also need to have or pick up a few skills on the job:

Large scale Python web development.
Working with SQL and NoSQL data stores, particularly Cassandra.
Developing and deploying in a Linux environment; using and customizing shell tools.
Deeply grokking reddit’s full codebase, community standards, and site culture.

If you have a background in most or all of the above, then odds are you have a lot of choices of how to spend your time. Consider reddit as a rare chance to shape millions of peoples' experience discovering each other (and themselves) on a frontier of internet community. Each and every day the human element of reddit surprises and captivates us, and we hope it will you, too. There are huge rewarding long term projects but also a ton of low hanging fruit (you shouldn't have to look around the site long to find some...). Just about any feature you touch contains something interesting to hack on that will affect how hundreds of thousands of people experience reddit daily.

If this sounds like an interesting challenge to you, . Feel free to ask us any questions in the comments.

Monday, October 28, 2013

What was that?? peers down the basement stairs

It’s that time of year again… The time for pumpkin carving, apple picking, costume designing, and being scared shitless by creepy things you find on the internet. In honour of Halloween being right around the corner, we’ve compiled a list of some of the creepiest subreddits for your perusal.

Enjoy… if you dare.

/r/creepypasta: a subreddit that consists of short horror stories and urban legends
/r/creepy_gif: some of the most unnerving gifs you’ll find
/r/CemeteryPorn: images of graves of those who are no longer part of this world
/r/Ghosts: ghost stories, sightings, pictures… you name it
/r/imaginarymonsters: drawings of terrifying beasts from the minds of redditors and other artists
/r/scaredshitless: a compilation of scary stories, pictures, and videos
/r/LetsNotMeet: real-life stories from redditors about terrifying things that have happened
/r/nosleep: creepy stories told by redditors
/r/Paranormal: a subreddit dedicated to the discussion of anything paranormal
/r/shortscarystories: stories that will have you cowering in fear in only one paragraph
/r/Slender_Man: if you see a tall, thin man with no discernable facial features, you’d better hightail it out of there!
/r/truecreepy: a subreddit for truly creepy things
/r/welcometohell: welcome...
/r/fearme: just… just go there. No description is good enough.
/r/horror: for anything and everything having to do with horror
/r/creepy: from whence many of the above subreddits spawned

And here is a multireddit of all this creepiness.

Our favorite creepiness:

/u/5days: Headless portraits from the 19th century
/u/chooter: Terrifying cat and mouse song
/u/cupcake1713: Ted the Caver
/u/highshelfosteam: Penguin march
/u/hueypriest: Fire ants
/u/kirbyrules: "Real life" barbies
/u/krispykrackers: That comic... *shudder*
/u/rram: If you're afraid of flying, don't watch this
/u/spladug: The smiling man
/u/powerlanguage: ...

Did we miss any spooky subreddits? What frightening tales do you have?

Friday, October 25, 2013

46,000 votes later, and voting was a SOCKcess!

We wanted reddit socks, you wanted reddit socks, and our awesome friends over at Betabrand (who have been a gold partner for a while now and happen to have all kinds of sock expertise) wanted reddit socks too. So we got together with them, put together all kinds of ideas, and asked you guys which ones were best. 46,000 votes later, we have our results, and they are available for preorder!

Based on the votes and what socks we thought would go best together, we've created two different packs of three pairs each. You can buy the Arrows & Aliens set in the redditgifts marketplace (20% off for people with gold or redditgifts Elves!) or the Community Choice pack over at Betabrand (which has free US shipping through Halloween).

Here's how the voting went down:

For those of you who like pretty pictures more than graphs, here's the lineup of the socks in order from most-voted to least.

And here are some fun stats from the results:

On average, each person who voted chose 5.6 pairs of socks.
Even though we had more than 46,000 votes, they actually stabilized by the time we had received 5,000 responses.
97.4% of people who answered voted for at least one of the six leading pairs of socks.
Several users also came up with the really awesome idea to create another pair--test socks please ignore--that got so many upvotes and comments that we had to make it a reality.

We're pretty excited about these socks, and we hope you are too. If you're too lazy to scroll back up, here are the links again: You can buy the Arrows & Aliens set in the redditgifts marketplace or the Community Choice pack over at Betabrand.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

We continue to be astounded. Plus some answers to common questions.

reddit, we continue to be astounded! This weekend, when we first put up the progress bar, we never expected to blast through the daily target and exceed 500% before the day ended. It's been an amazing few days and we are absolutely floored by everyone’s dedication to this site and to each other — there’s so much “paying it forward” and helping each other out. Hitting our daily gold revenue targets means that gold can be a key part of reddit becoming a self-sustaining, community-supported platform.

We thought we’d also take this chance to answer some question we saw in the gold threads over the weekend, especially from users who are new to gold. Without further ado, here are some Common Gold Questions:

Q: What is reddit gold?

A: reddit gold is our premium subscription service. It gives you access to exclusive features and discounts with our partners. You can read more about it at reddit.com/gold/about.

Q: Can I buy gold for myself?

Click here to buy reddit gold

A: Yes! You can buy gold by going to reddit.com/gold.

Sometimes people think that you can only receive gold via the little “give gold” links underneath comments, by having someone give it to you (called "gilding" or having your comment "gilded") Au contraire — you can most certainly purchase it for yourself, and most people who have reddit gold do just that! Go ahead, you deserve it.

Q: Can I buy gold in bulk? I want to give gold away to comments and would rather buy in bulk instead of entering my payment info each time. Plus can I get a discount for buying in bulk?

A: Yes! You have multiple ways to do this, and you get a discount if you buy in bulk.

Buying gold for yourself: If you buy a year’s subscription, each month of gold is only $2.50, a 37.5% discount off the normal rate of $3.99 per month!

Buying gold creddits to gild: You can buy a bunch of “creddits” which allow you to gild lots of comments without having to enter your payment information each time. Buying any of the special bulk tiers of creddits will also net you the same 37.5% discount off the normal rate!

Q: What does server time mean? How does that work?

A: This question refers to this box shown in the screenshot shown on the right:

We launched it couple weeks ago, and you may have noticed it on your user profile. You can also see it on other user profiles if the user has elected to make it public.

What we wanted to do was convert the funds that users pay us into something that reflects how much of reddit you’re helping to support. reddit runs on hundreds of servers, and each of those servers costs a certain amount to run, so we averaged it all together to get a rough unit cost per server.

The "server time" number on your profile includes money you’ve contributed via buying reddit gold, buying reddit gold for someone else (which includes gilding), or buying ads through our self-serve system. “Gifts on your behalf” represent gold that someone has bought for you, either by gilding your comments or by buying gold for you from reddit.com/gold.

For a somewhat more involved technical explanation on how the number is generated, please refer to this post in /r/howredditworks.

Q: Other than buying ads or gold, how can I help support reddit?

A: One easy way to help the site is to disable AdBlock on reddit. We do have ads, and the more impressions they get, the more our clients like us. We work hard to ensure the ads we display are reddit-friendly. We don’t allow full-page ads or any type of flash. We also include a lot of internal-community ads which point to things like new subreddits. Disabling is simple: when viewing reddit, simply right click on your AdBlock icon and uncheck ‘Enabled for this site’.

Perhaps the best non-monetary way to support the site is to help make reddit a community which you’re proud to be a part of. Go check out your local subreddits (or consider starting your own), consider the reddiquette and help keep it alive, and be thoughtful when engaging with others. reddit is not special or unique because of the design of the site, it is special because of the community that contributes to the site. Every person reading this can help ensure that reddit continues to be worthy of your time and support.

Lastly a tidbit - we’re planning a fun bonus for everyone who helps contribute to hitting the 100% goal each day. Stay tuned!