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reddit

Screenshot reddit front page on June 11, 2008
URL	www.reddit.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	News aggregation site
Registration	Free
Owner	Condé Nast Publications
Created by	Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
Launched	2005

reddit is a social news website owned by Conde Nast Digital on which users can post links to content on the Internet. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to become more or less prominent on the reddit home page.

Overview

Mister Splashy Pants logo used on November 27, 2007

The site has discussion areas in which users may discuss the posted links and vote for or against others' comments. When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default, although a reader can display it through a link or preference. Users who submit articles which other users like and subsequently "vote up" receive "karma" points as a reward for submitting articles those other users consider interesting.

Reddit also includes topical sections called "reddits" (colloquially called "subreddits"), which focus on specific topics, such as politics, atheism, programming, "not safe for work", or science. There are hundreds of reddits. ^[1] Users can create reddits.

The Reddit logo changes for various holidays and often for no reason, paying homage to Star Wars, classic video games, and geek culture in general. It often changes in response to major discussion subjects within the site or major news stories.

History

Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, both 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia.^[2] It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz in 2005. Aaron Swartz joined in late January 2006 as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami.^[3] The combined company was known as "not a bug." Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired not a bug on October 31, 2006.^[4]

On June 18, 2008, Reddit became an open source project.^[5] With the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit became freely available on another website dubbed "Fixxit."^[6]

Reddit was named by Ohanian while browsing the University of Virginia's Alderman Library.^[7] It is pronounced, "[have you] read it."

reddit (or "Reddit", as called by less literate wikipedians) is well known for its self-congratulation. This often revolves around giving random strangers money or pizza in exchange for sob stories, but it can occasionally be a force for good; in January 2010, reddit users raised over $134,000 for the victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.^[8]

Technology

Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in 2005.^[9] The reasons given for the switch were faster performance, wider access to code libraries, and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework that former reddit employee Aaron Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project.^[10]

Reddit currently uses Pylons as its web framework^[11]. The site was hosted on several Linux servers running lighttpd, HaProxy, and paster;^[12] however, as of November of 2009, Reddit has decommissioned their physical servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services.^[13] In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery.^[14]

On February 18, 2009, Reddit released an iPhone Application for $1.99, which allows users to more easily navigate the site while using the iPhone. There were also several other reddit iPhone Applications made available, prior to the official application's release date. The first application was named "Satellite", which was released in November of 2008. It originally cost $4.99 but its price was later reduced to just $.99 after the release of the official Reddit application^[15]. The second application, released in December of 2008 was called "Open Source Reddit", differing from Satellite by being free of charge.

See also

• Diigo
• Delicious (website)
• Digg
• Fark
• StumbleUpon
• Slashdot
• Social bookmarking
• Web 2.0

References

External links

• reddit
• Fixxit (reddit's code repository)
• think you've reddit all? - Alexis' blog (the logo artist).
• reddit's job board