January 26, 2006
On Reddit
I first discovered Reddit through Paul Graham's website in May of last year. I ignored the link that was up on his site for months before finally giving into my curiosity. I wanted to find out what this "Reddit" was. I'm glad I did.
Reddit is sort of a webpage aggregator. It's similar to Slashdot and Digg, but it has several important differences. First is that any user can submit any page they like (even the about:blank page). Second is that any user can vote on whether they like or dislike a page (though only once). And, of course, anyone can become a user and registration is free.
The main Reddit page is the "hot page." Pages there are ranked on a semi-complex algorithm weighing how many positive votes they've received versus how long ago they were posted to Reddit. That page is heavily weighted in favor of new stuff, so a submitted page that gets a handful of votes (say five or six) has a very decent chance of showing up on the "hot" page. (I have my preferences set to show 25 stories on a page; I'm pretty sure that's configurable)
Reddit also has a "top" page where the pages which have receive the greatest number of votes over time are kept. This page has some really good stuff on it, in my opinion. After all, I have personally voted for ten of the top twenty-five (and only voted against one of them). I imagine this page could stultify, as the highest ranked pages may be too far ahead of any newly submitted page to be seriously challenged. However, there's a page posted only two days ago that's reached this exalted spot, so I imagine it hasn't stultified yet.
Supposedly the best part of Reddit is its "recommended" page. After you register and as you vote, you train your own personal filter that tries to guess what you individually will like and displays it on this page. Personally, I rarely look at this page, spending most of my time on the "hot" or "new" or "top" pages. As Reddit continues to grow, I may find this page more useful.
Oh, yes, the "new" page. This one is fairly straightforward — it has the links most recently posted. As Reddit has become more popular, this page continues to change very rapidly. I don't think we're quite at the place where one page is posted every second, but one per minute (on average) is probably low. This page (of course) has a much higher variation of quality than the others, but I've found a number of gems that never made it very high here. Besides, none of my submissions have ever been popular enough to make the top pages, so I owe it to others to help vote, even on the new pages.
You can accumulate karma at this site. Your popularity is determined by the balance of votes your stories receive (with a minimum of 1, thank God. I would have spent quite a while in the negative ranges before I managed to submit something enough people liked.). My karma is very low (as you can see), but it was nice to move off of the lowest rank.
Finally, Reddit also has comments for individual stories. Comments are still unusual and rather weak (nothing as powerful and useful as Slashdot's). The highest comment count I've ever seen for any link is under two hundred, and the majority of pages have no comments at all.
Reddit still has a small user base and a very good one (IMHO). It is very heavily weighted in favor of Lisp, Linux, Open Source, evolution, etc. It is very heavily weighted against Microsoft, the United States, creationism, religion in general, etc. What comments exist are often quite good (lightyears ahead of Digg) and the general taste of the community is very good. It is very much a "geek" community at present, though that will change as it continues to grow in popularity.
I like Reddit. I hope and trust you will, too. I imagine it'll change a lot as it grows, but at the moment it's a very nice website.
By the way, you might want to take a look at this thread of comments. Feel free to point out any glaring lapses in logic I stumbled into.
