User:16912 Rhiannon/Reddit History

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History[edit]

Company history[edit]

Further information: Timeline of Reddit
Co-founder Alexis Ohanian speaking in 2009

The idea and initial development of Reddit originated with then college roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Huffman and Ohanian attended a lecture by programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham in Boston, Massachusetts, during their spring break from University of Virginia.[1][2][3] After speaking with Huffman and Ohanian following the lecture, Graham invited the two to apply to his startup incubator Y Combinator.[1] Their initial idea was unsuccessful: My Mobile Menu,[4][5] which was intended to allow users to order food by SMS text messaging.[1][2] During a brainstorming session to pitch another startup, the idea was created for what Graham called the "front page of the Internet".[5] For this idea, Huffman and Ohanian were accepted in Y Combinator's first class.[1][2] Supported by the funding from Y Combinator, Huffman coded the site in Lisp[5][6] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[7][8]

The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe in November 2005. Between November 2005 and January 2006, Reddit merged with Aaron Swartz's company Infogami, and Swartz became an equal owner of the resulting parent company, Not A Bug.[9][10] Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million[1][11] and the team moved to San Francisco.[12] In January 2007, Swartz was fired.[13]

Huffman and Ohanian left Reddit in 2009.[14] Huffman went on to co-found Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, and later recruited Ohanian[15] and Slowe to his new company.[16] After Huffman and Ohanian left Reddit, Erik Martin, who joined the company as a community manager in 2008 and later became general manager is 2011, played a role in Reddit's growth.[17] VentureBeat noted that Martin was "responsible for keeping the site going" under Condé Nast's ownership.[18] Martin facilitated the purchase of Reddit Gifts and led charity initiatives.[18]

Reddit launched two different ways of advertising on the site in 2009. The company launched sponsored content[19] and a self-serve ads platform that year.[20][21]

Reddit launched its Reddit Gold benefits program in July 2010, which offered new features to editors and created a new revenue stream for the business that did not rely on banner ads.[22]

On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications.[23]

Reddit and other websites participated in a 12-hour sitewide blackout on January 18, 2012, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act.[24] In May 2012, Reddit joined the Internet Defense League, a group formed to organize future protests.[25]

Yishan Wong joined Reddit as CEO in 2012.[26] Wong resigned from Reddit in 2014, after more than two years at the company.[27] Ohanian credited Wong with leading the company as its user base grew from 35 million to 174 million.[27] Wong oversaw the company as it raised $50 million in funding and spun off as an independent company.[20] Also during this time, Reddit began accepting the digital currency Bitcoin for its Reddit Gold subscription service through a partnership with bitcoin payment processor Coinbase in February 2013.[28]

Ellen Pao replaced Wong as interim CEO in 2014 and resigned in 2015 amid a user revolt over the firing of a popular Reddit employee.[29] During her tenure, Reddit initiated an anti-harassment policy,[30] banned involuntary sexualization, and banned several forums that focused on bigoted content or harassment of individuals.[31]

After five years away from the company, Reddit founders Ohanian and Huffman returned to leadership roles at Reddit. Ohanian returned as the full-time executive chairman in November 2014 following Wong's resignation. Pao resigned on July 10, 2015 and Huffman returned to Reddit as the company's chief executive.[32][33] After Huffman rejoined Reddit, the returning CEO launched Reddit's iOS and Android apps, fixed Reddit's mobile website, and created A/B testing infrastructure.[1] The company launched a major redesign of its website in April 2018.[34] Huffman said new users were turned off from Reddit because it had looked like a "dystopian Craigslist".[34] Reddit also instituted several technological improvements,[35] such as a new tool that allows users to hide posts, comments, and private messages from selected redditors in an attempt to curb online harassment,[36] and new content guidelines. These new content guidelines were aimed at banning content inciting violence and quarantining offensive material.[1][35] Slowe, the company's first employee, rejoined Reddit in 2017 as chief technology officer.[37]

Reddit's largest round of funding came in 2017, when the company raised $200 million and was valued at $1.8 billion.[38] The funding supported Reddit's site redesign and video efforts.[38]

Technology and design[edit]

Underlying code[edit]

Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in December 2005[39] for wider access to code libraries and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework that Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is available as an open source project.[40] As of November 10, 2009, Reddit uses Pylons as its web framework.[41]

Reddit was an open source project from June 18, 2008 until September 2017.[42] During that time, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit were freely available on GitHub, with the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions.[43]

Users can contribute to translating Reddit into 89 languages using the localization management platform Crowdin.[44]

Hosting and servers[edit]

As of November 10, 2009, Reddit decommissioned its own servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services.[45] Reddit uses PostgreSQL as their primary datastore and is slowly moving to Apache Cassandra, a column-oriented datastore. It uses RabbitMQ for offline processing, HAProxy for load balancing and memcached for caching. In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery.[46]

Mobile apps[edit]

In 2010, Reddit released its first mobile web interface for easier reading and navigating the website on touch screen devices.[47]

For several years, redditors relied on third-party apps to access Reddit on mobile devices. In October 2014, Reddit acquired one of them, Alien Blue, which became the official iOS Reddit app.[48] Reddit removed Alien Blue and released its official application, Reddit: The Official App, on Google Play and the iOS App Store in April 2016.[49]

The company released an app for Reddit's question-and-answer Ask Me Anything subreddit in 2014.[50] The app allowed users to see active Ask Me Anythings, receive notifications, ask questions and vote.[50]

Product and design changes[edit]

The site has undergone several products and design changes since it originally launched in 2005. When it initially launched, there were no comments or subreddits. Comments were added in 2005[34][51] and interest-based groups (called 'subreddits') were introduced in 2008.[52] Allowing users to create subreddits has led to much of the activity that redditors would recognize that helped define Reddit. These include subreddits "WTF", "funny", and "Ask reddit".[52]

Reddit rolled out its multireddit feature, the site's biggest change to its front page in years, in 2013.[53] With the multireddits, users see top stories from a collection of subreddits.[53]

In 2015, Reddit enabled embedding, so users could share Reddit content on other sites.[54] In 2016, Reddit began hosting images using a new image uploading tool, a move that shifted away from the uploading service Imgur that had been the de facto service.[55] Users still can upload images to Reddit using Imgur.[55] Reddit's in-house video uploading service for desktop and mobile launched in 2017.[56] Previously, users had to use third-party video uploading services, which Reddit acknowledged was time consuming for users.[56]

Reddit released its "spoiler tags" feature in January 2017.[57] The feature wants users of potential spoilers in posts and pixelates preview images.[57]

Reddit unveiled changes to its public front page, called r/popular, in 2017.[58] The feature creates a front page free of potentially adult-oriented content for unregistered users.[58]

In late 2017, Reddit declared it wanted to be a mobile-first site, launching several changes to its apps for iOS and Android.[59] The new features included user-to-user chat, a theater mode for viewing visual content, and mobile tools for the site's moderators.[59] "Mod mode" lets moderators manage content and their subreddits on mobile devices.[59]

Reddit launched its redesigned website in 2018, with its first major visual update in a decade.[34] Development for the new site took more than a year.[34] It was the result of an initiative by Huffman upon returning to Reddit, who said the site's outdated look deterred new users.[34] The new site features a hamburger menu to help users navigate the site, different views, and new fonts to better inform redditors if they are clicking on a Reddit post or an external link.[34] The goal was not only for Reddit to look nicer, but also to make it easier to accommodate a new generation of Reddit users.[34] Additionally, Reddit's growth had strained the site's back end;[60] Huffman and Reddit Vice President of Engineering Nick Caldwell told The Wall Street Journal's COI Journal that Reddit needed to leverage artificial intelligence and other modern digital tools.[60]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Hempel, Jessi (October 6, 2015). "Inside Reddit's plan to recover from its epic meltdown". Wired. Retrieved March 13, 2018.
  2. ^ a b c Fink, Steve (August 2015). "Mr. Meme". Baltimore. Retrieved March 13, 2018.
  3. ^ Williams, Michelle (August 2015). "'This internet thing is not a fad': Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian to discuss online entrepreneurship at UMass Amherst". Mass Live. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
  4. ^ Guy Raz (August 31, 2017). "Make Me Smart 6: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is not horsing around" (Podcast). NPR. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  5. ^ a b c "Live Episode! Reddit: Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman". How I Built This With Guy Raz. August 31, 2017. NPR.
  6. ^ Wallace, Benjamin (October 6, 2015). "Reddit Redux". New York Magazine. Retrieved March 28, 2018.
  7. ^ Richards, Zak. "Unleashing High-Profile, High-Profit Websites".
  8. ^ Macale, Sherilynn "Cheri". "A rundown of Reddit's history and community [Infographic]". The Next Web Social Media. Retrieved November 12, 2011.
  9. ^ Singel, Ryan (July 19, 2011). "Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles". Wired. Retrieved January 12, 2013.
  10. ^ Swartz, Aaron (February 27, 2006). "Introducing Infogami". Infogami. Archived from the original on December 2, 2008. Retrieved January 6, 2007. (archive.org link)
  11. ^ "Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit". 2006-10-31.
  12. ^ Arrington, Michael (October 31, 2006). "Breaking news: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 6, 2007.
  13. ^ "A Chat with Aaron Swartz". Blogoscoped.com. May 7, 2007. Retrieved December 4, 2011.
  14. ^ Peterson, Andrea (July 15, 2015). "The two co-founder quotes that explain Reddit's struggle to grow up". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  15. ^ Lagorio-Chafkin, Christine (June 27, 2011). "30 Under 30: Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman, Founders of Hipmunk". Inc. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  16. ^ Kincaid, Jason (November 1, 2010). "Reddit Chief Takes Flight To Hipmunk, Explains Why He's Leaving Now". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved December 4, 2011.
  17. ^ Parks, Miles (January 1, 2015). "Erik Martin helped make Reddit huge, then he left. What's next for an Internet master?". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  18. ^ a b Cheredar, Tom (March 30, 2012). "Reddit General Manager Erik Martin leads Time's "100 Most Influential" poll". VentureBeat. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  19. ^ Kafka, Peter (March 27, 2009). "Reddit's Ad Experiment Is Good News for Condé Nast. Maybe for Digg, Too". All Things Digital. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  20. ^ a b Loizos, Connie (July 31, 2017). "Reddit just raised a new round that values the company at $1.8 billion". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 16, 2018. Cite error: The named reference "Loizos17" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  21. ^ Siegler, MG (12 November 2009). "Reddit opens its homepage to anyone willing to pay (invites)". TechCrunch. Retrieved 25 May 2018.
  22. ^ Shu, Catherine (June 12, 2013). "Reddit Adds Benefits For Gold Members To Further Monetize The Site Without More Ads". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  23. ^ "blog.reddit – what's new online: Independence". Retrieved September 6, 2011.
  24. ^ "Reddit Plans SOPA 'Blackout' Protest Jan. 18". Entertainment Consumers Association. Archived from the original on October 10, 2014. Retrieved October 7, 2014.
  25. ^ "The Internet Defense League - Protecting the Free Internet since 2012". internetdefenseleague.org.
  26. ^ Kerr, Dara (March 8, 2012). "Reddit names new CEO, Yishan Wong". CNET. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  27. ^ a b Rushe, Dominic (November 13, 2014). "Reddit CEO Yishan Wong resigns after row about new office space". The Guardian. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  28. ^ Olanoff, Drew. "Reddit Starts Accepting Bitcoin for Reddit Gold Purchases Thanks To Partnership With Coinbase". Techcrunch. Retrieved February 14, 2013.
  29. ^ Alba, Davey (July 10, 2015). "Ellen Pao steps down as CEO after Reddit revolt". Wired. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  30. ^ "Reddit, under Ellen Pao, launches harassment crackdown". BBC. May 15, 2015. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  31. ^ Dewey, Caitlin (June 10, 2015). "These are the 5 subreddits Reddit banned under its game-changing anti-harassment policy — and why it banned them". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  32. ^ "An old team at reddit • /r/announcements". reddit. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
  33. ^ Issac, Mike (July 10, 2015). "Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit's Chief". New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2015.
  34. ^ a b c d e f g h Pardes, Arielle (April 2, 2018). "The inside story of Reddit's redesign". Wired. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
  35. ^ a b Lagorio-Chafkin, Christine (March 9, 2018). "Steve Huffman Talks About Bringing Reddit Back From the Brink". Inc. Retrieved March 13, 2018.
  36. ^ "Reddit Launches New Block Tools To Help Temper Harassment".
  37. ^ Matney, Lucas (August 27, 2017). "Reddit's new CTO was the company's first hire". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  38. ^ a b Wagner, Kurt (July 31, 2017). "Reddit raised $200 million in funding and is now valued at $1.8 billion". Recode. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  39. ^ steve [spez] (December 5, 2005). ""On lisp" blog post by Reddit founder "spez", detailing the reasons for switching to python from lisp". Blog.reddit.com. Retrieved December 4, 2011.
  40. ^ "Official web.py site". Webpy.org. Retrieved December 4, 2011.
  41. ^ Sites Using Pylons Archived 2008-09-13 at the Wayback Machine – Pylons Community – PythonWeb
  42. ^ steve [spez] (June 17, 2008). "Reddit goes open source". Blog.reddit.com. Retrieved December 4, 2011.
  43. ^ "Reddit GitHub". GitHub. Retrieved June 5, 2011.
  44. ^ "reddit — Translation Project on Crowdin". Crowdin. Retrieved 2017-07-30.
  45. ^ jeremy [jedberg] (November 10, 2009). "Moving to the cloud". Blog.reddit.com. Archived from the original on April 10, 2016. Retrieved December 4, 2011.
  46. ^ What's new on Reddit: Reddit now powered by jQuery – Posted by Chris Slowe (keysersosa) (Friday, January 30, 2009) – blog.reddit
  47. ^ Siegler, MG (June 9, 2010). "Reddit Finally Becomes Usable On The Mobile Web — Cause They Hate The App Store". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  48. ^ Kumparak, Greg (October 15, 2014). "Reddit Acquires Alien Blue, The Most Popular Unofficial Reddit App". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved October 25, 2014.
  49. ^ Reddit scraps Alien Blue in favor of in-house built iOS and Android apps April 2016
  50. ^ a b Spradlin, Liam (September 3, 2014). "Reddit's Official Ask Me Anything App Hits The Play Store As Promised". Android Police. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  51. ^ Steve Huffman (December 12, 2005). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: comments!". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015.
  52. ^ a b Vanhemert, Kyle (January 9, 2014). "Fascinating graphs show how Reddit got huge by going mainstream". Wired. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  53. ^ a b Cheredar, Tom (July 23, 2013). "Reddit rolls out its front page-changing multireddit feature to the public". VentureBeat. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  54. ^ Fingas, Jon (March 24, 2015). "Reddit now lets you embed comments on other websites". Engadget. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  55. ^ a b Toor, Amar (May 26, 2016). "Reddit moves away from Imgur with new photo-uploading tool". The Verge. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  56. ^ a b Perez, Sarah (August 17, 2017). "Reddit rolls out its own video platform". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  57. ^ a b Mejia, Zameena (March 28, 2017). "The hidden benefit of Twitter's hate-speech controls: avoiding TV spoilers". Quartz. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  58. ^ a b Shah, Saqib (February 15, 2017). "Reddit is eliminating explicit content from its public homepage". Digital Trends. Retrieved May 25, 2018.
  59. ^ a b c Statt, Mick (December 18, 2017). "Reddit overhauls mobile app with chat function and new moderation tools". The Verge. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  60. ^ a b Loten, Angus (April 10, 2018). "Reddit CEO revamped outdated website from the IT foundations". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
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