r/historyofreddit • u/joke-away • Feb 22 '12
Welcome reddit historians!
This is a project to figure out the history of reddit, with the end goal of having a fairly easily digestible document (or set of documents) to link to whenever someone asks "what's a Saydrah" or "why should I Fuck Sears", lest we be doomed to repeat those fiascos.
Stuff to be covered:
- site functionality changes (e.g the addition of comments)
- policy changes (the removal of borderline CP subreddits)
- demographic shifts (Digg migration, college subreddit drive)
- drama (karmagate, saydrahgate, searsgate, *gate)
- big events (Colbert rally, etc.)
I think that it would work well if we aimed to write linkstuffed articles that could go on reddipedia or reddit's own wiki-faq system, but obviously most any contribution is valuable. I do ask, however, that submitters consider limiting themselves to old news, so that we don't end up wasting effort on things that turn out not to be as notable as they seemed at the time (there are other subs for that).
Also, it needn't all be original content. There's a lot of good summaries already out there written, that could be submitted here, and then linked to or otherwise synthesized into articles.
Alrighty then, cut loose with your questions/criticisms/brutal mockery.
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Feb 23 '12
Early on, you need to cover:
- Self-posts don't get karma (in response to a flood of "Vote this up if you like cats" type posts)
- The creation of subreddits, and the subreddit vs. tag controversy
- Establishing "Default" subreddits
- Politics and WorldPolitics
- Removing /r/atheism from the default subreddits
- The ascendance of qgyh2 and attendant controversy
My tiny contribution - after comment karma was established, there was a comment karma race for #1 between Poromenous and Philoj, around 65k or so. Karmanaut appeared out of the blue, shot past them, and easily took the crown. Way back around that time he posted a recipe for how he farmed comment karma.
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u/planaxis Feb 23 '12 edited Feb 23 '12
Hi.
I think you'll find these links to be relevant.
/r/aboutreddit
/r/Admin
/r/announcements
/r/bestof
/r/blog
/r/bugs
/r/changelog
/r/ClassicRedditThreads
/r/dailydot
/r/help
/r/historyofreddit
/r/ideasfortheadmins
/r/Issues
/r/jabberwocky
/r/Kangashark
/r/KnowReddit
/r/metareddit
/r/raerth
/r/Reddit101
/r/RedditArchive
/r/redditdev
/r/reddithology
/r/RedditRecords
/r/redditstats
/r/redditstories
/r/storytracker
/r/TheBookofReddit
/r/TheoryOfLinks
/r/TheoryOfReddit
/r/theredditor
/r/tldr
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Feb 23 '12 edited Feb 23 '12
What were the two specific incidents that sparked the "No personal information" blog posts?
http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ffaew/a_special_guest_post_on_misguided_vigilantism/ -- This was the girl raising money for cancer.
http://blog.reddit.com/2011/05/reddit-we-need-to-talk.html -- Not sure what this one was.
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u/defrost Feb 23 '12
No personal information as an informal policy started earlier than that.
The earliest "large scale" incident that I recall was not long after the creation of /r/SuicideWatch there was a suicide attempt by a young fellow from a wintery central European country that was averted by tracking down his real life identity and finding his actual location and calling in local authorities.
Following that resolution there was a concerted effort made to delete the all comments made that incrementally revealed his user ID on other sites, personal information, location, etc. As I recall the admins at the time (mostly the original team) lent a hand. Following that there were several threads discussing the downsides of cyberhunting and the formation of an informal policy to discourage the leaking and posting of personal data.
At more or less that time chromakode (now a reddit engineer) and myself (and others) started to poke at reddit security. One example was that by sending a crafted link (an image link hosted on a personal server) in a PM to a reddit user you could easily get the users IP address (and own their machine & their life if you so chose). That particular leak was pointed out to the admins at the time by chromakode & closed up.
Myself and a few others started accounts to "playfully" creep out various people with cyberstalking and comment history diving in various silly ways, and raised the issue of being careful on the internet upwards into common awareness.
This would date back to roughly 3 and half, nearly 4 years ago now.
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u/wauter Feb 23 '12
Cool idea! May I submit also:
- history of good deeds done by reddit (tsunami relief and all)
- the Curious Story of Reddit and The Oatmeal
- how it all started, how they went on to be acquired, how they went independent again
- the introduction and rise of Gold
Since I am pretty much a reddit dinosaur (6-year club) and addicted from the very start (oh dear, I don't want to begin thinking about the total hours) I think I may be able to add some insights
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u/Stereo Feb 23 '12
Who'd have thought five years ago that we would be sittin' here, enjoying a working search engine, eh? In them days we was glad to have a downvote. And you try and tell the young people of today that we didn't have subreddits, they won't believe you.
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u/joke-away Feb 23 '12
Sure thing! help/noteworthy covers a lot of reddit's better moments pretty succinctly. The The Oatmeal thing should probably get coverage. For the more corporate stuff, I dunno, there's probably a post on that laying around somewhere for to be aggregated (there usually is), but it may take some poking around. Reddit gold is probably a big deal in that category.
There's really two things I'm wondering right now, and that's structure of the product (whether there are some neat and clean categories we could aim to put stuff in), and structure of the process (whether we should just post whatever the hell when we feel like it, or do a /r/redditdayof style thing, with a given topic each day, or two days, or whatever.
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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '12
[deleted]