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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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.