Reddit Presents: Upvoted
upvoted.com
upvoted.com
I wanted to do something cool with it but never did. Then one day I got an email from an assistant of Alexis Ohanian's asking to sell it cheap for his little school project :P
I knew he was just trying to avoid being gouged, so I offered to sell it to Alexis for his initial asking price, if he'd give me a meeting and some feedback on my startup. He agreed and we had a good meeting. He gave my co-founder and I some genuinely usable advice, and technically funded our bootstrapped startup (https://portal.cloud) for a few weeks there.
edit: Update: It's happening!!!!!! Thanks, HN.
Unless we're thinking of two very different blogging platforms, Wordpress is pretty much exactly the opposite of "extremely new". Can you please elaborate on why you consider it to be extremely new and unfamiliar to a lot of developers?
> steep complexity curve
Brought on by the basic insecurity of the Wordpress blogging platform. Executable PHP in the Database, as a single example...
> No one has really provided a flexible way to host a platform like wordpress
Sorry? Wordpress hosts have been around for years, again, I'm really not understanding what you're trying to convey here.
> This is going to likely be the first major company using wordpress
You mean, aside from just about everybody; Wired coming to mind as a recent, big example.
I feel like I'm really missing some context here.
EDIT: Satire. Got it. Of course, then there's the question of whether the +1 response by heathwblack is also satire, or... :D
My account is new so it does look like a straight troll account but I was just having a bit of fun. TBH, as I stated in another comment ITT, wordpress provides a really easy way to test out this concept. I expanded my thoughts on the concept in that comment, but as to wordpress:
I bet reddit is just getting crushed with improvements and the engineering team is overworked. It is really easy and inexpensive to test this concept out without losing developer bandwith. wordpress provides a pretty good CMS (obviously bloated, [standard other wordpress criticsims], etc.) but they can get a tight feedback cycle on this idea and it could successful, but if not, will not be resource intensive.
I generally wish them the best of luck, they need something to work at a monetization level, and I hope this helps as it likely is not the long term solution.
I had a rough first experience with wordpress for a client recently and I just had to vent.
Do you have a specific example of this? WP itself doesn't use executable PHP in the database, although there are plugins that do (and are hence heavily discouraged).
(You _could_ be referencing storing complex values as serialized data for options/meta, which can technically give you some sorts of executable capabilities: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/PHP_Object_Injection )
^What this individual said is way better than I could say it, but is basically why we chose Wordpress VIP ^
In addition the Wordpress VIP program has much higher standards for plugins and security, which are things we care about greatly. Lots of great publications use VIP like Techcrunch, FiveThirtyEight, Facebook, and Time.
Although I'm surprised they are going with the hot new relational databases as opposed to the old standby NoSQL.
American Online
========================
They are going by just the initials AOL, and are poised for massive growth. People have said they are a total slack clone, but they are really just overlooking the integration with hotmail notifications. Rumor is Silicon Valley darling Time-Warner is poised to make a big investment.
Skour
=================
Travis Kalanick, a name a lot of people have forgotten, was the original founder of Uber but he bailed to disrupt the entrenched bitcoin/peer-to-peer/file-sharing industry with Skour. It is a totally distributed network for sharing your music. Obviously, it is a little derivative of stuff like Napster and pandora, but I wouldn't count them out. Box and Dropbox are companies that have been cold from the get-go. You have moore's law compounding to make storage and hardware super expensive, so profit will only go up as people clamour to share data even at high bandwith rates. Skour, is looking to capitalize on that idea, but allow consumers to save a bit of money by contributing to the network and sharing files from their own systems. With server prices skyrocketing, consumers are going to be the only one's who can afford dropbox/box. Look at Skour to hop into the Enterprise space with music sharing putting them on the map.
Kosmo.com
===============
You have this "on-demand" economy starting to really cool off, NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS. It is going to be big. Kosmo.com is a company that delivers anything, when you want it. No one is doing this right now. Older companies like Postmates and Uber have been here for years, and when you need a $5 dolalr sandwhich, where are these guys?. Uber has been doing delivery for so long that it is going to be tough to shut down their lobby. Talk about "Rent Collector", they built a business around monopolizing sharing and delivery. Kosmo.com is pretty unique though, and they have a huge war chest to get it done. A lot of people think that marginless micro transactions won't be able to scale out the volume required to be profitable, but let's remember Uber started as a delivery company.
Apple.com
==================
Apple.com is facing some serious competition from Apple.com. Now historically both companies have had their hand in a lot of pies.
Apple has some pretty compelling things going for it. They just hired their old CEO. Now running NeXT and Apple it is almost impossible not to draw comparisons with Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. Jobs is poised to continue in the media space with a new media player which is supposedly better than the walkman. Job's also poached the NeXT team and are revamping the macintosh operating system. You are really going to see a return to Apple's roots here. Job's, an engineer, has been designing things from the ground up but his "Aspy" demeanor and liek of salesmanship have crippled the company in the past.
On the other hand you have Apple CEO Tim Cook's long track record to contend with but he is still innovating. You have a traditional guy like Jobs who is only willing to tackle the safe legacy stuff he brought over from NeXT. With a lose cannon like Tim Cook, it is pretty much disruption or bust. His media blitz 2054 was a massive success, and he has maintained a solid image amidst allegations of failure to share credit. The company has really been evolving the CAAS space. Camera as a service is going to be really big. He has been dumping resources into the iPhone camera for a few years, and this is the biggest driving factor of iPhone sales. Outside of a 10x increase in MP and zoom, he has really brought hackers on board by unlocking the "Walled Garden". On stage at CameraCon, he released a 2000MP camera that felt like you were inside the picture it was so good. That level of detail has set them apart of late, from companies tackling the solved problem of security and laten y.
Difficult to tell if Steve Job's fastpaced, borderline reckless product release cycles will be to complex and overengineered for the general public. OTOH, Cook's acquisiton of innovative hardware manufacturer BEATS is in the past, and people are wondering if he can continue to deliver the Mega Pixels customers are demanding.
So 2015 is the year of mySQL, postgrSQL *SQL, .NET. Get ready to port all your Mosaic/Netscape apps over to the Windows Phone because 2015 is the year of the apps.
You truly should write a book about sarcasm, and the book could be written in exactly the same sort of every-single-thing-exact-opposite sarcasm. I would buy this book.
Also, I just got a pretty hefty equity package from a serious business entrepreneur so I don't have a ton of time. You've probably heard of him (rcc9la26d7534400a6a03514c34f9200@reply.craigslist.org). He's got a sure thing in the content discovery business, it's sort of like Mosaic for Google Chrome, but we use the Tinder layout. We launched the MVP in Aberdeen, Saskatchewan Province in Canada[0] and have market penetration of ~5 which is a total and a percentage. We already have more users than there were fatal cougar attacks in North America the previous decade[1] which is the top metric VCs look for.
Thanks though does mean a lot, and we are scaling globally so I can probably hook you with up a DBA position. We're full stack so just basic stuff e.g 5+ Years of Swift, and obviously experience with a robust database framework like Microsoft Access with a google drive caching layer, adobe dreamweaver a big plus.
I couldn't work the joke in about our computatiom engine using godaddy and a ti-83 plus silver edition, so I'll just come out and say it so you know we're serious. Cheers.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen,_Saskatchewan [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_cougar_attacks_i... [3]off by one errors
Also, I had to click the link, because I did not believe there really was an Wikipedia entry for fatal cougar attacks.
I lost it there. Bravo!
I'm also a big fan of the "Node.js evangelist" who pops up in /r/programming.
[0]localhost:3000
In your child comment, you say "I can see it replacing newer languages like nodeJS, Go and PERL in the future. In the next couple years people will start realizing that the consistency, speed and security offset the lack of communities using it, and I can see it becoming really popular."
Again, I feel like I'm in a time warp, but when have those three things been qualities of PHP? Also, PHP has been huge for years. Node.JS and Go have only recently been taking over.
I'm so confused…
Perl 6 was just released, and is at the top of HN. ;)
there are negotiations, and there are straight lies
It's a shitty situation no matter what of course so I'm not that upset.
Edit: I think the inspiration for this comes from the guide how to buy domains someone (founder?) from Stripe wrote.
From the looks of the Upvoted front page, looks like they're doing it as a content marketing strategy, which doesn't bode well. Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors despise.
(Disclosure: although I have done a LOT of work analyzing Reddit [http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/], I have not been approached to write anything for Upvoted)
https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3npxm4/introducing_up...
As for Tom, here's what I posted on r/defaultmods addressing that concern.
>>
I ran those ads when I learned Tom was using the site.
I did that because for the last few weeks more and more celebrities have been coming on or reaching out to use reddit as members of the community. And we've run sponsored headline to draw attention to it, these ads have been viewed over 14M times in the last couple of weeks without incident. They've also performed exceptionally well (Bill Gates' for instance had 368% higher CTR than average).
+That moment when Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) shows up to compliment your Rebel helmet patch +Oh, just Bill Gates hanging out on r/infographics +Lil Dicky drops a new music video, shows up in the comments of r/Music thread
Admittedly, these ads all went up at least 24hrs after the celeb showed up and left, whereas I jumped on the Tom Hanks one as soon as I realized it was happening. We're not going to do that again. Those ads also performed very well (63% higher than site average) but were a really bad look.
To be clear: we're not paying them. They're coming because we're actually making progress showing them the value of joining the community.
Wynter (u/808sandhotcakes) has been doing a lot of great work, by virtue of her great reputation in the industry alone, people are genuinely reaching out to learn how to join the Reddit community. We're excited about that, because it clearly makes our users very happy and by every account the talent enjoys it, too.
edit: (See, I'm already getting better: Arnold + Adam Savage stopped by since Tom and no obnoxious sponsored headlines.)
That said, I still have concerns about the power dynamic. I do see that users are credited for submissions, but Reddit is the one that mostly benefits from it, especially since ads are being run on the site. It's the same concern that people have with BuzzFeed that attribution alone won't solve. (There's also the issue of determining if Original Content on Reddit is actually OC, and that could lead to interesting problems.)
As mentioned in the original image, Upvoting still does encourage brigading on submissions (https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/3ni1il/upvoted_wee...), which can have fallout in the future.
http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/omari-nyaega-machete-kenya-orp...
202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop.
We're working on anti-brigading tools. That's on us to get right, because a lot of "brigading" is AKA "how social media works."
It's long been a very fuzzy definition, which is on us (e.g., how is it OK for a celeb to tweet to his followers about an AMA -- it's both "brigading" and "required for verification") and there's a more obvious and negative brigading we can thwart better with technology so that mods have the ability to throttle when, say, one community wants to all pile into a thread and sway it.
Primarily because Buzzfeed just copy-pastes content from Reddit with minimal credit. Upvoted at least looks to be providing genuinely improved-upon content with strong attribution linkage. To me, it gets rid of a lot of the scuzzy-ness associated with Buzzfeed, so I'm all for it.
* It doesn't link back to Reddit
* There's no context
* It's glib, impersonal and bland
* It has an unnecessary illustration
* It adds nothing to the original content
Contrast this with what I presume is a comment from Tom Hanks about what his perfect sandwich is. That's meaningful.
[1] http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/perfect-sandwich-tom-hanks-red...
I honestly see no value added with any of the articles I looked at. Every single one could be replaced with links to reddit comments, maybe with some quotes of the reddit comments, and the images down at the bottom.
It's a little less sensationalist than Buzzfeed, and I'd rather look at this than Buzzfeed, but I really don't want to use either of them.
> Primarily because Buzzfeed just copy-pastes content from Reddit with minimal credit.
Well, Reddit itself operates the same way. By the time it gets to Buzzfeed it's already twice removed from the original source (and Buzzfeed REALLY should find and credit where it came from). Redditors constantly take content and rehost it on Imgur sans credit. I'd really love to see Reddit make an effort to incentivize users to credit the source. Some subreddits do, which is good, but I think the site as a whole should.
It always pains me to see someone's photo, art or comic get thousands of upvotes but no link or mention of who actually created the content. Sometimes the creator will see it posted on Reddit and post a comment, but it often gets buried.
(Speaking as one who's had their work lifted thusly, particularly this one, "Momentary": https://500px.com/photo/43052792/momentary-by-porsupah-ree. It hurts, especially when there's not even any attribution, let alone any attempt to offer or agree on some modest fee)
[1] http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/survivors-of-suicide-spent-the...
Part of Reddit's weakness is the Redditor mentality. Do I have to adopt their way of thinking, acting, consuming when I sign up? No, but I'm sure a ton of the mainstream is turned off by it.
Want to show some growth numbers? Target users outside of your core demographic. Re-purposed content re-presented for a different audience is a pretty easy way do that.
I don't think this actually exists.
There are 'meme-storms' -- Libertarianism, getting riled up about finding some 'criminal' them getting riled up about the people getting riled up, and the anti-censorship crusades, etc but I think attributing these things to the hivemind is a mental shortcut that's found way too much purchase.
Yep. People have a strong tendency to take a single example, or small number of examples, and apply it as universal truth to all similar things.
"Redditor mentality", "market believes", "government did"...they are all statements you will see often on Internet forums and offline conversations, but I think they are a clue into the person making those claims.
What exists are many individual actors making decisions; pretending they are an independent, collective, conscious entity is delusional.
--
RE: Redditor mentality
All you saw were a tiny fraction of comments from a tiny fraction of people on a website named reddit.
Tl:dr there definitely is a mentality.
Talking about Reddit's hivemind is like talking about European mentality. Just because most of the continent is in the EU, doesn't mean the culture is monolithic.
> According to Google Ad Planner's estimate, as of May 2013, the median Reddit user is male (59%), 18–29 years of age [0]
A lot of the reason Reddit skews young is the interface, which in turn results in a young-male echochamber.
..because older-female people can't figure out how links and votes work? Huh?
I don't think you'd be able to substantiate that connection you just made, and what's more, it's quite insulting.
The site really is ugly as sin, with elements you need to interact with hidden all over the place in nonintuitive fashion. Bugs left to languish for months. Dead links on the frontpage for years. Add to that, allowing every single subreddit to redesign everything with their own CSS leads to a highly divisive experience.
Also, sorry you find an opinion insulting.
Do you have another interpretation of this text?
What is absolutely insulting is to imply that women or older people can't handle Reddit's UI, moreso when it's a completely unsubstantiated speculation.
A site experience can be inclusive or exclusive. I'm arguing that it's exclusive.
Digg fucked with the fundamental architecture of how the site worked with respect to the community's interaction.
Reddit has many flaws, but it's still hands down the best method to massively consume information and share thoughts...
The ability to navigate it and engage instantly while maintaining both thread context and inside-community-culture is unmatched...
This is not like that.
digg started to go down when they started doing that. i recall ad space being used for a survey to try to understand if the Rose guy was essential to digg.
now this thing is exactly a copy of what digg become lately.
I'll stipulate that some redditors despise buzzfeed, but the population of users is too big for you to be that assertive. I bet you despise it, though, and decided that you are the protoredditor. Am I right?
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1vqs25/whats_...
Actually, many of the comments in the Reddit thread about Upvoted have this sentiment too: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3npxm4/introducing_upv...
[0] Where "true" == many/most users feel the same way.
I think upvoted looks really sleek and I hope it is successful, but they really need a way to monetize and it is a really hard problem to solve. Obviously, using a widely supported mature CMS like wordpress makes it easy to produce content with minimal effort and cost but that has been reddit users largest gripe. Upvoted is a curator/aggregator built on top of a curator/aggregator, which is weird. Reddit's success and problems stem from providing the long tail of content, allowing diverse topics and communities to be covered while allowing globally popular things to float to the top. This means that there is rarely community consensus, so while upvoted has little risk as it is cheap to make, I can't see it providing much financial support for the company.
In all honesty though, I wish them the best of luck and hope to see them do cool and intersting things in the future. Obviously, improving the search would be a great start because Google is an awesome search engine, but for content discovery and curation, Reddit is doing a great job. Best of luck guys and sorry about the sarcastic comments about Wordpress and PHP, it really is a good way to quickly test out something like upvoted without significant dev reources and is a good content management system, edit: [if used correctly]
Their user base seems to really dislike this move[1], but it seems to be more of an expansion to get users that don't normally use Reddit. I imagine users of Upvoted will be people that would normally use Buzzfeed or 9gag, probably largely disjoint from the actual Reddit community.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/3fnkni/9g...
[1] 45% upvoted at time of posting: https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3npxm4/introducing_up...
To all those saying whether or not current redditors will use it: that's not the point. This is Reddit attempting to use the content users generate on the platform for the 99% of people who don't use Reddit. Call it buzzfeed if you want, an absurd amount of people use buzzfeed.
So long as Reddit and Upvoted are separate, I think it makes a ton of sense.
One the more entertaining/interesting things about original subreddit content is that it often gets fleshed out, corrected (occasionally to a full 180˚) and otherwise improved by further contributions. I'm curious how upvoted deals with that. Perhaps your editor could do an AMA sometime after things settle down post-launch.
You might want to put some of that in the about menu. Right now it's not immediately obvious what the site is/does.
* "202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop." Is what he said earlier in the comments, I'm sure he'll clarify if I've gotten anything wrong.
E.g.,
This photo of an unemployed man handing out resumes went to the top of r/pics: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3kc1sh/this_man_lost_...
We interviewed the guy pictured + wrote about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/3kxp7q/bottom_of_t...
Then a week later a photo of the guy (now with a job) topped on r/pics again and a random redditor linked to our story to provide context for everyone on the thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3lv1b3/way_to_go_redd...
This was back when we just posted as selfposts to r/upvoted, so I suspect that same article in a beautiful blog layout: http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/donnie-grooms-unemployed-busch...
Would do even better and reach even more people!
> it will post sponsored content paid for and approved by advertising partners—and written by the same editorial team that writes editorial posts. “
[1]http://www.wired.com/2015/10/no-comments-allowed-reddits-new...
http://upvoted.com/promoted/the-united-franks-of-america-gol...
We were not going to put facebook comments an DEFINITELY not going to take devs away from all the work they've been doing on mod/community tools (http://reddit.com/r/modnews), alien blue, and infrastructure.
We're not trying to be first with a cheap quick post (Reddit.com is always going to be faster than any newsroom anyway) and I'm really excited about the vision Vickie (editor) has for longer-form features like this one.
they already have the normal reddit user.
they want the rest now.
What I would actually like to see:
Have journalists contact Redditors who post interesting stories for interviews to write up more fully fleshed stories.
A lot of Redditors post really interesting stories about their experiences, businesses etc. It'd be super cool to read more about it.
"The newsletter has hundreds of thousands of subscribers that wake up each Sunday to enjoy a curated digest in their inbox. Last month, we started posting original content directly to r/upvoted, including an interview with the guy handing out his resume at Busch Stadium. The subreddit amassed its highest traffic with over 700,000 unique visitors. With Upvoted, editorial, original video, podcasts, and graphic art have a place to thrive and tell Reddit’s tales in the most creative ways possible." -- http://www.redditblog.com/2015/10/introducing-upvoted-reddit...
it is nothing more than a pretty RSS feed with a little curation and images, linking to all the lies that are business as usual on reddit.
Whatever happens, I'm really with reddit in light of all the controversies that surrounded it. I really have a high esteem of community driven websites who can be user-oriented and still grow and attract more users. It's not an easy task. I'm sure there must be some kind of game theory around it if you want to keep it going. Making balanced rules for such a website might be no easy thing.
Some call it "plebeian" but I think it's still a very good website if you don't focus too much on the default subreddits. I will never be able to wrap my head around the 4chan UI, even if it has an attractive community.
At the very least, there's value in whitelisting IP access to the wp-admin login.
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