Reddit is definitely not a fun code base to go mucking around in. I wrote about this here: http://www.deserettechnology.com/journal/reddit-the-open-sou... . I think the amount of effort necessary to grok reddit's codebase would be pretty large, and I can't imagine many people doing that without getting paid or having a ton of extra time and a lot of love for reddit. The code needs a lot of work before it's ready for anything besides reddit.com.

My experience is that most people that try to get reddit running in the first place give up because it's such a gargantuan monstrosity. reddit will take any reasonably-sized personal VPS entirely over -- I was running on a 1GB slice and had to login every few days to restart Cassandra and paster (after the Oct. push). Reddit is just not well-suited for anything except reddit.com, and I think new developers would have some difficult maintaining that, and that most people aren't going to do it without getting paid. It's a big, ornery project, certainly not easy to jump into.