Big Reddit Changes Coming? Conde Nast Purchases 285 Reddit Domain Names | Hacker News Reader

Big Reddit Changes Coming? Conde Nast Purchases 285 Reddit Domain Names

billhartzer.com

52 pointsbrandnewlow42 comments

> If you did not have specific plans for 285 domain names (which would cost over $2200 to register for one year), you normally would not purchase them.

Clearly the author has never worked with a content company on the web (writing for a blog aside). This kind of thing happens all the time. Purchasing domain name permutations related to your brand en masse is still usually cheaper than going through the legal process of taking ownership from another party.

I agree. $2200 is close to nothing for a company as big as Condé Nast. And it's certainly less than what a lawyer would cost to try to get back one of these domains.

Also, it's hard to imagine that they could possibly have specific plans for 285 domain names ranging from zenreddit.com to redditsex.com. Oh, and my personal favourite, redditthe.com

Surely you've heard of Mahalo's domain spam?

domain spam?

Yeah... there's a disconnect here between the idea of "big plans" and spending $2200. The latter is not a particularly large expenditure, representing maybe a week or less of dev. time including all overhead.

To put it in perspective $2200 would be 3.5 billable hours from our IP attorney. Spending this small sum up front could save $500K in legal fees (assuming it only took 3.5 hours to reclaim a squatted domain legally).

This is a good example of coming to the right conclusion for the wrong reasons.

Big things are indeed coming for reddit, but it has a lot more to do with Conde Nast finally investing some money in personnel than the fact that they registered redditgreen.com and redditblue.com.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/reddit-programmer/

This.

I find this rather amusing, that kn0thing would make a post that's essentially the scourge of reddit. Are the reddit admins trying their hand at being a hipster, and /ironically/ posting this? :)

It's okay when the replier is, in some way, an authority on the subject at hand. As in, "I, a cofounder of the site this person is talking about, hereby endorse his position."

Nobody cares if it's just, "I, as some random person on the Internet, endorse his position."

Why say in many words what could be said in one. I mean ah..

Agreed. :P

The information density is in kn0thing's username, the comment was merely a nod of the head.

I dunno. Redditblue.com sounds like something that could finally make Reddit a really profitable enterprise.

It speaks volumes that Conde Nast spending $2200 on Reddit is enough to generate headlines.

Vertical (ie. reddit___.com or _____reddit.com) and Horizontal (ie raddit.com riddit.com etc.) domain securing is standard practice. It does not necessarily mean that those market will be actively brought online, instead it means that those markets will be unavailable for pirates and coat tail surfers. However, it's always fascinating to see these little tactical moves on the part of larger companies.

I know the phrase "reddit has become worse over time" is pretty much a meme here on hn but wow has that website been extremely bad as of late. Nothing but rage comics and pictures of pets, and some trolling. Probably a combination of more and more people plus summer vacation for the kids who have too much time on their hands.

Everything is broken into subreddits on reddit and if you learn to select the subreddits that interest you instead of just reading the "rage comic" and "pet picture" subreddits it might be of more interest.

Agreed. My mix of subreddits is article heavy and awesome. I'm always a little surprised when I find myself logged off on the default front page - about 85% imgur links at least.

Rage comics, advice animals, scumbag x, etc have bled over into virtually every subreddit now. It's basically part of reddit's culture.

I've said it before, but you can unsubscribe from a subreddit, but you can't unsubscribe from a culture.

There are many subreddits where posts/comments along those lines get downvoted hard.

I haven't seen that at all on the sub-reddits I frequent. Maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough, but I still find /r/machinelearning, /r/semanticweb, /r/compscipapers, /r/csbooks, etc. to be very useful.

I don't see a single rage comic or pet picture when I log into Reddit.

I see stories about technology, computer science, physics, all the programming languages and tools I use, Minecraft, Austin Texas, Team Fortress, etc.

My wife logs into her account and she sees a million stories about crafts.

subscribe to truereddit depthhub etc unsubscribe from everything you hate about reddit

Try a 'reddit reset' - unsub from every subreddit and then hand pick those that you find useful.

Unsuscribe from /r/reddit.com /r/todayilearned /r/pics /r/videos /r/askreddit /r/politics and pretty much all the default reddits.

Suscribe to topic specific reddits ( e.g. /r/haskell or /r/Android ).

Enjoy your tenfold improved reddit.

It's difficult to find good subreddits. Even if the subject matter of the subreddit interests you, it possibly only has dozen subscribers and received its last submission months ago. So subreddits are better than nothing, but could be better.

As an aside, I have found browsing reddit.com/r/all has allowed me to discover several neat subreddits I otherwise would have never found. (Warning, /r/all is all subreddits, including NSFW ones)

> It's difficult to find good subreddits.

That's propably why there are good subreddits.

As an old saying, don't judge a person by its cover, so, don't judge a website by its default frontpage.

Didn't Reddit drop down to one developer sometime recently? If "something big" is coming -- involving 285 domain names -- I would hate to be that one developer.

I seem to recall reading they actually hired people recently, or were in the process of doing so.

This isn't a big move, it's just good houskeeping. First it was hiring developers. Now this, which helps them with SEO, possibly using all these sites as redirects to sub-reddits.

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/06/02/conde-nast-has-big-plans-...

I bet they are registering the subreddit domains to have them redirect to the subreddits. All of them seem like pretty established subreddits. Perhaps they want the subreddits to function more like stand alone websites?

Sounds like someone at CN found a new domain registration toy...

This is a brand protection move, pure and simple. Easier to throw money at it now than to waste a retained lawyer's time writing cease and desist letters later.

Perhaps they got some (dubious?) SEO advice suggesting that splitting subreddits over more registered names would improve their serch rankings and ad rates?

Defensive registrations, other than very common typos are silly.

You can never, ever, register all the variations and new TLDs come out every year.

In this day and age, users are not quite that stupid and all modern browsers have phishing site checks built in.

Assuming it did cost them $2300, that would have only been about 1% of color.com. They got a steal.

How about paying for proper server resources? I mean fuck... it's down every day multiple times.

It's not the servers' fault. Even Google would have terrible uptime if they only had five engineers -- regardless of how many servers they had.

Not in the case of Reddit? As far as I know, Reddit's main issue is constant 502 errors/requests timing out, which to my knowledge would indicate they constantly hit the limits of their webservers or don't understand how to load balance.

Indeed, they're hitting the limits of their webservers. But they already have the most powerful servers EC2 provides. So they have three options:

* Move to a new provider

* Change the way things work so that the job can be spread across more servers

* Fix suboptimal things

All three of those options are extremely difficult to do quickly with a skeleton crew. Reddit's been improving scalability as fast as 3-4 engineers can, but their traffic is growing even faster.

Reddit may be doing better than any of the other businesses that company owns.

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