Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream | Hacker News Reader

Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream

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115 pointsdanielhonigman70 comments

Original post with HD graphics: http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...

He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content.

Its my personal opinion that this has really hurt the depth of content. Its still a fun site, just very different then when I first went there ~6 years ago.

EDIT: Not to say RES isn't a great project and super useful. I use it and really appreciate it. Its just interesting how ease of use can shape the content and culture of an online community.

If I remember correctly, which is doubtful, picture posts became more popular, and while Reddit has the ability to shape the types of content that make it to the front page, they chose not to as this seems to express the will of the users.

I think reddit being picture heavy is just a cause of its exploding popularity. Ever follow a subreddit from infancy to infamy? You'll see as it grows, there will be more and more posts of just pictures/memes, which in turn will cause users to complain, mods to step in to filter these out, more subreddits dedicated solely to memes about this topic, etc.

While I do think RES is awesome, most of my non-tech friends who browse Reddit (usually on their phone) haven't even heard of RES.

The other big boost to images taking over was the popularity of imgur. Other picture hosting sites were so poor that I think it actually reduced the amount of picture content prior to 2009.

Here's imgur's creator's post from 4 years ago introducing the site to redditors:

My Gift to Reddit: I created an image hosting service that doesn't suck. What do you think? http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7zlyd/my_gift_to...

Here's an AMA (ask me anything, reddit interview post) he did: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y81ju/i_created_imgur_...

Interesting quote from the AMA: "Imageshack tried to buy it 6 months after I made it". I'm sure everyone is glad he didn't sell. IIRC half of imageshack links were "bandwidth exceeded" messages

If I recall correctly, he specifically created imgur because Reddit links to Imageshack and the like would always die.

I went from Digg to reddit due to digg being heavily saturated with pictures. :( Now it's the opposite.

FYI MrGrim created imgur for both reddit and Digg. He now needs neither though.

>He touches on reddit becoming very picture heavy circa 2012 but doesn't guess on why. My theory is that it is because RES. RES has a "view all images" feature that automatically opens all links out to images the page and an "endless reddit" feature that loads the next page once you scroll to the bottom. This makes it very easy to mindless scroll through reddit, looking at and up-voting pictures and ignoring any other content.

Nah, nothing to do with RES, that's just how things tend to evolve without strict moderation. The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it's easy to consume and upvote.

http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...

I disagree. Nothing to do with RES? Before RES you had to click on images. Images in comments were even weirder being an all text site (as in, the opposite of forums with image signatures). RES, with its expando, made this a one button change, especially with the "view all images" button. To say it was 0% RES and 100% moderation is false. It can be both you know.

>Nothing to do with RES? Before RES you had to click on images.

I don't know anyone in 'real life' who uses RES, but many who use reddit. I expect it's less than 10% and maybe much less of readers.

I don't think anyone here but reddit admins can tell us the split. My point is that it's most definitely due to both in share.

> The race to the shortest, funniest thing always ends in images because it's easy to consume and upvote.

I honestly think that reddit would be better if they killed karma, or at least killed displaying it to the users. The obsession over it dominates the site with people posting cheap shit to get more of it, other people shitposting to see how far negative they can go, people complaining that one thing got karma while another thing did not, etc.

Quite a few subreddits do this, either permanently or time-delayed (i.e., no comment scores visible for some time t after posting).

Performance concerns could also be related. As Reddit got slower and bigger, stuff that looked awesome right from the thumbnail or headline with no loading became more successful.

Aw, the data is a year old. I wonder how much more of the site has transformed into video/picture content.

I recently did an analysis using Reddit data between 7/22/13 and 9/26/13. 1 in 3 links go to Imgur or YouTube.

http://minimaxir.com/2013/09/reddit-imgur-youtube/

Ugh, I really hate stacked area graphs. Usually you can display the same information in a much more readable format by using a multi-colored or dotted line graph with a legend, and use logarithmic scaling to space out all the crap on the bottom.

The main problem with these stacked graphs is spikes/dips on the bottom cause everything stacked on top of it to distort in weird ways, making things very difficult to see.

Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time, which would be interesting and relevant.

Also, the ones in this article are square shaped, so you can't even see total site growth over time in them, which would be interesting and relevant.

I came here to say that (although your other points are good, too). The title of the article is "Fascinating Graphs Show How Reddit Got Huge by Going Mainstream" but then they normalize away all of the growth info and make it completely impossible to see how traffic growth is related to anything they are displaying.

The decline of r/programming with regard to quality of links and discussions was probably inevitable.

It does seem to be the blind leading the blind much more than in other forums.

This is probably related to SO and the later rise of HN in that area as well.

I just had a look and the submissions were very similar to the front page on HN. Are you exaggerating or do you think the quality has gone down here as well?

I think that actually, most of the submissions there come from the front page of HN.

The submissions are nearly identical on any given day. The discussions? Not so much.

Not saying HN comment threads are the pinnacle of discourse, but they are an order of magnitude better than proggit's.

Before Hacker News was popular, you tended to be able to go to proggit for breaking news and large discussions. Being less popular, HN had smaller discussions and stories took longer to rotate out. There was much more focus on startups and California things, much less on infosec.

Proggit now seems to have been reduced to an HN mirror, but HN is something else too.

I used to read r/programming a lot, but eventually ended up reading hacker news for this kind of news. I would not be surprised if you could match r/programming decline in popularity with a rise in popularity of HN.

Or an alternate headline could be "Graphs show how Reddit became more diversified as it became more popular".

That is far too positive. Please try and be more negative in future, it challenges my worldview less.

What a missed opportunity reddit was. If it hadn't turned into a meme/image site it could have been much more interesting. I had an ongoing pattern of unsubscribing from the different sections one by one as I get tired of memes, images, and general low-content posting. Until there was really nothing left.

Calling one of the most successful sites on the Internet a "missed opportunity" is a bit odd. Whether you want junk or you want quality, it's there (dig into the subreddits).

I wish there was a better way to discover subreddits I might like.

If Reddit did to subreddits what Pandora and Netflix did to music and movies (analyze and recommend,) it would pay off for them.

You get subreddit suggestions ("people also added:") when creating multireddits.

Hmmm...I subscribe to a number of travel and backpacker subs and am constantly pleased by the content.

http://metareddit.com/r/backpacking

In my experience, the problem with subreddits is that they are either too well trafficked, in which case it eventually devolves back into puns and memes, or it's way too sparse and there's no content.

I think you are missing the point. Meme/image site is precisely what got reddit so big in the first place. Number of users allowed for a striking amount of highly sophisticated communities to develop (as science, workouts, etc.).

In practice, the mainstreaming of a site brings down the quality globally as the memes and spam bleed into other topics.

What do you mean "bring down the quality"?

This graph is misleading because it shows number of posts as a percentage, not an absolute number. I'm sure there is just as much or more quality content in r/programming and other subreddits than there was in 2005.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080123104208/http://reddit.com/...

http://web.archive.org/web/20080129072548/http://reddit.com/...

http://web.archive.org/web/20140109132834/http://www.reddit....

http://web.archive.org/web/20140110004528/http://www.reddit....

You can decide on your own.

Arguably, if it hadn't been turned into a meme/image site, it would have been closed, which is not interesting at all.

Wow. Reddit is that young? It feels as if it has been around forever.

I'm not so sure about the image overload thing. Maybe that is just a symptom of another problem. IMO, the standard settings of the main page should be "fixed". It would be nice if you saw posts from a dozen or so _random_ subreddits as a standard setting, instead of the current colorful goo mixed from the big catchall subreddits.

Reddit is very young. It feels like yesterday that we were still using Digg.

4chan conjecture: all forums evolve to approximate 4chan or they die by the death of long tail.

imo

I think all forums evolve towards decaffeination, including 4chan. People like to give 4chan as an example of low quality, but I think 4chan is actually in the top 1% of quality due to being an out-of-control creative machine. The 4chan-as-low-quality cliché goes well with all the other re-re-redigested morsels of tedium that 99% of content consist of.

It's interesting that /r/politics got a huge bump (looks to me to be about 75% increase in size) around the 2008 U.S. presidential election, but had no noticeable difference in 2012.

Will be interesting to see what happens in 2016, with Obama having reached his two-term limit. Plus, I also think Obama was focusing on more "mainstream" channels like FB, Twitter, etc.

This seem to be purely a function of volume. By 2012 there were all sorts of other subreddits that people frequented.

Good point

In 2012, Obama's AMA received 5.6 million views (1.6 m unique) [1]

"The site averaged over three billion pageviews each month in 2012, which is a 50% increase from the two billion the site reported for the month of December in 2011."

[1] http://www.slashgear.com/reddit-saw-37-billion-pageviews-in-...

Good lord, what happened in mid 2009?! The reddit.com blue area spikes up for a month.

Edit: the original blogpost by Randy Olson says he doesn't know either.

US schools let out for summer vacation

That was the Digg exodus. I was a Digg user, and I switched around that time. It had started to suck really bad, to where people like myself were willing to give it a fair shot, only to discover that the discussions were generally higher-quality. That's also why I'm here, from a discussion on Reddit for other sites. But I still find that the smaller subs scratch that itch, too.

You're off by a year. Digg v4 was the end of summer 2010.

Whoops, Thanks for the correction.

Endless summer ;)

I think you meant "Eternal September". Endless summer is just a description of the weather in Miami.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I recently saw someone make a similar reference to the endless summer.

We are anyway moving towards the long October, where the number of new people using the (English) internet is roughly proportional to the number of new people.

:) I was attempting a more politically correct version of: http://www.lurkmore.com/wiki/Newfag_Summer

I heard about eternal september last year and figured that eternal summer was a play on it.

Those who only take a cursory glance will assume that Reddit started as a porn site, with nsfw dominating. This is of course contrary to how most of us remember it.

If you delve deeper, it is actually that Reddit started entirely without subs, and happened to mostly be programming related, with a smattering of politics.

nsfw was created because, much like with the TLD debate on the same topic, it was a content category that people wanted to separate. As the "subless" Reddit started to get noisy with mainstream topics, that's when people started fracturing off to /r/programming.

A few years ago, I heard the same thing, then went and checked out the archive and it was about the furthest thing from the truth.

Screenshot from 2005 of the home page: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804002153/http://www.reddit...

EDIT: Apologies, however I misunderstood at-fates-hands's point of contention, however leave this post just for the neat archive.org links.

What is the "furthest thing from the truth"?

While you selectively chose a generalist front page, how about-

https://web.archive.org/web/20051204033222/http://reddit.com...?

A Ruby post up at number 1. Heck, almost all of the front page is exactly the sort of material you would find on HN.

Another 2005 day -

https://web.archive.org/web/20051230160447/http://reddit.com...?

Another day with four LISP front-pagers - https://web.archive.org/web/20051210015338/http://reddit.com...?

Every post wasn't always about programming specifically, but it was a site primarily populated by programmers and other IT professionals, which is how what would be fringe material topped the front page. But there was the other stuff, just as there is on HN.

Just to make an aside about something I found interesting on the archived reddit page - the header "reddit learns what you like as you vote on existing links or submit your own!". The premise was that Reddit would use clustering and other intelligent logic to individualize itself to the viewer. They abandoned that and went the "subscribe to subs you like" notion.

Reddit was released to the world by a link on paulgraham.com. It had an impact on the initial user census.

It took a while for all the cat picture morons to take it over.

Exactly - that's how I found reddit, back in the day.

First it was mostly hacking, startups, and some libertarian politics. Then there started to be more politics, and less hacking and startups. And more "outrage stories". And it went downhill fast enough that PG started Hacker News.

That's one of the reasons I loathe the political stories so much - they build a momentum of their own and wreck sites like this one.

Interestingly enough, you can see PG helping to get reddit off the ground:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050725010627/http://reddit.com...

"bugbear" is PG.

Edit, I think it was through this essay:

http://www.reddit.com/comments/20775

Heck, almost all of the front page is exactly the sort of material you would find on HN.

I believe HN was originally set up to be "like how reddit used to be"

>>> What is the "furthest thing from the truth"?

It was poorly worded so I apologize for that. I meant that I heard the same thing as @corresation that it was mainly a porn site at first, which wasn't true at all.

> Still, the graph shows the site’s beginnings in the primordial muck of porn and programming. The r/NSFW subreddit was one of the first, Olson explains (though he notes that the site was never 100 percent NSFW; his graph leaves out /r/reddit.com for purposes of legibility.)

FTA

Did the graph get updated? The one I'm looking at shows nsfw peaking at 5%, but only ever being a small fraction of the total content.

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/design/2014/01/reddit1.jpg

That's the current graph, seemingly showing nsfw as 100% of Reddit content at the beginning of 2006.

Looks like an error to me. Here's their second graph. http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/design/2014/01/SubredditGr...

Buried in the text:

> He notes that the site was never 100 percent NSFW; his graph leaves out /r/reddit.com for purposes of legibility.

This is a problem of poor axis labelling. It should be: "Fraction of posts submitted to Reddit.com (excluding /r/reddit.com)". The other issue is that the other graphs that include /r/reddit.com are hidden in the slideshow at the top.

It's clearer in the actual blog post: http://www.randalolson.com/2013/03/12/retracing-the-evolutio...

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