Title's wrong. Growing by 300% means Reddit would be at 1 billion pageviews. Grow by 100%, you get 500 million. Grow by 200%, you get 750 million. Grow by 231.6%, you get 829 million.
They are not handling the load well, and it is getting bad enough to discourage me from commenting there. It was annoying but livable when it was just slow loading when reading, but lately it has progressed to errors when trying to post. That is a lot more annoying because then you've either got to give up on the post, or save a copy somewhere to try again later.
It's also losing the status of inboxes. That is, it will show the orange envelope meaning you've got a message (typically someone replied to one of your comments). You then click that to see the reply, and it just sits there not responding. If you give up and go elsewhere, it often has marked your messages as read, even though you never saw them.
I'd prefer if posting and dealing with the inbox were given high priority, even if it meant more "you broke reddit" messages when I try to read stories.
They still only have 4 engineers, and their lead engineer left. So, that's like 3 engineers and a trainee. To run a massive site with 120 servers and 830M pageviews/month.
Basically, they don't have the human resources right now to go in and fix the code that worked for 100M pageviews and broke at 830M. They're working on fixing it, but it's a slow process. Keep in mind, even after its layoffs, Digg still has 10 times as many engineers, with far fewer users.
We're almost ready to hire a couple of really awesome folk. Then we have to train them. Then they can be useful and help us make the site faster and more stable.
We're just really constrained on human time right now.
Not quite as simple as business vs. leisure, but I agree that the only reason they'd chose Dec10/Jan10 not Dec10/Dec09 is to make the stats look more impressive.
Then that's really odd, the way any business would normally review a year's performance is to compare December/December, because that's the best way to get a decent comparison without being influenced by factors such as "Our traffic is usually down in Dec." Same thing for other time periods - if you want to see how good traffic was over a weekend, you don't compare Sat/Sun to Thur/Fri, you compare Sat/Sun to the previous week's Sat/Sun.
Our traffic is usually down in Dec.
Oddly, I've found that to be the case every year, across a range of non-business for-leisure websites.
I remember a few years back top bloggers and industry 'experts' talking about reddit being toasted in competition with digg. Amazing momentum after 5 years. Congrats.
We saw about a 30% increase right after v4 was launched, and about most of those (25% of the 30%, or 83% of the increase) stuck around a week later. It's been basically normal growth since then.
Reddit Gold is not really "begging". They allow you to set your own price for an enhanced set of features. While Reddit Gold is mostly about expressing your support for Reddit, it's not a straight up donation, and Reddit didn't spend two months with a banner at 25% screen height with a bearded kn0thing or ketralnis staring down the userbase.
We weren't really begging for money. We needed money, we let people know that, and then we let people set their own price because we had no idea what the price should be, so we crowdsourced it.
We can't talk about our revenue, but I'll just say, we're still here and will be here for a while yet.
Becoming more clear every day that either the site is short a few, maybe a dozen plus, servers. Or the design has reached an inflection point of some sort.
Interesting. I came to Reddit for the intelligent conversation compared to Digg. The commenting system was pretty great, as well as the subreddit system though, so I'd call it as a good mix of people and UI.
Eventually, I realized it was wasting my time like digg, just in a less obvious way. Also, the community had grown enough that those long joke threads and aggressive attempts at meme creation were hurting my enjoyment. These are not solvable problems on reddit in my opinion. I finally turned in the towel after an extremely long thread on how useless churches are in America: criticize all you want, (and I will certainly continue to do so), but churches feed and take care of homeless people and poor people in every county (and probably, town) of America.
My final solution was to add the following to my /etc/hosts file:
174.132.225.106 reddit.com www.reddit.com
This has saved me a lot of time. In exchange, I've missed (I imagine) many outrage-generating stories on US civil rights, a lot of great pictures of cats, and in exchange get to skip reading the perspectives of many, many 4chan alums.
The trick to post-2008 Reddit is to be very, very judicious about which sub-reddits you subscribe to. There are still quite a few gems. I've flirted with abandoning ship since the early 2009 hockey stick growth, but found peace by continuously weeding out sub-reddits that had gone bad. It's kind of like pruning a bonzai tree.
This is my go-to answer to anyone who complains about pun threads and whatnot. If you're running into that stuff, you're on the wrong subreddits. My discussions there are perfectly enjoyable since removing r/atheism, r/pics, r/reddit.com, etc.
There's another issue at play too, I feel. That is, Reddit doesn't change. Or, rather, it doesn't appear to. They add things (like subreddits or "gold") but the core mechanism rarely changes. The cost of changing people's muscle and visual memories is strongly underestimated.
Both, imho. Our design is based around giving tools for our users to create with (subreddits, self posts, commenting system etc) and letting them work their magic.
edit: unfortunately, we haven't got the benefit of a visible community on hipmunk - but that's a challenge for me to overcome as I try and build the same kind of fervent community on a site where no one can start a pun thread.
I thought the story was that PG wanted his own subreddit where nobody could downvote, you said no, so he built HN (this is a paraphrasing of hazy memories)
edit: If memory serves, Steve mentioned this offhand in a video interview I saw somewhere. I think this one, but I could be wrong.
