Reddit, the social bookmarking website that was acquired by Condé Nast in November 2006  has opened up their source code.  The source code is available at http://code.reddit.com. 

The success of Digg and Reddit have inspired many companies to start their own social bookmarking sites.  Netscape started and closed down Propeller and Mixx has risen as a favorite.   Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo! and StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay.  MySpace, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, and Live also have social bookmarking features.  Digg still remains as Reddit’s biggest competitor.  Going open source is one way that Reddit has one-upped Digg.

Ever since Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast, the company’s monthly uniques has grown by 4.4 million and page views have grown by 120 million according to co-founder Steve Huffman.  Reddit will be launching a new design and a partnership with PBS shortly.

Reddit is a product of Y-Combinator.

What has the alien done for its users lately? The users aren’t happy, that’s for sure. One of the stories that made it on the homepage today is:

Reddit has been taken over by US politics :(^[1] and was posted by _simon_^[2], which was submitted roughly 8 hours ago.

I have Reddit plugged into my RSS feed aggregation homepage and I definitely agree. Whenever I check out the homepage RSS feeds, the stories mostly pertain to what is happening in the lives of George Bush and Dick Cheney. While this is very important to the nation and to us as a whole, it would be nice to see some news diversification. Diversification is one of Digg’s strengths, despite the fact that Google/Apple news tend to dominate the various technology industry homepages.

Further evidence that indicates the unhappiness of Reddit users include a story that was homepaged earlier today:
Should reddit go open source so that features get implemented^[3] and was submitted by Dreyus^[4]

Reading the commentary in both submitted articles is interesting. There seems to be an intense discussion in the open source posting between Reddit developers and users. Below is a screen shot example:

While I do not know much about the evolution of Reddit from history to acquisition to its present state so I may be jumping the gun in pointing out the opinion of Reddit users, I definitely think that reading the comments from the users is an indication of what has been happening since the acquisition of Reddit by Condé Nast^[5].

[1] Reddit news posting
[2] Reddit user: _simon_
[3] Reddit news posting
[4] Reddit user: Dreyfu
[5] TechCrunch: Breaking News: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit

On October 31, TechCrunch reported that Condé Nast, the owners of Wired Magazine, had acquired Reddit.com. The price was not disclosed but Michael Arrington revealed that the owners of Reddit will be moving from their Boston location to San Francisco. Reddit has four employees.

TechCrunch reported “Reddit is a social news site that has always played second fiddle to Digg.” After reading this, I noticed an article posted in ValleyWag about how the Reddit founders must have felt when compared to Digg. The following quote from the founders of Reddit was placed on ValleyWag: “As far as I know, this was the first time we graced the pages of TechCrunch, so we’re just happy for the coverage. In fact, I think Michael made some very good points about reddit’s fast load time and high content-to-ad ratio. I do wish he’d mentioned our mascot, but oh well.”

It seems that ValleyWag wanted to get a response from the Reddit founders about not wanting to be compared to Digg. I think this is a good question from ValleyWag because sometimes when you see one of the first press releases of your acquisition, you should expect that the details of it should be focused more on the actual acquisition and not other potential acquisitions. Yes, we know everyone loves Digg, but there is definetely a time and place to highlight Digg’s success.

However the interview TechCrunch put together just two hours after the acquisition is impressive. Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the founders of Reddit were interviewed by Michael Arrington and Marshall Kirkpatrick on TalkCrunch. I sat myself down and listened to it for 24 minutes. Here is a rundown of several of the interview points:

• Steve is 22 years old and will be 23 as of next week, Alexis is 23
• Steve was a fan of Paul Graham for a long time and attended a lecture by Paul Graham at Harvard about “How to Start a Start-Up.” Steve and Alexis had coffee with him and applied for Y-Combinator in their senior year of college. And then they moved to Boston with Y-Combinator funding.
• Reddit’s initial funding was $12,000. At the end of summer of 2005, Reddit had another round of funding which was less than $100,000.
• Reddit receives roughly 70,000 unique visitors per day and roughly around 700,000-800,000 pageviews per day. Recently they had an all-time high of 96,000.
• Arrington: “Well I’m proud to see that is the top story right now on Reddit beating out even your own blog entry announcing the acquisition. Is that still right?”
  Reddit founder: “Well we weren’t allowed to write our blog post until you had a fair shot at it.” Arrington followed that up with “And it looks like your story is #12 now.”
• The founders of Reddit stated that they would be maintaining creative control of Reddit as it was part of the discussion with Wired.
• Reddit owners were not allowed to mention anything about the acquisition, but stated that “they were very pleased.”
• One thing that was important to Reddit was not to “get in the way of the users.” This is what really drove the company direction.
• Steve will be moving to San Fran at the end of the week, Alexis will be moving in a couple months. Chris, another founder is under contract to finish his PhD in January.
• Arrington and the Reddit founders spoke to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg on IM around the same time as the acquisition and Rose definetely had warm wishes for Reddit.

Between ValleyWag, TechCrunch, and GigaOM, there is certainly a good amount of coverage on the Reddit acquisition. Congratulations to Steve on getting health insurance too.