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Reddit Community Writes The First Draft Of The Free Internet Act

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:34:39 +0000

The Reddit community are some of the biggest advocates of having a free from censorship and open Internet. Last month, the Reddit community responded to the SOPA proposal by writing their own piece of legislation that would protect Internet freedoms. The first draft of the Free Interact Act has been published on a public Google Doc. Below is a small portion of the draft:

The Free Internet Act: To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by preventing the restriction of liberty and preventing the means of censorship. FIA will allow internet users to browse freely without any means of censorship, users have the right to free speech and to free knowledge; we govern the content of the internet, governments don’t. However enforcements/laws must also be put into place to protect copyrighted content.

The Reddit community hopes to aim high and then reach a compromise with this law in a similar manner that SOPA and PIPA was pushed.

Reddit Hit 2 Billion Pageviews In December 2011

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:12:01 +0000

Social bookmarking website Reddit.com has hit 2 billion pageviews in December 2011. They saw about 34 million unique visitors. Other stats include 12.97 pages/visit, 16 minutes average time spent on website, 100 million monthly pageviews per employee, 100,000+ subreddits, and 8,400+ subreddits with over 100 subscribers. Reddit’s traffic has more than doubled in less than a year. Reddit said that they do not get any traffic from ads or traffic trading. They do not integrate with Facebook and don’t know anything about SEO. These are very impressive stats and it further justifies Conde Nast’s acquisition. Reddit hit one billion monthly pageviews back in February 2011. [Reddit Blog]

Reddit Community Helps Raise Over $50K For Lucas Gonzalez’s Immune Disorder

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:32:37 +0000

The Reddit community has helped raise over $50,000 in charity that would go towards a bone marrow transplant for Lucas Gonzalez, a 3 year old buy that suffers from Hyper IgM Syndrome. The syndrome is a rare immunodeficiency disorder that makes him more susceptible to infections.

Dr. Suhag H. Parikh of Duke University recommend that Gonzalez gets a bone marrow transplant to overcome risks that are associated with the disorder. The Gonzalez family is relocating from Florida to North Carolina. A financial adviser said that the estimated cost of 6 months worth of living expenses, insurance, and medical expenses would cost about $50,000.

Lucas’ aunt’s boyfriend wrote about the story on Reddit.com and the community responded with kindness. He posted under the user name ironyx with a letter from the doctor that verified Lucas’ condition and treatment recommendation. One Reddit user confirmed the story by talking to the doctor on Duke’s campus. To show his gratitude, Lucas’ father Luis got a Reddit tattoo.

[Reddit via HuffPo]

Amazon Service Issues Shut Down Netflix, Foursquare and More

Riley Kennysmith — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:50:41 +0000

Amazon‘s Elastic Computer Cloud and Relational Database Service went down yesterday, interrupting service for Amazon Web Services users like Netflix, Reddit, Foursquare and Instagram. PC Mag reports that service was disrupted around 10pm but back online around 11pm. The service error occurred when network traffic was moved to a lower-capacity network instead of shifting to another router, which downed servers in Virginia.

Amazon also experienced an outage in an Ireland data center earlier this week as the result of a lightning strike. The company also had a larger cloud server outage in April.

Reddit Cofounder Charged For Stealing Data from MIT and JSTOR

Riley Kennysmith — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 17:11:21 +0000

Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz has been charged for data theft by Carmen M. Ortiz, the US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. He is charged with stealing more than 4 million documents from MIT and academic archive JSTOR. The charges could result in up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million. Swartz’s charges include computer fraud, wire fraud, criminal forfeiture and obtaining information from a protected computer. [The New York Times]

Condé Nast Considering Spinning Off Reddit

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:59:00 +0000

Condé Nast acquired Reddit five years ago and now they are considering spinning them off again. Condé Nast would continue to own the website but they are talking to investors about selling a stake in the company with a $200 million valuation. Reddit saw tremendous growth after Digg released a new, less favorable version of their website. Reddit recently saw one billion page views in one month. “We love our Reddit asset, and it’s a core asset for us, and it’s getting more valuable every day,” stated Advance Publications digital operations head Steve Newhouse. [AllThingsD]

Google Poaches Reddit Engineer and Admin Mike Schiraldi

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:59:46 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has poached Mike Schiraldi, an admin and engineering, from Reddit. Reddit receives a lot of traffic and has a small team of engineers so this is a big deal for them. Below is Schiraldi’s blog post he wrote about his time at the company and how Google approached him with a “dream offer.”

Today was my last day at reddit.

Well, I should clarify that. I mean, I’m still going to spend half my life on this site and maybe I’ll even try building up my karma again. But from now on, I’ll be doing it as an amateur.

My time here has been wild. I’ve made friends with startup founders and web cartoonists and have been lucky enough to shake hands with redditors from Adam Savage to Marc Andreessen to the thousands of creative and wonderful people who joined us in DC last October. I’ve watched the site grow from a mere link-aggregation portal into a true community — the best forum on the Internet, if you ask me.

When I started in November 2008, revenue was a trickle. The site survived on t-shirt sales and Conde Nast’s love. Today, reddit is signing big advertising deals, does brisk business every day via the sponsored links system, and (thanks to all you reddit gold subscribers out there) has proven that endless advertising isn’t the only way for a website to pay its bills. Traffic is skyrocketing, articles are written about reddit nearly every day, and the four new programmers joining the team this spring should have a huge impact on speed, stability, and features.

I’m so proud of what our scrappy, brilliant skeleton crew has been able to accomplish, and I know that the best is yet to come for reddit, but I nonetheless feel that it’s time for me to move on. At this point in my career, I want to work at a place where the programmers go all the way to the top, where the policies coming from HR and IT and everyone else are designed with nerds in mind, not magazine publishers.

And so when Google approached me recently with a dream offer, I realized that it was time for me to make my pilgrimage. (I think that every programmer should work there at least once in his or her career.) If you’d like to hear more about this adventure as it unfolds and keep in touch with me as I exit the reddit spotlight, you can follow me on Twitter. (This is my first time tweeting, so let me know if I do it wrong.)

[Reddit blog]

Yasir Afifi Suing FBI For Placing Tracking Gadget In His Car

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:14:01 +0000

A lawsuit by the Council on America-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been filed on behalf of Yasir Afifi against the FBI. Afifi is a Muslim-American student that is of Egyptian descent. Last year Afifi found a strange gadget underneath his car when getting an oil change. He was scared that it was a pipe bomb so his friend posted photos of it on Reddit. The Reddit community confirmed that it was a GPS tracking device placed there by the FBI without a warrant. FBI agents learned that Afifi discovered the device and they demanded it back from him before he destroyed it since it is expensive. Below is a video discussing the lawsuit:

[BoingBoing]

Reddit Hiring More Engineers Due To Constant Down-Time

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:37:44 +0000

Reddit is a social news sharing website owned by Condé Nast. Now Reddit is hiring some additional engineers to keep the website up and running after they received a lot of complaints. Reddit doubled their sales and system administration team from one person each to two people each team.

Reddit is also hiring two of their power users to manage customer service complaints. Reddit was able to make some additional revenues by launching a new service called Reddit Gold. Reddit Gold adds sponsored links on their main homepage. This allows Reddit to make the hires.

It is crazy to hear that Condé Nast is not doing much to help Reddit grow their team faster. Reddit recently hit 1 billion pageviews and 14 million unique users per month. “All reddit gold revenue goes right back into the site, either in terms of more servers or more people,” said Mike Schiraldi of Reddit in an interview. “Condé Nast does not seize it to buy Picassos for the executive washroom.” Reddit has about 14 employees in L.A., San Francisco, NYC, and Salt Lake City.

[VentureBeat]

Reddit Hits A Billion Monthly Pageviews

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:04:12 +0000

Reddit has uploaded a screenshot of the pageview statistics from the Google Analytics dashboard. There are about 100 websites on the Internet that has hit 1 billion pageviews in a single month. The New York Times, Expedia.com, Weather.com, About.com and Fox News have yet to achieve this milestone. [Reddit Blog]