I was hoping Reddit's open code would give me the vehicle, but it's now clear that's not the case unless I get a hacker on my team. Any takers?

Pligg sucks. Drupal will work but it's kind of a pain. I'd been anxiously awaiting this announcement because I hoped the Reddit code would give us something to work with.

However when I visit code.reddit.com, all I see is stuff I don't understand. I'm no hacker, but I've developed Drupal and WP sites. However I don't know the foggiest about Python, Subversion or any of the other things listed under the dependencies. This is very disappointing. How do they expect their code to be deployed when it requires a hacker to set it up?

If anyone on here is interested in getting involved in what I believe would be a groundbreaking journalism effort, shoot me an e-mail at [email protected]

Note: I have no funding at all. Simply a concept and the means to launch a handful of trained journalists at news stories that merit more attention and follow-up. With all the talk of "citizen journalism", surely this could be an interesting way to tackle metro news, no?

I think their plan to remind people in hacker communities who are bored with Ron Paul stories that they still exist, rather than create competitors. Though that might be a straw man.

Also, if you want to manage programers, it would be worth your while to read the Mythical Man Month. Right in the first chapter, it explains why it is harder to produce software that runs on other people's hardware (software as a product) than it is to make it run on your hardware (in-house software). That certainly applies here.

Couple that with a Wordpress or MovableType blog for your own content, and you can at least get people working in the right direction.

Update: Nevermind. Found it. I'll look into it.

Slashdot only went open source after they gained a lead with their own instance of the code. Slashdot only went open source after increasing demand from its community. Since going open source, Slashdot has subsequently gained bug fixes and a much more scalable implementation at reduced cost. However, I cannot name any other instances or derivatives of the code which are active - not even Squishdot Zope clones.

So, if you've got a big archive of posts and a large number of active users then open sourcing your code only entrenches your position by reducing costs.

In Spain we have http://barrapunto.com much smaller but also using slashcode. IIRC there are also two more instances, one of them in Portugal.

Barrapunto added its own features for a long time, but they weren't incorporated to main branch, and after serious scalability and trolling problems arose, they reverted to regular slashcode.

That's very pertinent because reddit haven't released code to reduce spam:

From the article: There are a few portions of the code that we're keeping to ourselves, mostly related to anti-cheating/spam protection.

Anyone deploying their own instance of the reddit code will have to develop their own protection against spam, trolling and rigged voting.

A valuable observation, but seemingly only valid for frameworks and backends that are merely a glorified CMS.

Much of the web is a glorified CMS, indexed by Google.

If your businesses produces value through human generated content[1], you should share your code to push down the cost of technology, undermining the market for people trying to sell similar but potentially innovative software to your competitors.

[1] as opposed to computer generated content, such as online catalogues or search indices.

and a computer is just a collection of coloured pixels flickering a bit.

Absolutely. I'd be much more impressed with a comprehensive API for votes/comments/stories.

Pretty much, I think it would be best for everyone to let people make reddit (or private reddits) the back-end infrastructure of all sites like news.YC, slashdot (just like flickr is a back-end for other people's sites).

This was submitted as a request well over a year ago:

http://www.reddit.com/info/1jhma/comments/

It's interesting that you commented on that thread, saying:

  adding the display templates is easy. what i'd be really concerned about is the db load, but that's solvable as well.

  We'd certainly do it. It just takes time, and that's a scarce resource at the moment.

I'm not interested in starting a reddit clone, but am interested in reading interesting code. The one file I glanced through was readable, straightforward, and concise, the hallmarks of good Python style. That's a very good thing, but I'm wondering if they've done anything especially clever, or implemented anything generally applicable beyond the realm of discussion sites.

Not that they should. Clear, concise, readable, simple code that builds on existing, open code wherever possible is a wonderful recipe for success. But I'm still interested in whether they went beyond that anywhere.

What's wrong with a lot of defs anyway?

Not saying this is the case with the reddit codebase!

   @validate(over18 = nop('over18'),
	     uh = nop('uh'),
	     dest = nop('dest'))

I know I won't have time to build this, but I think somebody should.

http://slinkset.com/

It's disappointing and puzzling.

1. http://groups.google.com/group/reddit-dev/browse_thread/thre...

A lot of people are saying, "Oh, but it's so easy." The Reddit boys' point is that it may be easy, but it still takes greater than 0 time and effort. They either can't or do not want to, dedicate more than zero time and effort at this time. Their prerogative.

That would be bad enough on its own, but then they handled the response really poorly. This "we don't have time" response was the sane cap on the mouth of a bottle of crazy agitated mailing list messages from a different maintainer saying strange things. It's pretty likely they never even considered it before someone mentioned it.

#god this shit is disorganized and confusing

http://code.reddit.com/

good pylons code to learn from, written by smart dudes, working at a large scale.

hats off to reddit!

Anyone taken the time to unravel the great mystery behind it?

  def hot(ups, downs, date):
  s = score(ups, downs)
  order = log(max(abs(s), 1), 10)
  sign = 1 if s > 0 else -1 if s < 0 else 0
  seconds = epoch_seconds(date) - 1134028003
  return round(order + sign * seconds / 45000, 7)

"seconds" is the number of seconds that have elapsed since around 1.46am on 8th Dec 2005.

"sign" just ensures a positive value.

45000 seconds is 12.5 hours. I don't understand.... that looks like hotness increases the older the story is. I know brackets aren't needed but they help readability!"

wonder how long it will take for the flood of clones. i can see it now:

"now that they're open source, i can build that reddit clone for elite tech and startup news that i've always wanted to build"

I actually hope this will be disruptive, and popular sites return to servicing their audience directly instead of relying on Digg, for example. Digg has become so popular that it almost needs it's own nested-digg now, a rather ironic self-defeating problem with social popularity and vertical growth. I mean, don't get me wrong... I suspect Digg will continue forward and be hugely successful.

Hats off to the reddit team.

I can understand why they want to keep these hidden but on the other hand these would be some of the juiciest bits. Oh well. I hope one day people can come up with an algorithms that doesn't rely on 'security by obscurity' to deal with spam/cheating - I know I've tried.

there are plenty of niche clones