alexis

The team has really done a remarkable job -- shipping more in the last quarter alone than over years before.

Thank you, greenspot! The team has been working very hard on mobile and we're aiming for this to be the first of many updates.

Meet some of the folks behind it and hear how we're thinking about it: https://youtu.be/6IWMbdAuy1M

We're now available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Launching apps in other countries requires a little bit more diligence than just making a website available globally.

I'm sorry it's not available in your country -- we're planning on getting it out everywhere.

Reddit would absolutely not exist if not for Y Combinator. Sure, we'd all be a bit more productive at work, but I don't think it'd be worth it.

Really great job with this. I thought I was going crazy with all the size variations of shirts....

You're one of a kind, my friend. Our industry needs more Garry Tans. So... I guess what I'm saying is make more babies!

Congrats and all the best with the book! Happy to participate and hope it can help get my experiences with Reddit, Hipmunk and beyond into as many people's heads as possible.

We have an awesome Editor, Vickie Chang, who manages a small team of staff writers and freelancers: http://upvoted.com/contributors/

Thanks. Yep, they're separate, but based on the success of the Upvoted podcast and newsletter over this year, we definitely see the potential of upvoted.com to be a gateway to get new users into Reddit. One reason why, for instance, we have a link to a comment section on r/upvoted at the bottom of every article (each Upvoted.com gets automatically submitted to r/upvoted upon posting).

Heath did the diligence, so I'll ask him to chime in, but my only requirement was that we ask as little of our FT Reddit devs as possible.

Thanks and here is my welcome note: http://upvoted.com/2015/10/06/a-redditorial-publication/

It's a way to follow up on stories that bubble up on Reddit's frontpages and give them more depth. 202M+ people can do a great job surfacing and discussing content in real-time, but our awesome editor, Vickie, and her team can do a much more effective job following up on those stories, interviewing, and adding more substance.

E.g.,

This photo of an unemployed man handing out resumes went to the top of r/pics: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3kc1sh/this_man_lost_...

We interviewed the guy pictured + wrote about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Upvoted/comments/3kxp7q/bottom_of_t...

Then a week later a photo of the guy (now with a job) topped on r/pics again and a random redditor linked to our story to provide context for everyone on the thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3lv1b3/way_to_go_redd...

This was back when we just posted as selfposts to r/upvoted, so I suspect that same article in a beautiful blog layout: http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/donnie-grooms-unemployed-busch...

Would do even better and reach even more people!

Sure thing. You'll see from the content on Upvoted.com that the OP is usually just the start of the story and we're following up to learn more. e.g., Omari Nyaega

http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/omari-nyaega-machete-kenya-orp...

202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop.

We're working on anti-brigading tools. That's on us to get right, because a lot of "brigading" is AKA "how social media works."

It's long been a very fuzzy definition, which is on us (e.g., how is it OK for a celeb to tweet to his followers about an AMA -- it's both "brigading" and "required for verification") and there's a more obvious and negative brigading we can thwart better with technology so that mods have the ability to throttle when, say, one community wants to all pile into a thread and sway it.

Upvoted.com does not affect Reddit.com -- like, not even developer attention -- we didn't move any Reddit developers off of community/mod tools, infra, or mobile.

Thank you! It's a minor thing, but one of my favorite things about the product is this brilliant widget u/comeforthlazarus came up with -- every article (e.g., this one on suicide survivors[1]) has a widget on the left rail[2] that follows the reader to display the OP, subreddit, and link to it.

[1] http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/survivors-of-suicide-spent-the...

[2] http://imgur.com/gGVdaHU

Take a look at the piece on survivors of suicide, it's one of my favorites from launch: http://upvoted.com/2015/10/03/survivors-of-suicide-spent-the...

We're not trying to be first with a cheap quick post (Reddit.com is always going to be faster than any newsroom anyway) and I'm really excited about the vision Vickie (editor) has for longer-form features like this one.

Every article posted to upvoted.com gets submitted to http://reddit.com/r/upvoted with a link at the bottom of said article.

We were not going to put facebook comments an DEFINITELY not going to take devs away from all the work they've been doing on mod/community tools (http://reddit.com/r/modnews), alien blue, and infrastructure.

Thanks again! Let's have another date. Email me!

edit: Update: It's happening!!!!!! Thanks, HN.

No. Trending articles are determined by traffic and not salable. When we do have a sponsored post on upvoted.com (just like on reddit.com) it's clearly marked as sponsored.

http://upvoted.com/promoted/the-united-franks-of-america-gol...

The top thread on the announcement is a great discussion of why it's so important to us to credit Redditors in every article, which folks seem to appreciate.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/3npxm4/introducing_up...

As for Tom, here's what I posted on r/defaultmods addressing that concern.

>>

I ran those ads when I learned Tom was using the site.

I did that because for the last few weeks more and more celebrities have been coming on or reaching out to use reddit as members of the community. And we've run sponsored headline to draw attention to it, these ads have been viewed over 14M times in the last couple of weeks without incident. They've also performed exceptionally well (Bill Gates' for instance had 368% higher CTR than average).

+That moment when Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) shows up to compliment your Rebel helmet patch +Oh, just Bill Gates hanging out on r/infographics +Lil Dicky drops a new music video, shows up in the comments of r/Music thread

Admittedly, these ads all went up at least 24hrs after the celeb showed up and left, whereas I jumped on the Tom Hanks one as soon as I realized it was happening. We're not going to do that again. Those ads also performed very well (63% higher than site average) but were a really bad look.

To be clear: we're not paying them. They're coming because we're actually making progress showing them the value of joining the community.

Wynter (u/808sandhotcakes) has been doing a lot of great work, by virtue of her great reputation in the industry alone, people are genuinely reaching out to learn how to join the Reddit community. We're excited about that, because it clearly makes our users very happy and by every account the talent enjoys it, too.

edit: (See, I'm already getting better: Arnold + Adam Savage stopped by since Tom and no obnoxious sponsored headlines.)

- How did Reddit get acquired, and why?

I wish I could just copy paste the section from my book, but it happened because word spread about reddit and how well we were doing (this started right around when Steve + I got back from Google in Nov 05 and turned down their acqui-hire offer) and the head of Biz Dev from CondeNet reached out to me via a mutual friend. He proposed we work on a project together (lipstick.com) and this ultimately led to acquisition talks.

- Why did Alexis leave Reddit originally, and why did he come back?

Our contracts were up Halloween 2009 and I stayed on for a few more months to get things in place and wrap up some things before leaving to go volunteer in Armenia with Kiva for a few months. Needed to get away from SF and connect with my roots.

I was on the board when Yishan made his sudden departure and ultimately came back because the timing was right + reddit needed the help. Reddit means so much to me and it was really hard watching it struggle.

Thanks! Gonna get Steve to sit down again soon for us to talk about the next 10 years...

All they do is ship ship ship, no matter what.

As you wish. Twitter even answered questions that only applied to reddit, e.g. "9. Will only certain subreddits be policed for this content or can it come from any subreddit? Twitter: N/A" and our community folks have been working with them, but I'm not the boss here :)

Admittedly, I left full-time in 2010 (remained an advisor and then board member when reddit when independent in 2011) but this issue of stolen nudes was something that Ellen and I discussed almost immediately after we were put together in the wake of the our CEO's departure.

We at reddit have always valued privacy (and our userbase has always valued that) and we missed a chance to lead, but with new leadership in place, we as a company decided this was where we wanted to start. Our community team has done an awesome job in the last couple of months since and I hope more companies will follow.

This is something we knew we needed to do in order to go from over 9000 communities on the platform to many, many more.