Reddit is a social news aggregation and discussion website where users submit content like links and text posts. Registered users can vote submissions up or down and comment on them. Content is organized by subject into user-created subreddits. The site was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It grew rapidly due to its wide range of interests and celebrity Ask Me Anything interviews. While Reddit does not turn a profit, it earns revenue through advertisements and Reddit Gold subscriptions. The minimalist design focuses on accessibility and community over visuals.

1. By Skye Mainguy and Hekmat Iskandarani

2. WHAT IS REDDIT?
 A social news and entertainment website, where registered users submit content in the form of a link or
a text post
 A source for what’s new and popular on the web
 In English: An online community where people can go and submit links or photos, get votes on said links
or photos, and even have discussions.
 The more upvotes you get, the more “karma” one receives. Basically the amount of points you get.
 There are subreddits for what you particularly may be interested in such as: reddit.com/r/aww or
reddit.com/r/wtf, etc…
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlI022aUWQQ

3. SOME HISTORY ABOUT REDDIT
 Reddit started in June 2005 in Massachusetts by:
 Steve Hoffman and Alexis Ohanian
 Alexis was studying as a law student when at a Waffle
House, he first thought up the idea and decided he’d rather
do independent projects than become a lawyer

Y Combinator was the first initial funder for Reddit

4. THE ORIGINAL SKETCHES
Alexis, bored in his marketing class of senior year, starting sketching what
Their new website would be called, and what the logo would be.
Alexis decided he wanted a mascot, and these are the first original drawings.

5. “THE FRONT PAGE OF THE INTERNET” – REDDIT’S SLOGAN
 In January 2006, Reddit merged with a company called Infogami
 Reddit was later on bought by a publications company called Conde Nast Publications on October 31,
2006.
 By September 6, 2011, Reddit split from Conde Nast Publications and was a subsidiary of its parents
company, Advance Publications.
 By 2012, Reddit re-incorporated and is now a complete independent entity.
 Reddit’s headquarters is in San Francisco, California.
 The current CEO of Reddit is Yishan Wong.

6. PLATFORM
 Reddit is written in Python, however was previously written in Common Lisp

The change was so that there could be a wider access to code libraries and greater development flexibility
 It uses Pylon framework and also uses Amazon Web Services, Amazon CloudSearch, and jQuery
 PostgreSQL: Primary datastore and slowly moving to Apache Cassandra
 RrabbitMQ: Offline processing
 HAProxy: Load balancing
 Memcached: Caching
 Flaptor: Reddit’s search engine
 Reddit created an API for mobile interfaces using re-written CSS
 In addition, there are also several Windows 8 apps, and an unofficial desktop app called Reditr exists that is
compatible with Windows, OS X, Linux and ChromeOS

7. FUNDING AND PROFITS
 Reddit is NON-PROFIT
 Actually, Reddit actually loses more money than they make
 However, Reddit can make money from the following:

Advertisements

Reddit Gold (Just an upgrade for your account by removing ads and other small things, but is really just a way of
supporting the website)

Reddit Gifts

Reddit makes money for other purposes, not Reddit itself

8. HOW REDDIT GREW
 Reddit grew, fast, within the last couple of years. More and more people have joined Reddit for various
reasons:
 It’s entertaining and a good way to keep informed on the latest
 It allows others to share
 It has a variety of categories for people’s personal interests, so they can keep updated and share what
they find intriuging
 It involves more than just ordinary people, but also celebrities when they do an Ask Me Anything (AMA)
 Examples of those who have done AMA’s are: President Obama, Snoop Dogg, and Alexis Ohanian
himself!
 It’s informative, entertaining, and social all at the same time

9. KEY MOMENTS
 Alexis Ohanian’s first fundraiser that raised over $3K.
 This began the spread of people getting together for even more fundraisers and charities
 This gained a lot of publicity and more people were interested to see what Reddit was about and how
they could help or join
 The rise of Memes pop culture brought a lot of people in because of its huge gain in popularity
 Having the largest Secret Santa in the world
 Recently Reddit was running out of money, so Redditors started buying Reddit gold, exchanging and
buying Reddit gold karma, along with more gift exchanges to keep Reddit running.

10. CHARITY EXAMPLES
 Redditors raised over $70,000 to the Faraja orphanage in Africa in order to make it more secure and
build improvements
 A 7 year old girl Kathleen Edward, posted on Reddit about her advanced stages of Huntington’s
disease. Redditors got together and gave her a shopping spree at Tree Town Toys, a local store owned
by one of the redditors.
 Over $185,356 was donated to Direct Relief International for Haiti
 In addition, over $600,000 was donated to DonorsChoose in support of Stephen Colbert’s March to
Keep Fear Alive

11. REDDIT SITE
 Color scheme: Blue, dark grey, black, and white
 Logo: Alien man (also called a Snew)
 Banner: The usual Reddit
However with each subreddit, the logo and banner usually changes, banner is optional:

13. HOW TO CREATE AN ACCOUNT

14. CHANGES TO REDDIT
 Since Reddit started, there have been multiple changes, for instance:

The written code as discussed was changed from Common Lisp to Python

Reddit Gold and Reddit gifts came about

Bitcoin started becoming accepted, you can donate in bitcoins

It became more user-friendly

Subreddits started to become more personalized and relatable to that specific category

15. CHANGES TO REDDIT

Instead of upvotes or downvotes, there used to be just “interesting” or “uninteresting”

Design has changed, but has always remained primitive

People mainly changed the site with new subreddits and add-ons

Their general goal and business plan has always remained the same

16. FUNCTIONS: WHAT IT’S FOR/WHY
 It’s a discussion board where people post either educational, entertainment or news posts.
 People from all over the world join this community in order to know, learn and update themselves.
 Users post personal opinions of specific interests no matter what it is. It is very open speech.
 Other than the obvious, people join the community so that they can feel involved and feel as though
they are a part of something bigger

17. STRUCTURE
 Categories on the upper page on specific interests available
 Topics divided into subreddits where they are then put through an algorithm to sort them through
popularity
 Suggested topics available on what’s hot, new, rising, controversial etc.
 Search engine and Log in information on the top right

18. FEATURES
 Nothing significantly jumps out when you approach Reddit, it’s presented as a wall of text
 Accessibility of the website does not need a Reddit account
 You can not log in through any other social network except for Reddit
 New users are often deterred by its’ simplistic and primal design, but it can be quite apparent with a bit
of exploring and reading
 It is extremely easy to share content but for the content to gain in popularity is something entirely
different. You do care because you want to gain as many upvotes as possible on the content that you
post.

19. IN COMPARISON…
 Its easy to post and share content as long as you’re a Reddit user, but you must be registered
 Reddit is unique, because people enjoyed its minimalist layout with non-intrusive targeted advertising
 Unlike other websites, Reddit has unlimited user-created content and numerous categories
 The list of Reddit’s guidelines and rules are very short and rarely enforced, censorship is at a minimum
 Where other websites require various personal details, Reddit only requests that you give a username and
password. At most, an e-mail. .But you can remain anonymous, for things such as confessions, embarrassing
revelations, etc.

20. AMA…
 AMA (I Am A): In an IAMA post, a person posts who they are, what they did or what they currently do.
Other users can than ask the person questions that come to mind.
 AMA (Ask Me Anything): In an AMA post, a person will answer questions about literally anything from
Reddit users.

21. CELEBRITIES ON REDDIT
 Not surprisingly, the biggest ever AMA to take place on the site was the one posted by Barack
Obama, President of the United States on August 29, 2012. The AMA garnered almost 3 million page
views on that day, with many more millions of page views following for the days after the AMA took
place.
 Rapper Snoop Dogg did an AMA on Reddit in December of 2012, which attracted over 1.6 million page
views to the social news site just for that day. Reddit announced that it was the second biggest AMA to
ever take place on the site.

Top celebrity on Reddit – Zach Braff

22. PERSONAL ASSESSMENT
 Reddit as a website should work more on visuals and how the website is designed
 It should be more organized in terms of setup
 It should be broadcasted more and spoken about more
 You should be able to post pictures without having to upload them online first by giving a link.

23. ALIEN BLUE

24. WILL REDDIT STILL BE POPULAR IN 2 YEARS?
Yes.

25. Thank You!