all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything
IIRC we were doubling every 8-12 months, and Digg sped that up a bit for us that year. It wasn't like a make-or-break moment, but we certainly felt it. :)
Fortunately you had just turned up a bunch of new servers just days before.
That seems very unusual to have a large uptick in engagement without any corresponding increase in traffic. I'm not sure I understand how the Digg announcement would make existing Reddit users more active.
Keep in mind that commenting and voting don't count as page views since it's all AJAX. If you make no comments, one, or 50 on the same page, it's still one page view.
In fact, that was a main reason cited be people at the time as to why they liked reddit over other options -- because we didn't artificially inflate page views by forcing reloads.
It depends on how "page views" is defined, but I can imagine a case where the same number of pages were viewed, but the interactions on that page increased as people began commenting more on reddit than on digg. Reddit doesn't refresh pages when you comment, so if they didn't count the xhr requests as "page views", you could have more active, engaged users without significantly increasing the actual number of pages viewed.
I'm not sure we were quite double their size. In July 2010, Digg claimed to have 200M pageviews[0] and we had 279M[1]. So I think we were more like 40% bigger in terms of pageviews, which Chris's post from the time[2] seems to confirm. Though we were undercounting a bit[3], so it was probably more like 55% or 60%.
And when it comes to uniques, my memory's pretty foggy, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Digg actually had more than we did at that point.
That said, you're absolutely correct that we were far from struggling, except in terms of getting approval from Conde Nast to buy more AWS power, or to hire, or to get any support whatsoever from their ad sales team.
> And when it comes to uniques, my memory's pretty foggy, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Digg actually had more than we did at that point.
My recollection was that when we visited them shortly after, we were shocked to learn just how much bigger we were. But we might both be right. It was a while ago.
That's actually really surprising. I was part of the Digg exodus and I'd barely heard about Reddit at the time of the v4 debacle, while Digg was a pretty big brand in tech circles. Was it just better marketing while Reddit actually had a larger-but-quieter userbase at the time?
Digg spent a lot of money on marketing, while reddit spent none, so yeah, that was a big part of it. They had a lot of articles written about them because they had a fabulous marketing and PR team. One we were a bit envious of.
As a counter-anecdote, by 2010 I had been a reddit user for 4 years and I had never commented nor had had an account on digg, which felt more like the flashier version of an online phpbb forum.
I had first heard about reddit in the summer of 2005 while holding my first ever job as a programmer doing python work, which I would consider as a "tech circle". I remember that I was a little bummed when the front page first got rid of technical-related content and forced me to go to programming.reddit.com instead. That and the fact that people like Paul Graham were still being judged based on their programming merit not on any crazy start-upy valuations certainly made reddit a very techie community in the beginning, at least from my point of view. And I almost forgot, many people were actually pretty upset when reddit switched from Lisp to Python (in December 2005, I even wrote on my blog about it), because python felt "less pure". Funny times.
yeah my view is coming from just my experience, those around me, and general perceived vibe on the 'tech net' at the time. Digg was the spot where links broke. Then in the backlash due to the botched design launch etc, we all started giving reddit a chance, submitting there first/checking there first. It had always been around, but was more for maybe community/comments on links...not where they broke. Then that started to reverse very rapidly until well.....
Using Google trends basically shows you the people who type "reddit" into their search bar increased. :)
I know that isn't entirely true, but yes, for the most part reddit's popularity in the press exploded afterwards because the press needed something new to write about.
Personally, I don't buy too deep into v4 causing Digg's death. It certainly helped, but stuff like seeing "mrbabyman" and a dozen other power users controlling all the content became tiresome well before v4. Reddit was a little refreshing as I could post in a subreddit and have my content get a fair shake at being seen. That's still true today. My blog and my old webcomic have both been at the top of /r/comics and /r/android. The traffic and exposure was very nice and I think the upvote process is mostly fair. With sites like Digg or Slashdot there's zero chance my stuff would have gotten any exposure.
How did Obama's AMA impact the site's traffic? Aside from that AMA completely bringing the site down, it seemed to result in a longer term increase in users.
I first visited Reddit the day it opened (June 2005), and then started commenting regularly when they first added comments (Jan 2006).
The first announcement was by Paul Graham to comp.lang.lisp. AFAICT on that first visit, the only active users were the two founders (spez and kn0thing), PG, and spez's girlfriend, along with their sockpuppets. It was pretty boring while it was voting-only, but they kept at it, and once they added comments they got a small but fairly active userbase. The initial users were very technical, usually early-adopter programmers, and it drew heavily out of the Lisp/PL-theory crowd. I think that Reddit's YC batchmates also brought along some users, eg. there were a bunch of Semantic Web folks that presumably knew Aaron Schwartz.
I was one of them. I was a lurker on r/php (actually commenting using a bugmenot.com account) that I found using Google but somehow didn't understand the rest of the website / frontpage.
Digg v4 forced me to take a deeper look at reddit and since then my life has gone downhill :)
