reddit

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reddit

reddit front page on June 11, 2008
URL	www.reddit.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	News aggregation site
Registration	Free
Owner	Condé Nast Publications
Created by	Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
Launched	2005
Current status	online

Reddit (also reddit) is a social news website on which users can post links to content on the web. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to appear more or less prominently on the Reddit home page.

The site has discussion areas in which users may discuss the posted links and vote for or against others' comments. When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default, although a reader can display it through a link or preference. Users who submit articles which other users like and subsequently "vote up" receive "karma" points as a reward for submitting interesting articles.

Reddit also includes several topical sections called "subreddits", which focus on specific topics, such as programming, science, NSFW, and politics. There are dozens of subreddits.^[1]

The Reddit logo changes for various holidays and often for no reason, paying homage to Star Wars, classic video games, and geek culture in general. The logo generally changes daily, picking up on big dicussion subjects within the site or major news stories.

Although Reddit is not moderated by its owners, the Reddit developers have built a system to aid with curtailing spam, which works based on the "reports" of users.

1 History
2 Technology
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, then 22-year-old graduates of the University of Virginia.^[2] It received its initial funding from Y Combinator. The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz in 2005. Aaron Swartz joined in late January 2006 as part of the company's merger with Swartz's Infogami.^[3] The combined company was known as "not a bug". Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired not a bug on 31 October 2006.^[4]

[edit] Technology

Reddit was originally written in Lisp, but was rewritten in Python in 2005.^[5] The reasons given for the switch were faster performance, wider access to code libraries, and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework former reddit employee Aaron Swartz developed to run the site, web.py, is now available as an open-source project^[6].

Reddit is hosted on several Linux servers running lighttpd^[7].