For those who already have established communities on reddit, being able to point your own domain to reddit without having to host the open source version of the service yourself is a great step forward. Also, being able to customize your CSS stylesheets gives you the opportunity to make reddit fit into the design of your own brand. This makes using reddit a lot more palatable for those with established names who would like to experiment with social news sites, but shied away from it so far.

Reddit definitely doesn't seem to be afraid of giving up control. In the end, though, this move is only going to help it grow its audience - and while the audience might sometimes not even be aware that they are looking at a custom reddit site, reddit itself will surely run advertising on those sites, so its bottom line is only going to benefit from this.

One thing reddit doesn't allow you to do, though, is to create your own voting algorithm - though judging from the direction the developers have been moving in lately, this is probably only a question of time.

Contest

Also, reddit has announced a contest for those who want to start their own community on reddit. Whoever manages to create the largest sub-reddit within the next month can take away a Macbook Air and a reddit bobblehead.

Reddit Keeps Growing

Reddit also announced that they have seen a 300% increase in subscribers and subscriptions since unveiling their latest redesign in May.

While reddit is still much smaller than Digg or Yahoo Buzz, it is definitely driving the development of its site forward a lot faster, and, at the same time, pushing its competitors to become more open and creative as well. While Digg is trying to keep very tight control over its service, reddit is moving in the opposite direction and judging from the numbers cited in this announcement, it is working out quite well for them.

After Digg-founder Kevin Rose revealed Digg's July traffic numbers on his blog, Reddit administrator and programmer KeyserSosa publicly requested that the "entire mainstream media" quit with the diminutive adjectives already, as Reddit looks to have more traffic, not less, than Digg.

In his blog post, Kevin Rose revealed that Digg had "200+ Million page views in July" - a number that seems to contradict what Reddit sees as persistent attempts by the mainstream media to minimize its impact and relevance in comparison to other social bookmarking sites like Digg. As one user notes in the comments, Reddit has only 1/20th of the staff, but the numbers seem to show that it has at least 40% more traffic.

See a full-size version of the image here.

Slate.reddit is populated automatically via Slate.com's RSS feeds - so there are no manual submissions, as on the original reddit.com. All that Slate readers need to do is vote and comment.

I asked Alexis Ohanian what led to the deal. Alexis told me that "the relationship with Slate began when their articles started popping up on reddit shortly after we launched last June." That was followed by numerous other front page stories on reddit, at which point emails were exchanged between Reddit management and Slate.

Reddit's Recommendation Engine

What I like about Reddit is that it aims to be a 'recommendation engine'. As it states in the Help section:

"reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web -- personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you'll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes."

Personalization is of course the holy grail for Web apps, which we've established before on R/WW is a difficult thing to achieve. But it does seem to be a point of differentiation for reddit, from digg and Netscape - both of which focus more on community recommendations rather than reddit's personal recommendations. And reddit does have some smart people working on this. Aaron Swartz announced today the new version of reddit's recommendation system:

"One major improvement is that it's faster than ever before -- it's practically live. Head to your recommended page and vote on something and the recommender should whisk it away and give you a new recommendation within seconds."

I'll have to test that out! In any case, it strikes me that at the very least Slate.com will get to understand what articles on their site appeal to readers the most (provided the new reddit tool gets sufficient take-up over time). That extra feedback loop, via reddit, will be a valuable source of data for Slate.

Alexis from Reddit told me there are some other similar white label projects in the works, but this is their first announcement. Personally I think it's great to see these community news apps being white labeled to media organizations, where I've always felt they belonged.

"Since reddit's beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open," said the announcement blog post. "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we're finally giving back to the community that has given us so much."

It makes sense for Reddit, which has grown because of very passionate and technically savvy community, might go this route. Open sourcing Reddit's code will very likely lead to a stronger product and tighter community, and not to the birth of strong competitors. Anyone who wants to create niche Reddits on topics that the site doesn't adequately cover is now free to do so, however.

Reddit is written in Python. An explanatory video from the company is below.

While the Reddit team only offered its "undying gratitude and an optional trophy", it looks like users have gotten some new site functionality and even a potentially more stable site in return for their donations.

As of yesterday, when one of Reddit's continually-pesky servers crashed yet again, a new set of features were added site-wide and the Reddit team took advantage of the downtime to swap out some hardware.

According to a blog post by Reddit programmer Mike Shiraldi, the site now offers a sort function, meaning everyone can sort their userpages. If you're familiar with Reddit, then you might also be familiar with the often enigmatic mascot in the masthead. If the allusion seems unclear, a mouseover will now show some titletext and decipher the daily changing mascot.

For gold users, Reddit will also be adding "moar comments", loading up to 1,000 comments at a time. I don't know about you, but I often go to Reddit for the detective-esque crowdsourcing of information that happens in the comments, so loading more at once is always great.

The biggest change of all, however, has to be the swapping out of a flaky server. When the site went down yet again yesterday (it's been experiencing some downtime as of late), the team took the downtime as an opportunity to swap out some bad hardware. While Shiraldi warns that "there may be some initial issues while we bring it up to speed", he notes that this is a change that should benefit all Redditors, paying or not.

While there was certainly some doubt floating around the blogosphere when the site came out asking for donations, it seems to have paid off. Reddit is a perfect example of what all that "community building" hype is all about - build a devoted base of users and you can offer them little more than a virtual trophy and get enough out of them to put in new servers and hire some much needed developers.

Using crowdsourcing to combat spam submissions on an already trained populous that already votes on everything seems like a smart way to outsource an otherwise difficult task.

In addition to these problems, the site also found that the generally American make-up of the moderators left those of you in Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the future stuck with valid submissions sitting in spam boxes, as the moderators were fast asleep.

Thus, Reddit has "deputized" its users, enlisting them all in the battle against spam submissions by including a box that will appear "at the top of the front page every once in a while".

Average Reddit users will have the ability to pitch in and say whether or not a specific submission is indeed spam or was inadvertantly flagged, much the way you can train your email program to detect spam.

We asked Jared Goralnick, founder of AwayFind, how this might differ from standard spam filters on email, to which he replied that the method itself was not novel, but "taking just a few of the messages (the quarantine) and making them very prominent (the the front page of the site) seems novel".

The sort of filtering Reddit is employing, he said, elaborates on the old binary sort of spam filtering, where something is either spam or not spam, adding the quarantine as the third category. While this is not new, the method of dealing with that third category is interesting.

"In short, the technology behind their decision has a deep history..." he said, "...they've always been very community-oriented and this seems like a good next step."

]]> Discuss]]>

Okay, so it sounds perfectly traditional, but the site has gone and taken it one step further - email verification that is completely voluntary.

From Reddit engineer Mike Schiraldi's blog post:

First and foremost, nobody has to verify their email address. If you're paranoid about this sort of thing and would rather jump off a cliff than tell reddit your email address, you'll still be able to log in, vote, post crazy comments, submit links to bunker supplies and tinfoil hat designs, and everything else that you're used to.

In fact, we think (and hope) that normal, non-spammy users won't even notice any change. The only ones who should have a problem are people who submit one crummy link after another, as often as the site will let them. We're going to start limiting them to a certain number of crummy links per hour (and per day, per week, etc).

Schiraldi goes on to explain that "crummy" links are ones that are flagged as spam, fail to pass "deputy moderation" (that crowdsourced spam filtering we mentioned above) and links with more downvotes than upvotes.

So, if you surpass the number of crummy links allowed, all you need to do is verify your email address and "you'll be granted a lot more leeway."

It's interesting to see these attempts at slightly twisting traditional spam filtering because, as Schiraldi notes in the beginning of his blog post, "there are plenty of occasions when reddit users wish to remain anonymous" and "it's a fine line to walk, crushing spammers without hurting [their] community."

The IAmA is a perfect example. The name is a multipurpose anacronym, where someone says "I am a" but it also means "Ask Me Anything". Without anonymity, this massively popular section of Reddit would be far less interesting, if not impossible.

Not only does iReddit has all your favorite Reddit functionality: view stories, vote, comment, share, explore different subreddits, and save links for later, it also lets you 'shake' to get a new story; an idea, Ohanian says, that has been "floating around ever since I saw the Urbanspoon app."

An e-mail last summer "resurrected visions of a shake-able reddit iPhone app to cure away-from-the-computer-ennui once and for all," Ohanian posted.

Created with the help of 280North, the iReddit app is available for $1.99, with a free, ad-supported version in the pipelines.

Now, the website is saying that "'Experts' misunderestimate our traffic, and we don't know why".

We've been kinda bummed at reddit these days. It seems like every week something comes up that slows performance to a crawl or even leads to a total site outage. And we almost never get a chance to release new features anymore. [...] The bottom line is, we need more resources.

The problem the site is having now, it says, is that "advertisers generally don't trust Google Analytics numbers" and "have their own preferred sources of traffic information that they put their faith in." According to Google Analytics, Shiraldi writes, Reddit has seen more than 8,000,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 400,000,000 pageviews. "The numbers are very accurate, because there's a blog of Google Analytics javascript on every reddit page that lets them directly measure our traffic."

Shiraldi then goes on to compare the numbers provided by a number of web traffic measurement services. Compete.com reports 927,000 unique visitors a month - around 7 million less than Google Analytics. Quantacast, meanwhile, reports 10 million visits, which Shiraldi says is anywhere from a half to quarter of the true numbers.

The problem here, according to Shiraldi, is that advertisers are relying on numbers from third-party measurement services that just aren't true. In the site's efforts to raise more money - and therefor hire more engineers, buy more servers, increase performance and continue the cycle - these numbers appear to be hurting its bottom line.

The problem Shiraldi points to looks like one that would have broad implications for any number of websites trying to make a buck of advertisements and traffic. If all of the web measurement services out there have this large of a discrepancy between them, who's really making out in the end? Does a site just need to find the most favorable analysis and stick with it or should something be done to reconcile the numbers?

This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it's over you might wonder how it was done. What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What's next?

If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.

Currently, users can submit questions to the topic. Over the next several days, users will be able to vote on these questions and the IBM Research Team will answer them on Tuesday, Feburary 22 at noon EST.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote today about what he thinks makes Reddit as successful as it is (it recently broke 1 billion monthly pageviews), pointing to the IAmA subreddit. IAmA "is an endless treasure trove of fabulous content being created within reddit," wrote Ohanian.

To take part in the Q&A, simply head on over, sign up for a free account if you don't have one, and fire away. 

Oh, and currently, the number one question? "Can we have Watson itself/himself do an AMA?" The answer? "We're working on it ;)"

Reddit is another to have been extensively profiled by Read/WriteWeb. Back in July we noted that Reddit was integrating its software into Slate.com, the venerable Webzine currently owned by Washington Post. The reason was to give Slate readers "a new way to find and discuss its best content." I'm assuming Reddit will be similarly integrated into Wired.

Slate.reddit is populated automatically via Slate.com's RSS feeds - so there are no manual submissions, as on the original reddit.com. All that Slate readers need to do is vote and comment. Back in July I asked Alexis what led to the Slate deal:

"Alexis told me that "the relationship with Slate began when their articles started popping up on reddit shortly after we launched last June." That was followed by numerous other front page stories on reddit, at which point emails were exchanged between Reddit management and Slate."

At that time he told me there are some other similar white label projects in the works. Well looks like Wired has gone and bought the whole company, instead of just licensing the technology!

Also check out our Personalized News: A Market Overview post, which went into detail about Reddit's technology.

UPDATE: Co-founder Steve Huffman from Reddit told me:

"We will certainly be collaborating with wired, but we also be collaborating with the other CN properties such as style.com and other sites affiliated with the company's newspaper groups. We haven't worked out all of the specifics yet, however.

The first order of business will be getting a lay of the land and seeing what we can do for whom."

Also the official press release is now out, which has this quote from General Manager of Wired Digital Kourosh Karimkhany:

"Our goal will be to build Reddit as an independent company by collaborating with Wired through the integration of its core technology, and by offering partnerships to allow other companies to do the same."

The PR notes too that Reddit now has over one million unique users a month. Plus Wired’s parent company, Condé Nast, has already used Reddit technology to launch a beta site, Lipstick.com, for the social filtering of celebrity news.

Reddit‚Äôs technology will be used by Cond√© Nast to "unleash the power of the many communities touched by Cond√© Nast to enhance our Web sites by highlighting news that matters to them,‚Ä? said Sarah Chubb, President of Cond√©Net, the online division of Cond√© Nast.

Reddit, based in Boston, will relocate to San Francisco where Wired magazine and Wired Digital are based. The four founders will continue to direct Reddit as Wired Digital employees.

It's not perfect but it's pretty great. It's reminiscent of the excellent StumbleUpon Video but more timely, less repetitious and less full of commercials. The main question that comes to mind is: why hasn't Digg launched something like this yet?

Note that the video that appears first in the "best of the web" section is one long, juvenile joke about sexual violence from the comedy group "The Whitest Kids You Know." So not all readers here may appreciate the audience on the site and their taste. Unfortunately that's what you often get when you open up editorial selection to a vote of computer savvy folks who like to populate these kinds of sites. It's rule by the loudest voices with the most time on their hands.

The service isn't technically perfect either. On Safari we've needed to refresh the page regularly in order for it to load. You can't vote videos up or down from the Reddit.tv page - the designer says he wants to keep it simple but that may come soon. There doesn't appear to be a very high threshold for the number of votes a video needs to appear on Reddit.tv. Several we saw were just submitted. Finally, it would be great if there was a way to have continuous full-screen viewing of these videos. That might be easier said than done but it would add a lot to the user experience.

Those issues aside, though, Reddit.tv is pretty cool. It's a good way to see popular current events and cool science and tech videos in particular. The inclusion of TED Talk videos is great; those help balance out the rampant stupidity you find on any video sharing service.

This kind of viewing experience is much nicer than what Digg offers in its video section. Surely it's only a matter of time until Digg does something similar to this. In the meantime, if you want to watch up-to-date online videos that have been voted up by a crowd of geeks, Reddit.tv may now be your best option.

Reddit may have a jump on Digg when it comes to avoiding groupthink and spam, via a user reputation system it calls 'karma'. Check out the full story on ZDNet and tell me what you think: is Reddit's karma system a better - more honest - way to rank stories and users than Digg's populist approach of ranking by homepage hits? Or do you think Digg has the right approach, but just needs to address the groupthink and spam issues that come with scaling to thousands of users?

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Digg vs Reddit Market Share

Standoff

What is clear, though, is that Digg's users are not backing down - and neither is Digg's management. User revolts are nothing new for Digg, but this time it looks like Digg's management is not prepared to back down. According to former Digg engineer Ian Eure, Digg may not even have the ability to roll its service back to the old version anyway. Digg's CEO Kevin Rose does promise, however, that many of the old features Digg's users are now clamoring for will come back in one form or another. The question now is if the site's most fervent users will come back once all the issues with Digg v4 have been resolved, or if they will simply move on to another site like Reddit.

While Digg has now stabilized the site and added numerous features that its users were asking for, it's hard not to notice that the level of activity on the site has also declined. Currently, it only takes about 200 diggs for a story to appear in the daily top 10 list, and quite a few stories on the front page regularly get fewer than 30 comments.

Reddit Traffic: Only Up 2.6% (Updated)

While there has been a lot of talk about how the service's competitor Reddit would profit from Digg's decline, Hitwise only noticed a relatively small increase in traffic to the site. While there are surely numerous Digg refugees who found shelter on Reddit, overall traffic to the site only went up 2.6% since the launch of the new Digg. (Update 2: I just got an update from Hitwise. Reddit saw 2.6% growth in the U.K. according to Hitwise. For the U.S., Hitwise saw a 15% increase in visits to the site.)

Update 1: Reddit's lead developer Christopher Slowe just contacted us with updated traffic numbers for reddit. According to these numbers - which come directly out of Google Analytics - Hitwise's numbers for Reddit are wrong. Overall, traffic to Reddit increased 24% over the last two months (mostly during the month since the Digg relaunch) and these numbers are holding steady.