reddit Turns Five Years Old

Five years ago today, reddit received its first submission. This information networking site, founded by college students Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, has grown to be an influential engine of web culture. At Geekosystem, Robert Quigley wrote a thoughtful analysis of how reddit became so powerful in the Internet news cycle:

There’s nothing particularly objectionable about this: The Reddit community and the Reddit algorithm work together to ensure that mostly interesting pictures, videos, and articles quickly make their way to the front page of the site. But then, that’s the function of most social news sites; what makes Reddit special?

Without getting into the tired debate pitting Reddit against Digg or quipping that today’s Digg frontpage was yesterday’s Reddit frontpage, I think that even most Digg users will agree that the Digg frontpage is not geared for speed in the same way Reddit’s is. A big Gizmodo-iPhone type story can shoot up to the top of Digg fairly quickly, buoyed by thousands of Diggs up, but for mid-tier articles of a few hundred votes, Reddit is a lot faster. Now, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying slower-paced news as a reader — what’s the difference if you haven’t seen it yet? — but from the perspective of an online-oriented writer, newer tends to be far more valuable given the blogosphere’s fickle, hour-by-hour appetite for information.

Reddit’s algorithm ensures that new, well-liked stuff shoots up, but it’s up to the community to ensure that ‘well-liked’ and ‘actually good’ have much correspondence.


Link | Image via reddit

What else makes reddit special? It's paired up with Neatorama for a video talent competition! Be sure to enter and win a chance to get an Apple iPad.

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