I sold upvoted.com to Alexis Ohanian earlier this year. I'm glad it's not just a redirect anymore!
I wanted to do something cool with it but never did. Then one day I got an email from an assistant of Alexis Ohanian's asking to sell it cheap for his little school project :P
I knew he was just trying to avoid being gouged, so I offered to sell it to Alexis for his initial asking price, if he'd give me a meeting and some feedback on my startup. He agreed and we had a good meeting. He gave my co-founder and I some genuinely usable advice, and technically funded our bootstrapped startup (https://portal.cloud) for a few weeks there.
Wordpress is an extremely new framework, so it will be new to a lot of developers, but it provides an extremely performant developer friendly product. One drawback is that it is highly specialized, so it only had a few applications but luckily upvoted fits into this niche. Hosting is really still a problem as their is a lack of providers and a steep complexity curve. No one has really provided a flexible way to host a platform like wordpress and coupled with the lack of maturity and bleeding edge nature it makes sense that they went with a managed hosting service. Even as new as the organization is, they have a great array of security products and plugins which will certainly shield it from the less scrupulous users. This is going to likely be the first major company using wordpress, but I bet it could be a platform that will underpin a large percentage of websites.
Unless we're thinking of two very different blogging platforms, Wordpress is pretty much exactly the opposite of "extremely new". Can you please elaborate on why you consider it to be extremely new and unfamiliar to a lot of developers?
> steep complexity curve
Brought on by the basic insecurity of the Wordpress blogging platform. Executable PHP in the Database, as a single example...
> No one has really provided a flexible way to host a platform like wordpress
Sorry? Wordpress hosts have been around for years, again, I'm really not understanding what you're trying to convey here.
> This is going to likely be the first major company using wordpress
You mean, aside from just about everybody; Wired coming to mind as a recent, big example.
I feel like I'm really missing some context here.
EDIT: Satire. Got it. Of course, then there's the question of whether the +1 response by heathwblack is also satire, or... :D
Yeah, I am sorry. I hardly ever make comments like this and it is doubly dubious because I lost my account recently, but this was meant to be satire. When the PM responded, I couldn't help myself but double down.
My account is new so it does look like a straight troll account but I was just having a bit of fun. TBH, as I stated in another comment ITT, wordpress provides a really easy way to test out this concept. I expanded my thoughts on the concept in that comment, but as to wordpress:
I bet reddit is just getting crushed with improvements and the engineering team is overworked. It is really easy and inexpensive to test this concept out without losing developer bandwith. wordpress provides a pretty good CMS (obviously bloated, [standard other wordpress criticsims], etc.) but they can get a tight feedback cycle on this idea and it could successful, but if not, will not be resource intensive.
I generally wish them the best of luck, they need something to work at a monetization level, and I hope this helps as it likely is not the long term solution.
I had a rough first experience with wordpress for a client recently and I just had to vent.
I'm almost certain the comment you're replying to is satire. I had to read through it twice to be sure though. It's either satire or coming from a parallel universe where everything is upside-down.
> Executable PHP in the Database, as a single example...
Do you have a specific example of this? WP itself doesn't use executable PHP in the database, although there are plugins that do (and are hence heavily discouraged).
(You _could_ be referencing storing complex values as serialized data for options/meta, which can technically give you some sorts of executable capabilities: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/PHP_Object_Injection )
^What this individual said is way better than I could say it, but is basically why we chose Wordpress VIP ^
In addition the Wordpress VIP program has much higher standards for plugins and security, which are things we care about greatly. Lots of great publications use VIP like Techcrunch, FiveThirtyEight, Facebook, and Time.
Awesome, that is what I thought. PHP is one of those languages that wasn't designed by committee so there isn't that much documentation about it, but the founder built it specifically as scalable programming language and had been designing languages for years. I can see it replacing newer languages like nodeJS, Go and PERL in the future. In the next couple years people will start realizing that the consistency, speed and security offset the lack of communities using it, and I can see it becoming really popular. Wordpress will become big as well as LAMP architectures are really hot right now, and not a lot projects provide a CMS that has a minimal UI that provides only what a user needs and that makes it a really lightweight choice for a CMS. No bloat, high security and a trendy new design. Excited to see vip.wordpress finally getting some love!
Yeah, all the hip new startups are using this technology. Obviously, NoSql makes it impossoble to change your data structure. You are going to see these Silicon Rust Belt companies or "Technologies Old Guard" if you will, scramble to pick this up. Ancient companies like Slack, Uber, Postmates, Google and Bitcoin had a good run but it's over. 2015 is the year of the sharing/on-demand economy and communication is getting revamped:
American Online
========================
They are going by just the initials AOL, and are poised for massive growth. People have said they are a total slack clone, but they are really just overlooking the integration with hotmail notifications. Rumor is Silicon Valley darling Time-Warner is poised to make a big investment.
Skour
=================
Travis Kalanick, a name a lot of people have forgotten, was the original founder of Uber but he bailed to disrupt the entrenched bitcoin/peer-to-peer/file-sharing industry with Skour. It is a totally distributed network for sharing your music. Obviously, it is a little derivative of stuff like Napster and pandora, but I wouldn't count them out. Box and Dropbox are companies that have been cold from the get-go. You have moore's law compounding to make storage and hardware super expensive, so profit will only go up as people clamour to share data even at high bandwith rates. Skour, is looking to capitalize on that idea, but allow consumers to save a bit of money by contributing to the network and sharing files from their own systems. With server prices skyrocketing, consumers are going to be the only one's who can afford dropbox/box. Look at Skour to hop into the Enterprise space with music sharing putting them on the map.
Kosmo.com
===============
You have this "on-demand" economy starting to really cool off, NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS. It is going to be big. Kosmo.com is a company that delivers anything, when you want it. No one is doing this right now. Older companies like Postmates and Uber have been here for years, and when you need a $5 dolalr sandwhich, where are these guys?. Uber has been doing delivery for so long that it is going to be tough to shut down their lobby. Talk about "Rent Collector", they built a business around monopolizing sharing and delivery. Kosmo.com is pretty unique though, and they have a huge war chest to get it done. A lot of people think that marginless micro transactions won't be able to scale out the volume required to be profitable, but let's remember Uber started as a delivery company.
Apple.com
==================
Apple.com is facing some serious competition from Apple.com.
Now historically both companies have had their hand in a lot of pies.
Apple has some pretty compelling things going for it. They just hired their old CEO. Now running NeXT and Apple it is almost impossible not to draw comparisons with Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. Jobs is poised to continue in the media space with a new media player which is supposedly better than the walkman. Job's also poached the NeXT team and are revamping the macintosh operating system. You are really going to see a return to Apple's roots here. Job's, an engineer, has been designing things from the ground up but his "Aspy" demeanor and liek of salesmanship have crippled the company in the past.
On the other hand you have Apple CEO Tim Cook's long track record to contend with but he is still innovating. You have a traditional guy like Jobs who is only willing to tackle the safe legacy stuff he brought over from NeXT. With a lose cannon like Tim Cook, it is pretty much disruption or bust. His media blitz 2054 was a massive success, and he has maintained a solid image amidst allegations of failure to share credit. The company has really been evolving the CAAS space. Camera as a service is going to be really big. He has been dumping resources into the iPhone camera for a few years, and this is the biggest driving factor of iPhone sales. Outside of a 10x increase in MP and zoom, he has really brought hackers on board by unlocking the "Walled Garden". On stage at CameraCon, he released a 2000MP camera that felt like you were inside the picture it was so good. That level of detail has set them apart of late, from companies tackling the solved problem of security and laten y.
Difficult to tell if Steve Job's fastpaced, borderline reckless product release cycles will be to complex and overengineered for the general public. OTOH, Cook's acquisiton of innovative hardware manufacturer BEATS is in the past, and people are wondering if he can continue to deliver the Mega Pixels customers are demanding.
So 2015 is the year of mySQL, postgrSQL *SQL, .NET. Get ready to port all your Mosaic/Netscape apps over to the Windows Phone because 2015 is the year of the apps.
You truly should write a book about sarcasm, and the book could be written in exactly the same sort of every-single-thing-exact-opposite sarcasm. I would buy this book.
Honestly, really means a lot. I think I will try and do a blog post every now and again because I keep wanting to continue, but HN really isn't the place.
Also, I just got a pretty hefty equity package from a serious business entrepreneur so I don't have a ton of time. You've probably heard of him (rcc9la26d7534400a6a03514c34f9200@reply.craigslist.org). He's got a sure thing in the content discovery business, it's sort of like Mosaic for Google Chrome, but we use the Tinder layout. We launched the MVP in Aberdeen, Saskatchewan Province in Canada[0] and have market penetration of ~5 which is a total and a percentage. We already have more users than there were fatal cougar attacks in North America the previous decade[1] which is the top metric VCs look for.
Thanks though does mean a lot, and we are scaling globally so I can probably hook you with up a DBA position. We're full stack so just basic stuff e.g 5+ Years of Swift, and obviously experience with a robust database framework like Microsoft Access with a google drive caching layer, adobe dreamweaver a big plus.
I couldn't work the joke in about our computatiom engine using godaddy and a ti-83 plus silver edition, so I'll just come out and say it so you know we're serious. Cheers.
> So 2015 is the year of mySQL, postgrSQL *SQL, .NET. Get ready to port all your Mosaic/Netscape apps over to the Windows Phone because 2015 is the year of the apps.
Am I just misreading this or completely uninformed on something, but since when is Wordpress extremely new?
In your child comment, you say "I can see it replacing newer languages like nodeJS, Go and PERL in the future. In the next couple years people will start realizing that the consistency, speed and security offset the lack of communities using it, and I can see it becoming really popular."
Again, I feel like I'm in a time warp, but when have those three things been qualities of PHP? Also, PHP has been huge for years. Node.JS and Go have only recently been taking over.
It seems a little weird to see a company as big as Reddit succumbing the "new and shiny" mentality, though. I guess this is kind of a Reddit side project, but still... I don't get why they're betting everything on such a new framework (an open source one at that: who's going to support it?) when tried and true solutions such as StoryServer are available.
I think the reddit core programmers (Stallman, DHH, Linus Torvalds and Al Gore) have been itching to sink their teeth into something with more depth. StoryServer is a strong offering, but ultimately the team was worried that even though CNET rebranded storyserver from PRISM when they acquired it people would confuse it with the NSA program PRISM (rebranded as Facebook in the US). Totally correct though, I am a little rusty with storyserver and I should pick it back up (we've been using facetime and a sharpie marker as our backend).
Nah, they were just trying to buy the domain for a fair price and not get gouged based on who they are. I totally understand and blame domainers for poisoning the well.
Reddit founders are not beyond lying like that. Astroturfing your service to bootstrap it is a lie just as well. But I guess in both cases there was something good created out of the bad.
There is no consistent style for referring to users here. I've seen people writing Twitter-style @user, Reddit-style /u/user; personally, I usually go with Lisp symbols - 'user :).
School project? The website certainly looks like one. Who wrote those headlines for them? Did they outsource it to a school for the differently mentally-abled?
There was a recent allegation that the Reddit administration had encouraged vote brigading with Tom Hanks' comments: http://i.imgur.com/Obafhpc.png
From the looks of the Upvoted front page, looks like they're doing it as a content marketing strategy, which doesn't bode well. Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors despise.
The top thread on the announcement is a great discussion of why it's so important to us to credit Redditors in every article, which folks seem to appreciate.
As for Tom, here's what I posted on r/defaultmods addressing that concern.
>>
I ran those ads when I learned Tom was using the site.
I did that because for the last few weeks more and more celebrities have been coming on or reaching out to use reddit as members of the community. And we've run sponsored headline to draw attention to it, these ads have been viewed over 14M times in the last couple of weeks without incident. They've also performed exceptionally well (Bill Gates' for instance had 368% higher CTR than average).
+That moment when Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) shows up to compliment your Rebel helmet patch
+Oh, just Bill Gates hanging out on r/infographics
+Lil Dicky drops a new music video, shows up in the comments of r/Music thread
Admittedly, these ads all went up at least 24hrs after the celeb showed up and left, whereas I jumped on the Tom Hanks one as soon as I realized it was happening. We're not going to do that again. Those ads also performed very well (63% higher than site average) but were a really bad look.
To be clear: we're not paying them. They're coming because we're actually making progress showing them the value of joining the community.
Wynter (u/808sandhotcakes) has been doing a lot of great work, by virtue of her great reputation in the industry alone, people are genuinely reaching out to learn how to join the Reddit community. We're excited about that, because it clearly makes our users very happy and by every account the talent enjoys it, too.
edit: (See, I'm already getting better: Arnold + Adam Savage stopped by since Tom and no obnoxious sponsored headlines.)
Hi Alexis, thanks for the clarification regarding the ads.
That said, I still have concerns about the power dynamic. I do see that users are credited for submissions, but Reddit is the one that mostly benefits from it, especially since ads are being run on the site. It's the same concern that people have with BuzzFeed that attribution alone won't solve. (There's also the issue of determining if Original Content on Reddit is actually OC, and that could lead to interesting problems.)
Sure thing. You'll see from the content on Upvoted.com that the OP is usually just the start of the story and we're following up to learn more. e.g., Omari Nyaega
202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop.
We're working on anti-brigading tools. That's on us to get right, because a lot of "brigading" is AKA "how social media works."
It's long been a very fuzzy definition, which is on us (e.g., how is it OK for a celeb to tweet to his followers about an AMA -- it's both "brigading" and "required for verification") and there's a more obvious and negative brigading we can thwart better with technology so that mods have the ability to throttle when, say, one community wants to all pile into a thread and sway it.
> Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors despise.
Primarily because Buzzfeed just copy-pastes content from Reddit with minimal credit. Upvoted at least looks to be providing genuinely improved-upon content with strong attribution linkage. To me, it gets rid of a lot of the scuzzy-ness associated with Buzzfeed, so I'm all for it.
Agreed. This is an 8-word tumblr post stretched out to be an entire "article" of content.
I honestly see no value added with any of the articles I looked at. Every single one could be replaced with links to reddit comments, maybe with some quotes of the reddit comments, and the images down at the bottom.
It's a little less sensationalist than Buzzfeed, and I'd rather look at this than Buzzfeed, but I really don't want to use either of them.
Yeah, definitely kudos for the attribution. That's great to see.
> Primarily because Buzzfeed just copy-pastes content from Reddit with minimal credit.
Well, Reddit itself operates the same way. By the time it gets to Buzzfeed it's already twice removed from the original source (and Buzzfeed REALLY should find and credit where it came from). Redditors constantly take content and rehost it on Imgur sans credit. I'd really love to see Reddit make an effort to incentivize users to credit the source. Some subreddits do, which is good, but I think the site as a whole should.
It always pains me to see someone's photo, art or comic get thousands of upvotes but no link or mention of who actually created the content. Sometimes the creator will see it posted on Reddit and post a comment, but it often gets buried.
Very much so, although I'd perhaps argue Twitter's worse in that regard, with endless "best photos about X" bots happily swiping photos (often scraped from Reddit, sometimes even other such bots), inserting advertising into their streams, and making quite significant money off photographers' work. With Reddit users, it's done without commercial gain.
(Speaking as one who's had their work lifted thusly, particularly this one, "Momentary": https://500px.com/photo/43052792/momentary-by-porsupah-ree. It hurts, especially when there's not even any attribution, let alone any attempt to offer or agree on some modest fee)
Thank you! It's a minor thing, but one of my favorite things about the product is this brilliant widget u/comeforthlazarus came up with -- every article (e.g., this one on suicide survivors[1]) has a widget on the left rail[2] that follows the reader to display the OP, subreddit, and link to it.
> "...it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors despise."
Part of Reddit's weakness is the Redditor mentality. Do I have to adopt their way of thinking, acting, consuming when I sign up? No, but I'm sure a ton of the mainstream is turned off by it.
Want to show some growth numbers? Target users outside of your core demographic. Re-purposed content re-presented for a different audience is a pretty easy way do that.
There are 'meme-storms' -- Libertarianism, getting riled up about finding some 'criminal' them getting riled up about the people getting riled up, and the anti-censorship crusades, etc but I think attributing these things to the hivemind is a mental shortcut that's found way too much purchase.
Yep. People have a strong tendency to take a single example, or small number of examples, and apply it as universal truth to all similar things.
"Redditor mentality", "market believes", "government did"...they are all statements you will see often on Internet forums and offline conversations, but I think they are a clue into the person making those claims.
What exists are many individual actors making decisions; pretending they are an independent, collective, conscious entity is delusional.
--
RE: Redditor mentality
All you saw were a tiny fraction of comments from a tiny fraction of people on a website named reddit.
Are you going to test it on every subreddit or just on the front page? Hint: Reddit is huge, and topical subreddits often form strong communities with little overlap.
Talking about Reddit's hivemind is like talking about European mentality. Just because most of the continent is in the EU, doesn't mean the culture is monolithic.
It exists. Look at just the interface of the site itself. It's ugly and confusing, but if you say it's ugly and confusing, LOL @ U. Everyone knows you have to install RES+Hoverzoom for the real Reddit experience!
> According to Google Ad Planner's estimate, as of May 2013, the median Reddit user is male (59%), 18–29 years of age [0]
A lot of the reason Reddit skews young is the interface, which in turn results in a young-male echochamber.
Ugly? You mean it doesn't follow the latest Flat UI Design® standards where beauty means a lack of differentiation between clickable and not, is mostly text with a predictable layout, and degrades gracefully in the face of no javascript?
..because older-female people can't figure out how links and votes work? Huh?
I don't think you'd be able to substantiate that connection you just made, and what's more, it's quite insulting.
So, the person you responded to said exactly none of that, so feel free to stop exaggerating.
The site really is ugly as sin, with elements you need to interact with hidden all over the place in nonintuitive fashion. Bugs left to languish for months. Dead links on the frontpage for years. Add to that, allowing every single subreddit to redesign everything with their own CSS leads to a highly divisive experience.
A lot of the reason Reddit skews young is the interface, which in turn results in a young-male echochamber.
Do you have another interpretation of this text?
What is absolutely insulting is to imply that women or older people can't handle Reddit's UI, moreso when it's a completely unsubstantiated speculation.
You say "can't handle", I say "don't prefer". Older people are massive consumers of news, yet (as a demographic) are not well-represented in Reddit's userbase. That's not because they're idiots; it's because other sites surface content for them in a far more understandable way, in comparison.
A site experience can be inclusive or exclusive. I'm arguing that it's exclusive.
That's an interesting theory, but what I really want to know is how you prove that. Reddit has a culture that came, in large part, from the founding of the site and the kind of links that people submit (which started out as bots posting stuff at the founder's direction!), which at least superficially, sounds a lot more reasonable than "women and the elderly don't use the site because UI".
Until you express an opinion which certain groups of users don't like, at which point you get downvoted, harassed, brigaded, shadowbanned, and your whole community gets quarantined or banned.
As a fairly old reddit user of 7 years and someone who was on digg before that, this is nothing like what happened to digg. Nobody changed the core site they just bolted an optional extra onto the side to appeal to a different audience. Not got a problem with it whatsoever.
Upvoted.com does not affect Reddit.com -- like, not even developer attention -- we didn't move any Reddit developers off of community/mod tools, infra, or mobile.
digg started to go down when they started doing that. i recall ad space being used for a survey to try to understand if the Rose guy was essential to digg.
now this thing is exactly a copy of what digg become lately.
> Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors despise.
I'll stipulate that some redditors despise buzzfeed, but the population of users is too big for you to be that assertive. I bet you despise it, though, and decided that you are the protoredditor. Am I right?
I have been pretty critical of reddit lately, but there was a time when I really enjoyed using it and it does provide a ton of value to many people. It is a great website in a very difficult situation due to the community culture (very anti-corporate/advertising mentality), diversity of users and content ownership issues. On a real level, the site is pretty awesome. I want to see them succeed because sub-communities and even the organization have stood for an opened internet and positive things.
I think upvoted looks really sleek and I hope it is successful, but they really need a way to monetize and it is a really hard problem to solve. Obviously, using a widely supported mature CMS like wordpress makes it easy to
produce content with minimal effort and cost but that has been reddit users largest gripe. Upvoted is a curator/aggregator built on top of a curator/aggregator, which is weird. Reddit's success and problems stem from providing the long tail of content, allowing diverse topics and communities to be covered while allowing globally popular things to float to the top. This means that there is rarely community consensus, so while upvoted has little risk as it is cheap to make, I can't see it providing much financial support for the company.
In all honesty though, I wish them the best of luck and hope to see them do cool and intersting things in the future. Obviously, improving the search would be a great start because Google is an awesome search engine, but for content discovery and curation, Reddit is doing a great job.
Best of luck guys and sorry about the sarcastic comments about Wordpress and PHP, it really is a good way to quickly test out something like upvoted without significant dev reources and is a good content management system, edit: [if used correctly]
I think the Reddit execs see other aggregators just ripping off things that were popular on Reddit[0] and thinking that they are missing out on a potential revenue source.
Their user base seems to really dislike this move[1], but it seems to be more of an expansion to get users that don't normally use Reddit. I imagine users of Upvoted will be people that would normally use Buzzfeed or 9gag, probably largely disjoint from the actual Reddit community.
To all those saying whether or not current redditors will use it: that's not the point. This is Reddit attempting to use the content users generate on the platform for the 99% of people who don't use Reddit. Call it buzzfeed if you want, an absurd amount of people use buzzfeed.
So long as Reddit and Upvoted are separate, I think it makes a ton of sense.
Thanks. Yep, they're separate, but based on the success of the Upvoted podcast and newsletter over this year, we definitely see the potential of upvoted.com to be a gateway to get new users into Reddit. One reason why, for instance, we have a link to a comment section on r/upvoted at the bottom of every article (each Upvoted.com gets automatically submitted to r/upvoted upon posting).
Yo Alexis - was the main logic behind starting this the fact that so many other sites are using Reddit UGC to drive their content machines (and thus revenues)?
Oops, I did see that first but my initial uncaffeinated impression was that it was the intro for advertisers rather than users, what with the open rates and the click throughs and the numbers.
One the more entertaining/interesting things about original subreddit content is that it often gets fleshed out, corrected (occasionally to a full 180˚) and otherwise improved by further contributions. I'm curious how upvoted deals with that. Perhaps your editor could do an AMA sometime after things settle down post-launch.
That's the idea behind it. Though Buzzfeed actually have a news branch with actual journalists behind it based in west-coast & east-coast. I was interviewed by a couple of them and it was a pleasant experience. I don't know if upvoted is planning on hiring journalists on staff. May be Alexis can tell us more here.
Seems like they do have journalists* on staff, according to Alexis, in these comments.
* "202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop." Is what he said earlier in the comments, I'm sure he'll clarify if I've gotten anything wrong.
Is this Reddit trying to take itself more seriously? It's almost like a mask layer to obfuscate the hive mind. I'm curious how the content is created, how something is featured, etc.
It's a way to follow up on stories that bubble up on Reddit's frontpages and give them more depth. 202M+ people can do a great job surfacing and discussing content in real-time, but our awesome editor, Vickie, and her team can do a much more effective job following up on those stories, interviewing, and adding more substance.
Then a week later a photo of the guy (now with a job) topped on r/pics again and a random redditor linked to our story to provide context for everyone on the thread:
Internet now is only about the moment. The momentum sometimes last less than a second.Transform those seconds, in a story, could be useful and remarkable. I hope you succeed.
Content curated for upvoted.com is based on the most upvoted stories on reddit[1].
As for what is featured and where on the homepage is probably based on editorial choices as well as most viewed post.
No. Trending articles are determined by traffic and not salable. When we do have a sponsored post on upvoted.com (just like on reddit.com) it's clearly marked as sponsored.
So this feels like a way of obfuscating comments and some of the less appealing aspects of the reddit community, while turning it into a buzzfeed style community. It feels like a prettier version of http://thisisthe.link/
Every article posted to upvoted.com gets submitted to http://reddit.com/r/upvoted with a link at the bottom of said article.
We were not going to put facebook comments an DEFINITELY not going to take devs away from all the work they've been doing on mod/community tools (http://reddit.com/r/modnews), alien blue, and infrastructure.
Looks nice, functions nicely, I can see what they are doing but it's just not for me. Content appears pretty shallow at a brief browse through it all, buzzfeed esque.
Agreed. But from what I see through my social media, a large majority love the shallow content. Instagram is filled with highly-followed users that just repost curated reddit content (fuckjerry, thefatjewish, etc), it's obviously filling a large niche.
We're not trying to be first with a cheap quick post (Reddit.com is always going to be faster than any newsroom anyway) and I'm really excited about the vision Vickie (editor) has for longer-form features like this one.
I feel that normal Reddit users are going to hate this for the most part because it does a lot of the same things that BuzzFeed does in that it takes content from Reddit presents it in a somewhat dumbed-down, clickbait way. However, I don't think this is a problem. Upvoted is not supposed to be for Redditors, it's supposed to be for a different audience who isn't yet ready for Reddit. It's going to capture at least some of the traffic that usually lands on other clickbait sites which take content from Reddit, and it's going to allow them to monetize.
Publications like BuzzFeed have been making money off of Reddit's content, or at least content discovered on Reddit, for years. Makes sense Reddit would want to capture some of that value.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that Reddit would be much better off as a dontation-based non-profit. It seems ethical that nobody should make money off of user-generated content except the users are compensated for their time (which is unpractical); at least not beyond what’s necessary to keep the system up and running and occasionally add handy features to it. I bet the amount of time it takes to develop and run Reddit fades in face of the collective amount of time there is spent on creating and curating content by millions of people. I’m actually surprised that none of the comments here are touching on this point.
Nice. The thing I don't like about Reddit itself is that it's hard to find what each article is actually about, and most of the time it's some in-jokey/meme-y stuff I wouldn't have bothered with if I'd been able to see even one image or quote. Finding quality content there is hard; if I wanted to spend that much time separating wheat from chaff I might as well try Google+. Upvoted looks like a much more accessible way to get some light reading/entertainment done. Good idea, and AFAICT so far a good implementation.
Here's a question I have; reddit is full of liars. What efforts are the Upvoted staff making to verify stuff that appears on reddit before bringing it over to Upvoted?
they will do nothing, because they are not journalists.
"The newsletter has hundreds of thousands of subscribers that wake up each Sunday to enjoy a curated digest in their inbox. Last month, we started posting original content directly to r/upvoted, including an interview with the guy handing out his resume at Busch Stadium. The subreddit amassed its highest traffic with over 700,000 unique visitors. With Upvoted, editorial, original video, podcasts, and graphic art have a place to thrive and tell Reddit’s tales in the most creative ways possible." -- http://www.redditblog.com/2015/10/introducing-upvoted-reddit...
it is nothing more than a pretty RSS feed with a little curation and images, linking to all the lies that are business as usual on reddit.
I said this in another comment, but based on what Alexis said here, it seems like there might actually be staffers (reporters) doing additional research into the stories as they appear on upvoted.com.
I’m not sure what this site is supposed to be for: Is it (a) to generate more ad revenue for reddit to be finally self-sustaining or (b) an attempt to come up to the expectations of Reddit's VC shareholders (i.e. a separate startup to generate more revenue than necessary for self-sustenance).
Can't really like this, but at least it has the virtue of containing the kind of stuff that happened to digg.
Whatever happens, I'm really with reddit in light of all the controversies that surrounded it. I really have a high esteem of community driven websites who can be user-oriented and still grow and attract more users. It's not an easy task. I'm sure there must be some kind of game theory around it if you want to keep it going. Making balanced rules for such a website might be no easy thing.
Some call it "plebeian" but I think it's still a very good website if you don't focus too much on the default subreddits. I will never be able to wrap my head around the 4chan UI, even if it has an attractive community.
It's interesting to me that between this and Apple's news app that we're steering to a less-social-engagement centric model for news presentation. One new way to save myself from looking at the comments.
I can't quite put my finger on it but this feels like one of them websites someone will share on Facebook and I'll tell Facebook never to show me anything from that domain again. I'm sure those sites are making lots of money though and are getting shared because people like them, so they'll probably do way better with it than I expect.
Never sure what the point of having it as a PDF is apart from being able to print it nicely which has got to be a minority, especially considering it's thick and colourful.
I wanted to do something cool with it but never did. Then one day I got an email from an assistant of Alexis Ohanian's asking to sell it cheap for his little school project :P
I knew he was just trying to avoid being gouged, so I offered to sell it to Alexis for his initial asking price, if he'd give me a meeting and some feedback on my startup. He agreed and we had a good meeting. He gave my co-founder and I some genuinely usable advice, and technically funded our bootstrapped startup (https://portal.cloud) for a few weeks there.