reddit experiment

My reddit experiment is going very well. I'll have a full report on it once I have put together all of my observations. Suffice to say that I think this is the key to a better model for a link aggregation community, which may serve as the future dominant paradigm for the web.

Roses

Roses
Originally uploaded by spifbv.

These are the roses my daughter wanted for Valentine's day. We were a little reluctant to get them at first, but we were in the middle of Trader Joe's and she was very insistent in that way that only 4 year old daughters can be. My wife improvised a vase out of a plastic jar that previously held pretzel rods. They are still beautiful and really brighten up the kitchen. I'm not a big flower person but these are really nice to have around, especially because my daughter likes them so much.

How To Conquer Reddit

I'm the biggest karma gainer on reddit today and this week! I WIN! I WIN! W00T!

Ahem. OK, so anyway, my method is simple. Go here. Click on a link. Then click your reddit bookmarklet to submit the link (if it hasn't already been submitted - most of the best ones will already have been submitted unless you get lucky). Enter a good title (see previous blog post for ideas on that). Rinse and repeat until you rule the world.

If that doesn't work, go here and do the same thing.

Rock on and be righteous to each other, my reddit brethren.

Ben and Alice: Eliminating dupes from reddit

Ben and Alice: Eliminating dupes from reddit

More reddit meta-foo. Good stuff.

Sledding With My Daughter - a photoset on Flickr

Sledding With My Daughter

Still smiling.

I Am The Complete Anatomy of a Geek

I live this.

Well, close enough anyway.

Just ask my wife.

(Note the conspicuous lack of linkage. If you have anything to ask her, just post a comment here.)

The Cringeometer

The Cringeometer for scientists, developed by Scott Aaronson at the University of Waterloo, is truly a great invention.

Now we just need one for sysadmins, one for programmers, and so forth.

I'll definitely start brainstorming on the System Administrator Cringeometer right away.

Das Analysis: More About The Reddit Model And The Future Of The Web

OK, hubristic enough title for you? Just trying to post reddit style ;-)

Yesterday, I made my first post about reddit. It was received with a warm thud on reddit itself, in terms of the score. But it did elicit some interesting comments and suggestions which I have been thinking about.

Then today, Ben of Ben and Alice posted part of what was missing from my misguided rant. His points are very valid, he expresses them much better than I could have, and for some insane reason he actually gathered evidence to back them up! So you should read what he has to say, and probably look at the reddit post linking to his and the attendant comments, before continuing.

OK, now that you've read that (if you haven't, then DO IT NOW! IT'S NOT A TUMAH!), the first thing I want to touch on is the headline factor. As redditor rnichols so wisely pointed out in a comment on the reddit posting of the link to my original blog post, the "killer headline" is very important in determining the success of a reddit post. So what makes a killer headline in the context of reddit posting? The fourth question on the reddit FAQ, about getting your submissions noticed, is a good start to figuring this out. The only truly important thing I could add to this is: don't change the original title just because you can. If it is clear, concise and sounds interesting when you read it out loud (ideally to a geek audience), go with it.

Now, to be clear, in case you didn't look at all of the comments on my original reddit post: I was wrong about a few things. Not the least of which is that all reddit votes are equal, which in retrospect would have been revealed by taking more than a cursory glance at the hot section and comparing the scores and recentness of posts in relation to their ranking. It's obvious that while the post with the most votes isn't necessarily the top ranked because of its relative lack of freshness, votes with roughly the same freshness are ordered by the their scores. There is probably just some simple algebra going on in the Python code to sort these into their respective slots.

Which brings us to the filtering system. The question is, how exactly does it work? The speculation is that it only looks at things like keywords and URLs. If so, then as Ben so eloquently points out, that isn't good enough. It should at least be collaborative, like the Amazon or Netflix or TiVo systems, and figure out what you would like or dislike based on what other people with similar tastes and interests say they like or dislike. This would be a "killer app" feature to put into reddit. But it would not be easy to implement or maintain. It would cost a lot of developer time and system resources.

So here's the question: will reddit do this? If so, they could implement the same basic approach to handle comments, and they could probably apply the same general methodology to determining how to rank posts in the hot section. The way that would work, as I see it, would basically be to create a recommendation filter for reddit as a whole, with freshness as an added variable in the calculation.

And as I mentioned in my first post on this, if they don't do it, who will? Perhaps Digg, or Newsvine, or even Google? I'm rooting for reddit because they are a cool, sleek upstart in this field. But we all know how that story can turn out. Let's just hope reddit is Cinderella and the future is holding a glass slipper.

Newsvine beta invitations

By the way, I have 20 invitations to the Newsvine beta, so if you want one send an e-mail to newsvinebeta at spif.com with your e-mail address and link(s) to samples of your blogging or other online writing.

What’s missing from slashdot, digg, reddit, and others?

What’s missing from slashdot, digg, reddit, and others? is another good take on social news sites.

Reddit As An Attention Economy

This was also posted on my Newsvine column, but they're still in beta so you can't see it there right now.

I'd like to talk about how reddit behaves as an attention economy.

I was surprised to find that there is no Wikipedia article on "attention economy", but I'll define it as this: A system in which the service of spreading ideas, and generating interest in them, is treated as a currency. Attention economies have existed for a long time as components of larger economic systems, but advancements in information technology have made it possible for more people than ever before to be on the supply side of the equation.

Reddit is one of a new crop of social news sites. It was founded in the summer of 2005 by two graduates of the University of Virginia. It received funding from Y Combinator and has been associated with programmer and author Paul Graham. Originally it was written in a dialect of Lisp, but late in 2005 it was rewritten in Python. The flavor of the reddit community has been influenced by these beginnings: a number of regular users are programmers and Lisp afficionados.

Reddit works as an attention economy in the following way: it allows registered users (also called redditors), who pay no fee for membership in the community, to post any URL they wish with any headline they choose. These posts first go into the newest submissions section of the site. They are listed here by order of submission, with the 25 most recent posts listed by default. Registered users, when logged in, can set the number of posts they see on a single page. There are navigation links to move through the rankings in each section.

Each post is given a score. The score is listed along with the poster-supplied headline of the post which links to the provided URL, the internet domain name associated with the URL, the login ID of the user who submitted it and the relative time of posting rounded to minutes, hours or days. Next to each post is also an up arrow and a down arrow associated with that post. When a registered user is logged in, and they click on one of these arrows, they give the post a vote. Clicking the up arrow gives a positive vote, called a "like", and clicking the down arrow gives a negative vote called a "dislike". The base value of each post's score is 0. However, when a post is submitted, the user who submitted it automatically gives it a "like" vote.

Not all "like" and "dislike" votes have the same value. When users give a post a positive score (more "like" than "dislike" the post), it increases a value associated with the user who submitted that post. This value is called karma, which may be in homage to Slashdot, one of the first major news discussion sites on the web. The value of a vote is based on the karma score of the user who gives the vote - users with more karma have more influential votes.

However, the sum of the actual value of the votes given to a post is not displayed in the reddit interface. Only the sum of the positive and negative votes is shown. This sum is used to determine the post's effect on the poster's karma, but not its ranking in the most important reddit section - the "hot" section.

The "hot" section serves as the front page for reddit, and unregistered visitors to the site will first see the posts which are ranked in the top 25 of that section. But the total value of a post's votes is only one part of the calculation used to determine what posts will end up in this coveted position. The other factor is the freshness value of the post, which is determined by how recently it was submitted. There may be other factors involved, but these two are the most obvious.

So as a result of this design, a typical reddit post follows this life cycle:

1. Submitted
   
2. Posted in new submissions section
   
3. Given positive and/or negative votes ("likes" and "dislikes")
   
4. Value of the post's votes reaches a certain threshold while it still retains its freshness - post ends up in the hot section, OR
   
5. Post's ranking in the new submissions section falls as more posts are submitted, and its value does not reach the required threshold while it is still fresh. Post is forgotten and neglected, though still retained in the reddit database.
   

There is a third section entitled top all-time which lists posts ranked solely by their value, with no consideration for freshness. A post might slowly but surely end up in this section even if it loses its chance at hotness. But this is unlikely as most posts do not garner enough attention, and therefore votes, to reach this point after dropping off the top rankings in the new submissions section without making it to the hot section.

In this way, the chance of a post reaching the hot section depends on the usage patterns of reddit users. The most influential redditors are those who:

• Frequently visit the new submissions section
  
• Aggressively vote for or against posts, and possibly even
  
• Campaign for or against a post using established channels outside of the reddit system, such as:
  
  
  
  • Chat
    
  • Blogs
    
  • E-mail
    
  • Phone
    
  • Face to face
    
  
  

Posts which attract the attention of these influential redditors are the most likely to reach the hot section. Once they have made it into the upper rankings of the section, other less influential users will frequently attach themselves to the growth trend of a post and drive it higher in the rankings, so that it may approach or even reach the number one ranking, the most coveted of all prizes for the submitting redditor. The most successful redditors are listed in the stats section, which is - perhaps intentionally -- similar to the top scores section of a video game. In this way, reddit feeds on the same factors that motivate gamers to get a top score, which in turn are the things that drive many people to seek recognition and acclaim in various aspects of life.

One question which remains to be asked is, how does reddit plan to make money? Advertising is certainly the simplest and most proven way. If sufficient value is provided by the information contained in posted links combined with the ranking of those links by the community, then another possibility is paid registrations. However, this is not likely to work for the main reddit site since much of the value is dependent upon the openness of participation. But the creation of a not safe for work version of reddit opens up the possibility that customized versions of reddit could provide sufficient value for a particular niche of users to justify paid registration. At the very least this would allow for targeted advertising opportunities, or even co-branded or third-party-branded versions of reddit addressed to particular audiences.

In conclusion I would say that it seems inevitable that some version of this approach, implemented by reddit and/or others, will constitute a significant part of the future shape of news - and of online community.

30 Boxes has no reminders? OMFGWTFBBQ!

30 Boxes is a cool new web2.0 calendar system. It's now available to the public.

It has no ability to send you reminders. This is an "upcoming feature". They hope to have nightly reminder e-mails.

WTF?

Google needs to solve this problem once and for all. Stop the floodtide of half-baked lame-ass attempts at web 2.0 calendaring. Can someone send me Larry and/or Sergey's cell number? Thanks in advance.

The Many Directions of Time

Alex Mayer of Stanford has written a book entitled The Many Directions of Time, to be published this year, in which he will lay out a new theory of time. His personal web site contains presentations and papers that outline this theory, which he summarizes like this:

The lectures are based on a single underlying idea that drove the insights they contain: that time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime. While this may seem very esoteric, it is actually quite simple.

Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat, which meant they thought that gravity pointed in the same direction everywhere. Today, we think of that as a silly idea, but at the same time, most people today (including most scientists) still think of spacetime as if it were a big box with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. So, like gravity for a flat Earth, the single time dimension for the 'big box universe' points in one direction, from the Big-Bang into the future. A lot of lip service is given to the idea of "curved spacetime", but the simplistic 3+1 'box' remains the dominant concept of what cosmic spacetime is like.

Imagine that 'the arrow of time' in the Universe, like gravity on Earth, is pretty much the same everywhere, yet also different everywhere relative to everywhere else. That means that the 'arrow of time' points in different directions in spacetime depending on where you are, so time has a geometry just like space has a geometry. The novel idea that there are an infinite number of time dimensions in the Universe revolutionizes gravitational theory and much of modern science with it. A number of outstanding scientific mysteries are definitively solved, including observations that lead to the concepts of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter'. You will know what these are after you read the lectures.

No Fluff Just Stuff - Gateway Software Symposium

I'd love to go to this symposium, but it costs $725. Anyone want to sponsor me? :-)