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Use Your Open Source Skills To Help Reddit
By Dan Morrill
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-06-20
Reddit has opened up its code base to the public at large in an effort to help take on other social networking systems.
While Reddit in its use is often difficult to understand from a social engineering perspective how or even why it functions the way that it does, if you have an abject need to fix something as inexplicably broken as reddit, then this is your chance to hone your open source skills.
Digg is the monster social news sharing networking site, and Reddit has given them an ok run for the time they have been on line, as shown in the last years worth of compete scores. If Reddit stands a chance of being relevant, this move into the open source community might be the one thing that saves them from the social news networking obscurity that they run under sometimes.
So far no one has the level of traffic that digg has, going through the compete scores, even Slashdot, which has the ability to crush a site with visitors (see graph below) to take on Digg.
We've always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and this is the next logical step. When we say 'open-source' we mean specifically that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download, and we're inviting the public to submit code to help improve the site. Reddit is unique in the social news scene in that we have a huge community of developers. It seems only natural that we give you all in that community a chance to contribute back to reddit and make it a better place for everyone. We know reddit's success has less to do with our technology than it does with you, our community, and now we want to let our community improve our technology. Source: code.reddit.com In all this might be the one thing that helps reddit take on Digg and bring in more users. There are some immediate things that really need to be taken care of, so my wish list for anyone working on reddit programming is: - Fix the whole voting thing, this is the worst voting up down system ever, if you look at the competition, digg, mixx, and even open source pligg it is all numbers, numbers work, up down arrows with a number just does not work. Give in to the competition on this one.
- Have a much better preview area for up and coming articles, don't care how this is done, but if you submit an article, you want to know it just didn't end up in your private book marks in Reddit, but that other people are going to see it, and vote on it.
- Much better integration with Blogging systems, you need a Reddit voting button just like Digg, everyone needs this except for stumbleupon, and they have a toolbar that you can download. Don't care how reddit does this, toolbar or voting widget, but please make one.
- Much better spam control - sorry folks, every social networking site gets hit with spam, need better controls on this one.
- Better categories, this way people who submit make sure that it gets into the right box or right category; a neat thing would be the ability for users to propose that the article be in one or more categories, it is sometimes very hard to vote on a bittorrent article, is this news, entertainment, junk?
While you don't have to listen to this, there is a real chance of making reddit into something much cooler than the disaster that it is to use now. Getting the whole open source programming model will help out. Listen to your users (even me, and I hate reddit), listen to the programmers, and just go change the world. If anything this is the best move in social news voting in a long time, maximize this puppy.
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About the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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