Timeline of Reddit

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This is a timeline of Reddit, an entertainment, social networking, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially an online bulletin board system.

Big picture

Time period Key developments at Reddit
2005 In the beginning, Reddit's creators help seed Reddit with numerous fake accounts.[1]
2006 Apart from "reddit.com", "NSFW" is the most popular subreddit at the beginning of 2006. "Programming" becomes the second most popular subreddit for most of the year. Then by the end of the year, "science" gets launched and soon becomes the third most popular subreddit.[2]
2007 For most of the year, "science" and "programming" are the most popular subreddits (apart from "reddit.com"). They then get displaced by "politics" as the most popular non-"reddit.com" subreddit towards the end of the year.[2]
2008 This year is dominated by the launch of numerous new subreddits. By the end of the year (except for a short-lived blip following the 2008 Presidential election), no one subreddit (not even "reddit.com") would capture more than 50% of Reddit's attention. From the beginning of 2008 (to at least the end of 2012), there is a continual exponential increase in the number of unique subreddits people submitted to each week.[2][3]
mid-2010 Reddit overtakes Digg in search popularity.
2010–2012 From the beginning to the end of 2010 (and following Reddit's move to Amazon AWS servers in November 2009), Reddit more than triples in pageviews and bandwidth count.[4] By February 2011,[5] reddit reached 1 billion page-views per month. Within a year (by January 2012), Reddit again doubled in pageviews and reached 2 billion pageviews per month.[6]
2010–2012 Top-level content on Reddit transitions from majority text-based to majority image-based. On January 1, 2010, 27/100 of the top posts were images. By January 1, 2012, 77/100 of the top posts were images.[3]
2012–2014 Reddit achieves 37 billion pageviews in 2012, 56 billion pageviews in 2013, and 71.25 billion pageviews in 2014. Yishan Wong serves as Reddit's CEO from March 2012 to November 2014. Wong is replaced by Ellen Pao in November 2014. By September 2014, Reddit raises $50 million in funding in a Series B round, and makes its first app acquisition in October 2014.
2014–2016 On July 10, 2015 Pao resigned as CEO and was replaced by Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman.

Full timeline

Year Month and date Event type Details
2005 June Company Reddit is founded in Medford, Massachusetts by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It raises $100k in seed funding from Y Combinator.[7]
2005 Late year Product Reddit merges with Aaron Swartz's company Infogami.[7]
2005 December Product Reddit adds commenting.[8]
2006 October 18 Community /r/science launches.[9]
2006 October Company Condé Nast (the publisher) acquires Reddit for less than $20 million. Team moves to San Francisco.[10]
2007 January Team Aaron Swartz is fired.[11]
2008 January Product Reddit decides to let users create their own custom reddits, or subreddits.[12][13]
2008 March 19 Community r/MensRights is created.[14]
2008 June Product Reddit becomes open-source.[15][16]
2009 January Community One of the most popular subreddits, "IAmA" (I am a), is created. Many famous people would proceed to participate in AmAs (Ask me Anything) from the community.[17]
2009 October Team Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman leave reddit. Steve Huffman helps form Hipmunk, and Alexis helps form Breadpig.[18][19]
2009 November Product Reddit decommissions its last physical servers and moves its hosting to Amazon Web Services.[20]
2009 late in year Product The online gift exchange Redditgifts runs for the first time.[21]
2010 June 7 Product Reddit launches a revamped mobile interface featuring rewritten CSS, a new color scheme, and a multitude of improvements.[22]
2010 July Product Reddit introduces Reddit Gold, in order to help raise more money for the site.[23][24]
2010 July Product The Reddit Enhancement Suite is released.
2010 July 21 Product Reddit outsourced the Reddit search engine to Flaptor, who used its search product IndexTank.[25]
2011 June 20 Community Alexander Rhodes creates the NoFap subreddit, r/NoFap.[26]
2011 September Company Reddit becomes operationally independent of Condé Nast. Reddit is now free to hire a CEO, pick out an ad sales team and figure out its own route to profitability.[27][28]
2011 October Community The jailbait subreddit comes to wider attention outside Reddit when Anderson Cooper condemned the subreddit and criticizes Reddit for hosting it. Following this negative news coverage (and the actual posting of the image of an underage girl), Reddit closes "jailbait".[29]
2011 October Community Reddit closes "reddit.com" and expands its number of default subreddits to 20.[30]
2012 January Community Reddit announces that it will start a 12-hour sitewide blackout protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act.[31][32]
2012 March Team Yishan Wong, a former Facebook employee and PayPal Mafia member, becomes Reddit CEO.[33][34]
2012 April 28 The Reddit serial killer hoax is perpetrated by class members of "Lying about the past", a course taught at George Mason University by T. Mills Kelly. The hoax – about an alleged serial killer named Joseph Scafe – is first debunked in just over an hour after being launched on Reddit.[35][36]
2012 August Community, Publicity Barack Obama does an AmA on Reddit. The increased traffic shut down much of the site.[37][38]
2013 April Community, Publicity Members of subreddit "findbostonbombers" wrongly identify a number of people as suspects in the Boston Bombings, including a missing Brown University student.[39]
2014 January 8 Community Mother Jones publishes a story describing the sale of guns on the site. The report suggests that sellers are doing so to exploit a loophole in U.S. federal law.[40] Nearly 100 AR-15s were engraved with the Reddit logo as part of licensing deal made with the page in 2011.[41]
2014 January Community American chemist Nathan Allen begins the /r/science AMA series with the goal of raising the visibility of scientists who are producing groundbreaking work in their fields but who are not well known outside of their fields.[42][43]
2014 February Company Reddit announces it will donate 10% of its annual ad revenue to non-profits voted among by its users.[44]
2014 June Community The "beatingwomen" subreddit is closed by Reddit administrators. The community, which featured graphic depictions of violence against women, is banned after its moderators are found to be sharing users' personal information online, and collaborating to protect one another from sitewide bans. Following the ban, the community's founder would reboot the subreddit under the name "beatingwomen2" in an attempt to circumvent the ban.[45][46]
2014 July Community Ben Eisenkop's Reddit account Unidan is banned from Reddit for using alternate (or "sockpuppet") accounts to upvote his own posts and downvote posts by other users that were either attracting attention away from his own or downvote posts from people he was arguing with.[47][48][49]
2014 August Publicity Reddit users begin sharing a large number of naked celebrity photos on the subreddit "TheFappening" in the 2014 celebrity pictures hack. Reddit closes TheFappening a month later.[50]
2014 September Company Reddit raises $50 million in funding in a Series B round, led by Sam Altman. Also participating in the round: Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, Snoop Dogg, and Yishan Wong. Reddit plans its own cryptocurrency to give back to the community (later known as "reddit notes").[51][52]
2014 September Product An official mobile application for browsing AMA (Ask Me Anything) threads is released for the iOS and Android platforms under the name Ask me Anything.[53]
2014 October Company Reddit acquires Alien Blue as its first official mobile app.[54]
2014 November Team Yishan Wong resigns as Reddit CEO. Ellen Pao becomes interim CEO and cofounder Alexis Ohanian returns to Reddit and becomes executive chairman.[55][56]
2014 December 18 Community Reddit takes the unusual step of banning a subreddit; it bans "SonyGOP", which was being used to distribute hacked Sony files.[57]
2015 April 1 Community The Button, a social experiment, is introduced in a post to the official Reddit blog.[58]
2015 May Community Reddit introduces an anti-harassment policy. It intends to rely on users to report bad actors in the community.[59]
2015 May Product Reddit announces Reddit Video.[60]
2015 June 10 Community Reddit bans five subreddits, citing an anti-harassment policy.[61][62] The largest of the banned subreddits, "fatpeoplehate," had an estimated 151,000 subscribers at the times of its banning.[61] The other four subreddits are "hamplanethatred," "transfags," "neofag," and "shitniggerssay."[61]
2015 June 27 Community /r/The_Donald is created.
2015 June–July Team Reddit bans multiple subreddits and fires Victoria Taylor, the site's director of talent, who has served on the Reddit team since 2013. Taylor served as a liaison between the moderators of specific subreddits (such as IAmA) and Reddit itself, helping organize and verify interviewees for Reddit's user-led "AmA" sessions. As a result of this and other frustrations with Reddit—such as its moderation tools and its new conduct under Pao—numerous subreddits (such as IAmA, todayilearned, pics and science) temporarily shut themselves down in protest.[63] Subsequently to these and other recent events a petition asking Pao to step down as CEO reaches over 160,000 signatures.[64] On July 10, 2015, Pao resigns and is replaced by cofounder Steve Huffman as CEO.[65]
2015 August 18 Team Reddit hires Marty Weiner, Founding Engineer at Pinterest, as its first Chief Technology Officer.[66]
2015 September Product Reddit launches Upvoted, a news site that digs out interesting content from reddit, but without enabling commenting.[67]
2015 December 15 Product Reddit announces that it is shutting down reddit.tv.[68]
2016 April Product In April 2016, Reddit launches a new blocking tool in an attempt to curb online harassment. The tool allows a user to hide posts and comments from selected redditors in addition to blocking private messages from those redditors.[69] The option to block a redditor is done by clicking a button in the inbox.
2016 May Controversy Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says on an interview at the TNW Conference that, unlike Facebook, which "only knows what [its users are] willing to declare publicly", Reddit knows its users' "dark secrets"[70][71][72] at the same time that the website's "values" page is updated in regards to its "privacy" section. The video reaches the top of the website's main feed.[72][73] Shortly thereafter, announcements concerning new advertisement content would draw criticism on the website.[74][75]
2016 November 23 A member of a subreddit dedicated to Donald Trump, /r/The_Donald, posts evidence indicating that Reddit administrators had modified multiple user comments inside the subreddit.[76]
2016 November 24 Community The Washington Post reports Reddit has banned the "Pizzagate" conspiracy board from their site stating it violated their policy of posting personal information of others, triggering a wave of criticism from users on r/The_Donald, a popular pro-Trump subreddit, who felt the ban amounted to censorship.[77]
2017 February Community Reddit bans the altright forum for violating its terms of service, more specifically for attempting to share personal information about the man who attacked alt-right figure Richard Spencer.[78][79] The forum's users and moderators accuse Reddit administrators of having political motivations for the ban.[80][81]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Derek Mead (June 21, 2012). "How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts". Motherboard.vice.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Matt Essert (January 12, 2014). "Here's the Cool Graph Reddit Fans Should Show Haters Who Still Claim It's Not a Legit News Site". Mic.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Randal Olsen (March 12, 2013). "Retracing the evolution of Reddit through post data". Randalolson.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  4. ↑ "2010, we hardly knew ye : blog". Reddit.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  5. ↑ Mike Schiraldi (February 2, 2011). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: reddit: billions served". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  6. ↑ Erik Martin (January 2, 2012). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: 2 Billion & Beyond". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Seth Fiegerman (December 3, 2014). "Aliens in the valley: The complete and chaotic history of Reddit". Mashable.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  8. ↑ Steve Huffman (December 12, 2005). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: comments!". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  9. ↑ "/r/science". Reddit. Retrieved February 8, 2017. 
  10. ↑ Michael Arrington (October 31, 2006). "Breaking News: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Reddit". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  11. ↑ Philipp Lenssen (May 7, 2007). "A Chat with Aaron Swartz". Blogoscoped.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  12. ↑ Alexis Ohanian (March 2008). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: make your own reddit". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  13. ↑ Mark Hendrickson (June 22, 2008). "Reddit". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  14. ↑ "moderators - r/MensRights". Reddit. Retrieved March 3, 2017. History of r/MensRights: r/MensRights was created on March 19, 2008. 
  15. ↑ Steve Huffman (June 2008). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: reddit goes open source". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  16. ↑ Erick Schonfeld (June 18, 2008). "Update: Reddit Tries To Compete the Open-Source Way". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  17. ↑ Alexis C. Madrigal (January 2014). "AMA: How a Weird Internet Thing Became a Mainstream Delight – The Atlantic". Theatlantic.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  18. ↑ Alexis Ohanian (October 2009). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: Fare Thee Well, reddit!". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  19. ↑ Michael Arrington (September 1, 2010). "Reddit Cofounder Alexis Ohanian To Join Y Combinator". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  20. ↑ Jeremy Edberg (November 2009). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: Moving to the cloud". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  21. ↑ Rachel Feltman (July 12, 2013). "How Redditgifts is making money on altruism". Quartz. Retrieved March 2, 2017. 
  22. ↑ "A better mobile Reddit for all". Reddit. June 9, 2010. Retrieved July 29, 2010. 
  23. ↑ Mike Schiraldi (July 2010). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: reddit needs help". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  24. ↑ Angela West (July 30, 2015). "Reddit Introduces Gold Service to Keep Site Running Smoothly". Techi.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  25. ↑ "Reddit Blog post announcing the use of IndexTank search engine". 
  26. ↑ "moderators - r/NoFap". Reddit. Retrieved March 3, 2017. created by Alexanderr: a community for 5 years (Mon Jun 20 23:46:08 2011 UTC) 
  27. ↑ Erik Martin (September 6, 2011). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: Independence". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  28. ↑ David Carr (September 2, 2012). "Reddit Thrives Under Hands-Off Policy of Advance Publications". The New York Times. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  29. ↑ Kevin Morris (October 10, 2011). "Reddit shuts down teen pics section". Dailydot.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  30. ↑ Fernando Alfonso III (November 2, 2014). "The war over Reddit's front page". Kernelmag.dailydot.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  31. ↑ reddit admins (January 2012). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: Stopped they must be; on this all depends.". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  32. ↑ Paul Tassi (January 11, 2012). "Reddit's SOPA Blackout Admirable, But Google and Facebook Must Follow". Forbes. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  33. ↑ Yishan Wong (March 2012). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: New reddit CEO reporting for duty". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  34. ↑ Rip Empson (March 8, 2012). "Meet Reddit's New CEO: Facebook Alum / Quora Star Yishan 'Sparklepants' Wong". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  35. ↑ Yoni Appelbaum (May 15, 2012). "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit". The Atlantic. Retrieved May 17, 2012. 
  36. ↑ "HatesRedditors comments on Opinions: "Please, Reddit. Do you think my 'Uncle' Joe was just weird or possibly a serial killer?"". Reddit.com. 2012-04-28. Retrieved 2012-07-20. 
  37. ↑ reddit admins (August 2012). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: POTUS IAMA Stats". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  38. ↑ Katie Rogers (August 29, 2012). "Barack Obama surprises internet with Ask Me Anything session on Reddit". The Guardian. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  39. ↑ Alyson Shontell (July 2013). "Reddit Wrongly Accuses Sunil Tripathi of Boston Bombing – Business Insider". Businessinsider.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  40. ↑ Follman, Mark (8 January 2014). "How Reddit Became a Gun Market—and Authorized Its Logo on Assault Rifles". Mother Jones. Retrieved 9 January 2014. 
  41. ↑ Nocera, Joe (9 January 2014). "The Gun Report: January 9, 2014". New York Times. Retrieved 9 January 2014. 
  42. ↑ Owens, Simon (7 October 2014). "The World's Largest 2-Way Dialogue between Scientists and the Public". Scientific American. Retrieved 6 May 2016. 
  43. ↑ Allen, Nathan (21 January 2014). "Announcing the /r/science AMA Series". Reddit.com. Retrieved 6 May 2016. 
  44. ↑ Eleanor Goldberg (February 28, 2014). "Reddit To Donate 10 Percent of Ad Revenue To Charity". The Huffington Post. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  45. ↑ Alfonso, Fernando. "Reddit bans infamous forum about beating women". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 10 June 2014. 
  46. ↑ Ongley, Hannah. "Gross Reddit Forum Glorifying Beaten Women Finally Gets Shut Down". Styleite. Styleite LLC. Retrieved 10 June 2014. 
  47. ↑ Koebler, Jason (July 31, 2014). "Reddit's Favorite Scientist Just Got Banned for Cheating the Site". Vice. Retrieved August 2, 2014. 
  48. ↑ Knoblauch, Max (July 31, 2014). "Reddit Bans One of Most Popular Users for Vote Manipulation". Mashable. Retrieved August 2, 2014. 
  49. ↑ https://np.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2c63wg/how_reddit_works/cjcc49i
  50. ↑ Timothy B. Lee (September 8, 2014). "Why Reddit just banned a community devoted to sharing celebrity nudes – Vox". Vox.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  51. ↑ Yishan Wong (September 2014). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: Fundraising for reddit". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  52. ↑ Ben Popper (May 24, 2015). "Reddit gets $50 million in funding and will share 10 percent of that with its users". Theverge.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  53. ↑ "Announcing the official reddit AMA app". 
  54. ↑ Mike Isaac (October 15, 2014). "Reddit Debuts an Official Mobile App". The New York Times. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  55. ↑ Alexis Ohanian (November 2014). "blog.reddit – what's new on reddit: Coming home". Redditblog.com. Retrieved May 24, 2015. 
  56. ↑ Alexia Tsotsis (September 11, 2014). "Reddit CEO Resigns, Alexis Ohanian Returns As Chairman". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  57. ↑ Goldman, David (December 29, 2014). "Reddit takes down Sony hack forum". Retrieved 4 January 2015. 
  58. ↑ "Introduction of the button". Reddit. Retrieved 7 June 2015. 
  59. ↑ Mike Isaac (May 14, 2015). "Reddit Introduces Anti-Harassment Policy". The New York Times. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  60. ↑ Ryan Lawler (May 6, 2015). "Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Announces Reddit Video at Disrupt NY". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved May 29, 2015. 
  61. ↑ 61.0 61.1 61.2 Robertson, Adi. "Reddit bans 'Fat People Hate' and other subreddits under new harassment rules". The Verge. Retrieved 10 June 2015. 
  62. ↑ THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. "Reddit Removes 5 Groups After Creating Harassment Policy". Business Day. New York Times. Retrieved 10 June 2015. 
  63. ↑ Wired Staff. "Reddit Is Revolting". Wired.com. Retrieved July 3, 2015. 
  64. ↑ Sifferlin, Alexandra (July 6, 2015). "More Than 160,000 Sign Petition for Reddit Chief's Ouster". TIME. Retrieved July 6, 2015. 
  65. ↑ Newcomer, Eric. "Ellen Pao Resigns as Reddit Interim CEO After User Revolt". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2015-07-10. 
  66. ↑ Olanoff, Drew (August 18, 2015). "Reddit Names Marty Weiner, Founding Engineer at Pinterest, Its First CTO". TechCrunch. Retrieved October 18, 2015. 
  67. ↑ "Reddit is launching its own news site called Upvoted". Theverge.com. Retrieved October 8, 2015. 
  68. ↑ "[reddit change] Shutting down reddit.tv • r/changelog". reddit. Retrieved March 3, 2017. 
  69. ↑ "Reddit Launches New Block Tools To Help Temper Harassment". 
  70. ↑ Boris van Zanten (30 May 2016). "Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'We know your dark secrets. We know everything.'". The Next Web (TNW). 
  71. ↑ Jessica Haworth (30 May 2016). "Reddit CEO tells users 'we know your dark secrets' as he strikes fear into web surfers". Mirror. 
  72. ↑ 72.0 72.1 "Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says, "We know your dark secrets"". Daily News and Analysis. 31 May 2016. 
  73. ↑ "CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, about advertising on Reddit: "We know all of your interests. Not only just your interests you are willing to declare publicly on Facebook - we know your dark secrets, we know everything" (TNW Conference, 26 May) (27,500 votes)". Reddit. 29 May 2016. 
  74. ↑ "New Ad Type: Promoted User Posts". Reddit (official announcement). 26 July 2016. 
  75. ↑ "Sponsored headline tests: placement and design". Reddit (official announcement). 
  76. ↑ Menegus, Bryan (24 November 2016). "Reddit CEO Caught Secretly Editing User Comments, Chatlogs Leaked [Update]". Gizmodo. Retrieved 24 November 2016. 
  77. ↑ Ohlheiser, Abby (November 24, 2016). "Fearing yet another witch hunt, Reddit bans 'Pizzagate'". Washington Post. Retrieved November 24, 2016. 
  78. ↑ "Reddit shuts down 'alt-right' subreddit". CNET. Retrieved 2017-02-15. 
  79. ↑ Resnick, Gideon (2017-02-02). "Reddit Bans Alt-Right Group". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 2017-02-15. 
  80. ↑ "Reddit bans a major alt-right community — and there may be a very good reason". Business Insider. 
  81. ↑ Hern, Alex (2017-02-02). "Reddit bans far-right groups altright and alternativeright". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2017-02-15. 

External links

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