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.
Time period | Key developments at Reddit |
---|---|
2005 | Reddit's creators help seed Reddit with numerous fake accounts to make Reddit seem more populated than it actually was. [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, subreddit "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] |
mid-2010 | Due to a controversial redesign brought on by Digg, disgruntled users declared a "Quit Digg" day where they posted links to Reddit and left Digg behind to join Reddit. Reddit subsequently overtook 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. [3] By February 2011, [4] 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. [5] |
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. |
2020 | On June 5, 2020, Ohanian resigned from the board and planned to be replaced "by a Black candidate". The orange colour of the site emblem was changed to black for few months. [6] [7] |
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. [8] |
2005 | Late year | Product | Reddit merges with Aaron Swartz's company Infogami. [8] |
2005 | December | Product | Reddit adds commenting. [9] |
2006 | October 18 | Community | /r/science launches. [10] |
2006 | October | Company | Condé Nast (the publisher) acquires Reddit for less than $20 million. Team moves to San Francisco. [11] |
2006 | November | Team | Aaron Swartz blogs complaining about the new corporate environment, criticizing its level of productivity. [12] |
2007 | January | Team | Aaron Swartz is fired. [13] |
2008 | January | Product | Reddit decides to let users create their own custom reddits, or subreddits. [14] [15] |
2008 | June | Product | Reddit becomes open-source. [16] [17] |
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. [18] |
2009 | October | Team | Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman leave reddit. Steve Huffman helps form Hipmunk, and Alexis helps form Breadpig. [19] [20] |
2009 | November | Product | Reddit decommissions its last physical servers and moves its hosting to Amazon Web Services. [21] |
2009 | late in year | Product | The online gift exchange RedditGifts runs for the first time. [22] |
2010 | June 7 | Product | Reddit launches a revamped mobile interface featuring rewritten CSS, a new color scheme, and a multitude of improvements. [23] |
2010 | July | Product | Reddit introduces Reddit Gold, in order to help raise more money for the site. [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 "/r/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 23 | Product | Reddit Live is launched. [47] In 2016, users form the 'Volunteer Live Team' to provide live threads on ongoing news events. [48] |
2014 | July 31 | 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. [49] [50] [51] |
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. [52] |
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"). [53] [54] |
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. [55] |
2014 | October | Company | Reddit acquires Alien Blue as its first official mobile app. [56] |
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. [57] [58] |
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. [59] |
2015 | April 1 | Community | The Button, a social experiment, is introduced in a post to the official Reddit blog. [60] |
2015 | May | Community | Reddit introduces an anti-harassment policy. It intends to rely on users to report bad actors in the community. [61] |
2015 | May | Product | Reddit announces Reddit Video. [62] |
2015 | June 10 | Community | Reddit bans five subreddits, citing an anti-harassment policy. [63] [64] The largest of the banned subreddits, "fatpeoplehate," had an estimated 151,000 subscribers at the times of its banning. [63] The other four subreddits are "hamplanethatred," "transfags," "neofag," and "shitniggerssay." [63] |
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. [65] Subsequently, to these and other recent events a petition asking Pao to step down as CEO reaches over 160,000 signatures. [66] On July 10, 2015, Pao resigns and is replaced by cofounder Steve Huffman as CEO. [67] |
2015 | August 18 | Team | Reddit hires Marty Weiner, Founding Engineer at Pinterest, as its first Chief Technology Officer. [68] |
2015 | September | Product | Reddit launches Upvoted , a news site that digs out interesting content from reddit, but without enabling commenting. [69] |
2015 | December 15 | Product | Reddit announces that it is shutting down reddit.tv. [70] |
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. [71] The option to block a redditor is done by clicking a button in the inbox. |
2016 | June | Product | Standalone image hosting service implemented. Previously, Reddit users primarily relied on Imgur for sharing pictures, screenshots, and graphics. [72] |
2017 | February | Community | Reddit bans the "altright" subreddit for violating its terms of service, more specifically for attempting to share personal information about the man who attacked alt-right figure Richard Spencer. [73] [74] The forum's users and moderators accuse Reddit administrators of having political motivations for the ban. [75] [76] |
2017 | April | Community | Place, another site-wide social experiment, is put into practice. [77] |
2017 | May 31 | Community | Reddit stops using default subreddits, centering its new discovery-oriented r/popular landing page. [78] |
2017 | June | Product | Added ability to attach a video to a post. [79] |
2017 | September 13 | Product | Reddit announces that its main code repositories, backing its desktop and mobile websites, are no longer open source. [80] [81] |
2018 | April | Product | Reddit announces the rollout of a new design for the site and its logo Snoo. [82] [83] |
2019 | August | Product | Reddit announces RPAN (Reddit Public Access Network) in August. The official subreddit is r/pan. |
2020 | June 5 | Team | In response to the George Floyd protests, Reddit announces a plan to revise its content policy to combat hate and racism on the site. Alexis Ohanian resigns from the Reddit board of directors and plans to be replaced "by a Black candidate". [6] |
2020 | June 29 | Community | Reddit updates its content policy to bar "hate based on identity or vulnerability" and bans some 2000 subreddits, including the long-controversial r/The_Donald. [84] |
2020 | December 13 | Company | Reddit acquires Dubsmash. They intend to integrate its video creation tools into Reddit. [85] |
2023 | Company | Reddit moves its headquarters from 455 Market Street to 303 Second Street, both of which are located in San Francisco. [86] | |
2023 | June–July | Product | Reddit announced new changes to its API pricing, effective July 1, that will force many third-party apps to shut down. In response, on June 12, thousands of subreddits went private in protest of the decision; some for two days, and others indefinitely. [87] After over 7,000 subreddits went private, Reddit experienced outages at approximately 07:58 Pacific Daylight Time on June 12 (14:58 UTC, June 12) credited to a "significant number of subreddits shifting to private". [88] [89] [90] [91] |
2024 | March 21 | Company | Reddit begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker RDDT. |
Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are unpaid volunteers. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco.
Digg is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
Mister Splashy Pants, or Mr Splashypants, is a humpback whale in the South Pacific Ocean. It is being tracked with a satellite tag by Greenpeace as a part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition, which was working to raise awareness about whales threatened by the Japanese Fisheries Agency's hunting of 50 humpback whales annually. The whale's name was chosen in an online poll that garnered attention from several websites, including Boing Boing and Reddit, quickly becoming an internet meme. Mister Splashy Pants became the subject of a TED Talk by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, titled "How to make a splash in social media."
Steve Huffman, also known by his Reddit username spez, is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, which ranks in the top 20 websites in the world. He also co-founded the airfare search engine website Hipmunk, which shut down in 2020.
Alexis Kerry Ohanian is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is best known as the co-founder and former executive chairman of the social media site Reddit along with Steve Huffman and Aaron Swartz. He also co-founded the early-stage venture capital firm Initialized Capital, helped launch the travel search website Hipmunk, and started the social enterprise Breadpig. He was also a partner at Y Combinator.
Yishan Wong is an American engineer and entrepreneur who was CEO of Reddit from March 2012 until his resignation in November 2014. With Niniane Wang he is also co-founder of the Mountain View coworking space Sunfire Offices, and was an advisor at Quora. Wong was briefly a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine.
Ellen Kangru Pao is an American investor and former interim CEO of social media company Reddit.
On the social news site Reddit, some communities are devoted to explicit, violent, propagandist, or hateful material. These subreddits have been the topic of controversy, at times receiving significant media coverage. Journalists, attorneys, media researchers, and others have commented that such communities shape and promote biased views of international politics, the veracity of medical evidence, misogynistic rhetoric, and other disruptive concepts.
Voat Inc was an American alt-tech news aggregator and social networking service where registered community members could submit content such as text posts and direct links. Registered users could then vote on these submissions. Content entries were organized by areas of interest called "subverses". The website was widely described as a Reddit clone and a hub for the alt-right. Voat CEO Justin Chastain made an announcement on December 22, 2020 that Voat would shut down. The site was shut down on December 25, 2020.
A user revolt is a social conflict in which users of a website collectively and openly protest a website host's or administrator's instructions for using the website. Sometimes it happens that the website hosts can control a website's use in certain ways, but the hosts also depend on the users to comply with voluntary social rules in order for the website to operate as the hosts would like. A user revolt occurs when the website users protest against the voluntary social rules of a website, and use the website in a way that is in conflict with the wishes of the website host or administrators.
r/The_Donald was a subreddit where participants created discussions and internet memes in support of U.S. president Donald Trump. Initially created in June 2015 following the announcement of Trump's presidential campaign, the community grew to over 790,000 subscribers who described themselves as "Patriots". The community was banned in June 2020 for violating Reddit rules on harassment and targeting. It was ranked as one of the most active communities on Reddit in the late 2010s.
Michael Seibel is a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
r/IAmA is a subreddit for question-and-answer interactive interviews termed "AMA". AMA interviewees have ranged from various celebrities to everyday people in several lines of work. Founded in May 2009, the subreddit has gone on to become one of Reddit's most popular communities.
r/AskHistorians is a subreddit on Reddit where users may ask questions about history. It is one of the internet's largest history forums.
r/dataisbeautiful, also known as Data Is Beautiful, is a subreddit dedicated to aesthetically pleasing works of data visualization. It was created in 2012; as of January 2022, it has over 20 million members.
r/wallstreetbets, also known as WallStreetBets or WSB, is a subreddit where participants discuss stock and option trading. It has become notable for its colorful jargon, aggressive trading strategies, stories of extreme gains and losses acquired in the stock market, and for playing a major role in the GameStop short squeeze that caused significant losses for a number of US hedge funds and short sellers for a duration of time in early 2021.
r/antiwork is a subreddit associated with contemporary labor movements, critique of work, corporate capitalism and the anti-work movement. The forum's slogan reads: "Unemployment for all, not just the rich!" Posts on the forum commonly describe employees' negative experiences at work, dissatisfaction with working conditions, and unionization. Various actions that have been promoted on the subreddit include a consumer boycott of Black Friday as well as the submission of fake jobs applications to the Kellogg Company after the company announced plans to replace 1,400 striking workers during the 2021 Kellogg's strike. The popularity of r/antiwork increased in 2020 and 2021, and the subreddit gained 900,000 subscribers in 2021 alone, accumulating nearly 1,700,000 subscribers by the end of the year. It is often associated with other ideologically similar subreddits such as r/latestagecapitalism. r/antiwork has been compared to the Occupy Wall Street movement due to the subreddit's intellectual foundations and decentralized ethos.
r/art is an internet forum on Reddit dedicated to art discussions and the sharing of artwork. As of January 2023, it has over 22 million members. It is the largest art-related forum on Reddit.
In April 2023, the discussion and news aggregation website Reddit announced its intentions to charge for its application programming interface (API), a feature which had been free since 2008, causing a dispute. The move forced multiple third-party applications to shut down and threatened accessibility applications and moderation tools.
created by Alexanderr: a community for 5 years (Mon Jun 20 23:46:08 2011 UTC)