Difference between revisions of "Reddit"

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| URL = http://www.reddit.com/
| URL = http://www.reddit.com/
| project_status = {{endangered}}
| project_status = {{endangered}}
| archiving_status = {{upcoming}}
| archiving_status = {{Partiallysaved}}
| irc = deaddit
| irc = deaddit
}}
}}

Revision as of 06:22, 21 July 2015

reddit
reddit home page as seen on March 26, 2013
reddit home page as seen on March 26, 2013
URL http://www.reddit.com/
Status Endangered
Archiving status Partially saved
Archiving type Unknown
IRC channel #deaddit (on hackint)

reddit is a content aggregator and social bookmarking service similar to the likes of Digg. Users can submit links, submit text posts, vote and comment on submissions in communities called "subreddits". It received considerable attention from its twelve hour SOPA blackout early in January of 2012.

Vital signs

  • Appears stable, though a small to medium size team is a concern.
  • Update (6/10/15): the admins carried out bannings of several subreddits claiming they were harassing people, the most notable of which was /r/fatpeoplehate. This has instilled some fear, uncertainty, and doubt in some part of the userbase, with a few claiming that reddit will soon become what Digg is now: nearly dead.
  • Extremely endangered - many subreddits were picketing after the firing of a reddit employee named Victoria by turning themselves private or restricting submissions.
  • 'Caution' - Reddit seems to have calmed down and returned to normal functionality after Ellen Pao's firing, and the Reddit team is making serious reforms (reducing shadowbanning, more mod tools). However, the revolt left unresolved issues and sour grapes within the community, and it seems Reddit was only saved by the lack of a practical alternative (Voat.co was crushed and went offline due to floods of refugees). It would be wise to preemptively archive the site before another crisis occurs.
  • On July 3rd, 2015, Reddit user Stuck_in_the_Matrix completed his 14-month effort to archive Reddit's entire publicly available dataset, just in time before the onset of the Reddit revolt. It has been uploaded to the Internet Archive in it's entirety.

October 2007 - May 2015 (Nearly) Complete Reddit Archive

On July 3rd, 2015, Reddit user Stuck_in_the_Matrix completed his 14-month effort to archive Reddit's entire publicly available dataset, just in time before the onset of the Reddit revolt. It has been uploaded to the Internet Archive in it's entirety.

The scripts used to generate this API dump were not made public, but it likely used PRAW, and it would probably be better to rewrite from scratch.

Also, this only preserves comments. All sidebar, wiki, and live thread data was not retrieved. It is unknown if Thread OPs fall under the umbrella of "comment", but they probably do.

Data liberation

As of March 26, 2013, users can only see up to 1,000 posts and comments on a profile page. However, it was stated by admin "spladug" that older comments and posts are still in the database. spladug also states that the team is in favor for retrieving dumps of a user's data, but that the task would be taxing on the servers. Since this comment was posted, there appears to have been no progress on a dump system. Archiving would be nearly impossible using the old-fashioned way (without wget) if things do wind up FUBAR in the future because of this limitation.

Instead, any archival methods should scrape from the Reddit API (which would have to run over several months). The API provides all nested comments that are not noticed by HTML. In addition, it significantly reduces server load.


External Links