Reddit

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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 Upcoming...
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.

Dealing with Private Subreddits

In response to the firing of Victoria, the subreddit /r/IAMA set their community to private, making all it's posts from the entire history of Reddit totally inaccessible. Almost every large subreddit has followed suit.

In case a future crisis occurs where we need access to a private subreddit, we will have to request three ways:

  1. Ask the mods of each subreddit to give an Archive Team account access to their Private subreddit. That way, the subreddit can still stay offline, but we can still grab the threads. The disadvantage is that we have to contact every mod and hope that they cooperate, but I'm sure that most mod teams are willing to at least preserve the legacy of their community, if not the current incarnation.
  2. The Reddit Admins may have full backups of Reddit. Because of their stated ideals, they are more likely than Digg was to release the data in event of their closure. This is not something we should count on, however.
  3. Google Cache and Internet Archive. The last resort is to grab whatever is left of the threads from archival services. The deep disadvantage of this that each reddit thread has more replies than at first glance, which are lost from this method.

Data liberation

Currently (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.

No further progress appears to have been made since then as of June 2015.

External Links