11/10/2005 Meeting Notes

Attendees:

  • Alexis
  • Steve
  • j
  • EG: erica
  • LB: Lynne Baer
  • BK: Beth Kanter
  • DEF: Deborah Elizabeth Finn
  • SJ: SJ Klein
  • JA2: Jenny Attiyeh
  • LW: Lisa williams
  • CR: Colin Rhinesmith
  • DS: Danny Silverman
  • JW: Jon Winsor
  • ASW: Aaron
  • JD: Jared Dunn
  • BS: Brett Stilwell
  • AW: Amanda Watlington
  • Sooz

    Agenda: (full agenda listed on main page…)

  • Reddit.com, Alexis & Steve
  • No it ain’t del.icio.us
  • how is this different?
  • main opage NOT TAGGED on purpose
  • they do have a function to save links, and it will work like delicious
  • it’s different from delicious/popular. very differetn material. news focused.
  • similar to slashdot, karma system and user voting etc.
  • karma doesn’t affect how your article you link is initially ranked or anything. all equal.
  • community of users: so far mostly technology. base is early adopters. want to broaden. tech people whoa re tired of reading about tech news.
  • goal: that feeds tailor themselves to you, thinks you like, things ppl like you like
  • DEF: what about renevnue?
  • they have had some funding so they can do working on this full time so far, which lasts for another half year or so
  • ppl have requested syndicating the tech but now they focus on working on the user/reader base. funders want them to focus on eyeballs.
  • uses like the non-ad setup currently “if someone else wants to ruin our site with ads they can buy them from us”
  • 2,000 real live registered users
  • 7,000 unique visitors/day
  • average users, maybe 10% of them vote, maybe 1% of users actually submit
  • they’re not explicitly tracking demographics yet. they’re going to add some more in the expanded profile but will make it optional.
  • when the same articvle has more than one url the community tends to pick one and it’s self-correcting
  • some discussion of if a ticker on the top would be good or not
  • are people going to be allowed to “cash in” a lot of good karma if they really want to promote something folks are voting down? (hey, or, to buy karma as a fundraiser hehe)
  • (Erica just signed up and is already voting. wheee!)
  • LW: why lisp as the programming language?
  • Steve: it’s really nice for this application. it makes our site really fast. whole site served from memory.
  • quality of content still fluctuates a little depending on who’s linking articles
  • LW: is there any way i can feed opml from my blogs into reddit automatically…? Using OPML say??? 😀 I want my blog to feed my flcikr, my delicious, my reddit
  • DS: have you looked at digg?
  • reddit: agh, yes. they have some issues, tho a lot of traffic. their site design is garish and content not great and they’re tech only. Digg is obsessed with feeding Slashdot.
  • mascots matter 😀 the alien guy rocks.
  • simple design is, well, by design. users come for content, give it to them fast
  • ooh the alien even has merchandise! but zero profit
  • erica gets all yay about shirts and merch and… off topic, so she’ll bug the boys about it later
  • they really really want feedback
  • final thought: other people are really good at finding things that are good, so you can trust your users.
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