We're now available in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. Launching apps in other countries requires a little bit more diligence than just making a website available globally.
I'm sorry it's not available in your country -- we're planning on getting it out everywhere.
Congrats and all the best with the book! Happy to participate and hope it can help get my experiences with Reddit, Hipmunk and beyond into as many people's heads as possible.
Thanks. Yep, they're separate, but based on the success of the Upvoted podcast and newsletter over this year, we definitely see the potential of upvoted.com to be a gateway to get new users into Reddit. One reason why, for instance, we have a link to a comment section on r/upvoted at the bottom of every article (each Upvoted.com gets automatically submitted to r/upvoted upon posting).
It's a way to follow up on stories that bubble up on Reddit's frontpages and give them more depth. 202M+ people can do a great job surfacing and discussing content in real-time, but our awesome editor, Vickie, and her team can do a much more effective job following up on those stories, interviewing, and adding more substance.
Then a week later a photo of the guy (now with a job) topped on r/pics again and a random redditor linked to our story to provide context for everyone on the thread:
Sure thing. You'll see from the content on Upvoted.com that the OP is usually just the start of the story and we're following up to learn more. e.g., Omari Nyaega
202M+ people can surface his story and raise a ton of money, but our team of reporters has a much easier time following up to close the loop.
We're working on anti-brigading tools. That's on us to get right, because a lot of "brigading" is AKA "how social media works."
It's long been a very fuzzy definition, which is on us (e.g., how is it OK for a celeb to tweet to his followers about an AMA -- it's both "brigading" and "required for verification") and there's a more obvious and negative brigading we can thwart better with technology so that mods have the ability to throttle when, say, one community wants to all pile into a thread and sway it.
Upvoted.com does not affect Reddit.com -- like, not even developer attention -- we didn't move any Reddit developers off of community/mod tools, infra, or mobile.
Thank you! It's a minor thing, but one of my favorite things about the product is this brilliant widget u/comeforthlazarus came up with -- every article (e.g., this one on suicide survivors[1]) has a widget on the left rail[2] that follows the reader to display the OP, subreddit, and link to it.
We're not trying to be first with a cheap quick post (Reddit.com is always going to be faster than any newsroom anyway) and I'm really excited about the vision Vickie (editor) has for longer-form features like this one.
Every article posted to upvoted.com gets submitted to http://reddit.com/r/upvoted with a link at the bottom of said article.
We were not going to put facebook comments an DEFINITELY not going to take devs away from all the work they've been doing on mod/community tools (http://reddit.com/r/modnews), alien blue, and infrastructure.
No. Trending articles are determined by traffic and not salable. When we do have a sponsored post on upvoted.com (just like on reddit.com) it's clearly marked as sponsored.
The top thread on the announcement is a great discussion of why it's so important to us to credit Redditors in every article, which folks seem to appreciate.
As for Tom, here's what I posted on r/defaultmods addressing that concern.
>>
I ran those ads when I learned Tom was using the site.
I did that because for the last few weeks more and more celebrities have been coming on or reaching out to use reddit as members of the community. And we've run sponsored headline to draw attention to it, these ads have been viewed over 14M times in the last couple of weeks without incident. They've also performed exceptionally well (Bill Gates' for instance had 368% higher CTR than average).
+That moment when Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) shows up to compliment your Rebel helmet patch
+Oh, just Bill Gates hanging out on r/infographics
+Lil Dicky drops a new music video, shows up in the comments of r/Music thread
Admittedly, these ads all went up at least 24hrs after the celeb showed up and left, whereas I jumped on the Tom Hanks one as soon as I realized it was happening. We're not going to do that again. Those ads also performed very well (63% higher than site average) but were a really bad look.
To be clear: we're not paying them. They're coming because we're actually making progress showing them the value of joining the community.
Wynter (u/808sandhotcakes) has been doing a lot of great work, by virtue of her great reputation in the industry alone, people are genuinely reaching out to learn how to join the Reddit community. We're excited about that, because it clearly makes our users very happy and by every account the talent enjoys it, too.
edit: (See, I'm already getting better: Arnold + Adam Savage stopped by since Tom and no obnoxious sponsored headlines.)