I sold upvoted.com to Alexis Ohanian earlier this year. I'm glad it's not just a redirect anymore!<p>I wanted to do something cool with it but never did. Then one day I got an email from an assistant of Alexis Ohanian's asking to sell it cheap for his little school project :P<p>I knew he was just trying to avoid being gouged, so I offered to sell it to Alexis for his initial asking price, if he'd give me a meeting and some feedback on my startup. He agreed and we had a good meeting. He gave my co-founder and I some genuinely usable advice, and technically funded our bootstrapped startup (<a href="https://portal.cloud" rel="nofollow">https://portal.cloud</a>) for a few weeks there.
There was a recent allegation that the Reddit administration had encouraged vote brigading with Tom Hanks' comments: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Obafhpc.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Obafhpc.png</a><p>From the looks of the Upvoted front page, looks like they're doing it as a content marketing strategy, which doesn't bode well. Also, it seems like a BuzzFeed clone, which Redditors <i>despise</i>.<p>(Disclosure: although I have done a LOT of work analyzing Reddit [<a href="http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/" rel="nofollow">http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/</a>], I have not been approached to write anything for Upvoted)
I have been pretty critical of reddit lately, but there was a time when I really enjoyed using it and it does provide a ton of value to many people. It is a great website in a very difficult situation due to the community culture (<i>very</i> anti-corporate/advertising mentality), diversity of users and content ownership issues. On a real level, the site is pretty awesome. I want to see them succeed because sub-communities and even the organization have stood for an opened internet and positive things.<p>I think upvoted looks really sleek and I hope it is successful, but they really need a way to monetize and it is a really hard problem to solve. Obviously, using a widely supported mature CMS like wordpress makes it easy to
produce content with minimal effort and cost but that has been reddit users largest gripe. Upvoted is a curator/aggregator built on top of a curator/aggregator, which is weird. Reddit's success and problems stem from providing the long tail of content, allowing diverse topics and communities to be covered while allowing globally popular things to float to the top. This means that there is rarely community consensus, so while upvoted has little risk as it is cheap to make, I can't see it providing much financial support for the company.<p>In all honesty though, I wish them the best of luck and hope to see them do cool and intersting things in the future. Obviously, improving the search would be a great start because Google is an awesome search engine, but for content discovery and curation, Reddit is doing a great job.
Best of luck guys and sorry about the sarcastic comments about Wordpress and PHP, it really is a good way to quickly test out something like upvoted without significant dev reources and is a good content management system, edit: [if used correctly]
I think this is a brilliant move.<p>To all those saying whether or not current redditors will use it: that's not the point. This is Reddit attempting to use the content users generate on the platform for the 99% of people who don't use Reddit. Call it buzzfeed if you want, an absurd amount of people use buzzfeed.<p>So long as Reddit and Upvoted are separate, I think it makes a ton of sense.
<a href="http://www.redditblog.com/2015/10/introducing-upvoted-redditorial.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.redditblog.com/2015/10/introducing-upvoted-reddit...</a> actually explains what it is and might be a more informative link.
Is this Reddit trying to take itself more seriously? It's almost like a mask layer to obfuscate the hive mind. I'm curious how the content is created, how something is featured, etc.
For anyone confused about why this exists: <a href="http://upvoted.com/advertise/" rel="nofollow">http://upvoted.com/advertise/</a>
So this feels like a way of obfuscating comments and some of the less appealing aspects of the reddit community, while turning it into a buzzfeed style community. It feels like a prettier version of <a href="http://thisisthe.link/" rel="nofollow">http://thisisthe.link/</a>
Looks nice, functions nicely, I can see what they are doing but it's just not for me. Content appears pretty shallow at a brief browse through it all, buzzfeed esque.
I feel that normal Reddit users are going to hate this for the most part because it does a lot of the same things that BuzzFeed does in that it takes content from Reddit presents it in a somewhat dumbed-down, clickbait way. However, I don't think this is a problem. Upvoted is not supposed to be for Redditors, it's supposed to be for a different audience who isn't yet ready for Reddit. It's going to capture at least some of the traffic that usually lands on other clickbait sites which take content from Reddit, and it's going to allow them to monetize.
Publications like BuzzFeed have been making money off of Reddit's content, or at least content discovered on Reddit, for years. Makes sense Reddit would want to capture some of that value.
Another Buzzfeed-y content site? Meh.<p>What I would actually like to see:<p>Have journalists contact Redditors who post interesting stories for interviews to write up more fully fleshed stories.<p>A lot of Redditors post really interesting stories about their experiences, businesses etc. It'd be super cool to read more about it.
Nice. The thing I don't like about Reddit itself is that it's hard to find what each article is actually about, and most of the time it's some in-jokey/meme-y stuff I wouldn't have bothered with if I'd been able to see even one image or quote. Finding <i>quality</i> content there is hard; if I wanted to spend that much time separating wheat from chaff I might as well try Google+. Upvoted looks like a much more accessible way to get some light reading/entertainment done. Good idea, and AFAICT so far a good implementation.
Here's a question I have; reddit is full of liars. What efforts are the Upvoted staff making to verify stuff that appears on reddit before bringing it over to Upvoted?
I’m not sure what this site is supposed to be for: Is it (a) to generate more ad revenue for reddit to be finally self-sustaining or (b) an attempt to come up to the expectations of Reddit's VC shareholders (i.e. a separate startup to generate more revenue than necessary for self-sustenance).
Can't really like this, but at least it has the virtue of containing the kind of stuff that happened to digg.<p>Whatever happens, I'm really with reddit in light of all the controversies that surrounded it. I really have a high esteem of community driven websites who can be user-oriented and still grow and attract more users. It's not an easy task. I'm sure there must be some kind of game theory around it if you want to keep it going. Making balanced rules for such a website might be no easy thing.<p>Some call it "plebeian" but I think it's still a very good website if you don't focus too much on the default subreddits. I will never be able to wrap my head around the 4chan UI, even if it has an attractive community.
It's interesting to me that between this and Apple's news app that we're steering to a less-social-engagement centric model for news presentation. One new way to save myself from looking at the comments.
I can't quite put my finger on it but this feels like one of them websites someone will share on Facebook and I'll tell Facebook never to show me anything from that domain again. I'm sure those sites are making lots of money though and are getting shared because people like them, so they'll probably do way better with it than I expect.
Sad that The Redditor didn't work out: <a href="http://www.theredditor.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theredditor.com/</a>
Looks like it's a Wordpress blog: <a href="http://upvoted.com/wp-admin" rel="nofollow">http://upvoted.com/wp-admin</a>