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A few things that strike me:

It's Pylons. I'm no Pythonista, but I think the code for such a highly trafficked site built using Pylons is interesting.

Isn't it unprecedented that such a highly trafficked site, owned by a large, decidedly Corporate company (Conde Naste), would become open source? Open sourcing web _sites_ is rare (applications, such as WP, Drupal, etc, not so much). Now Reddit is a web app (sort of due to it now being 'sold' -- although for free), but you could argue before that it was a web site.

Now it is trivial to start a new community, just like the old community. Eventually every community hits a critical mass of popularity and articles and discussions factor to the lowest common denominator. When it hits the limit (as Reddit did a while a go, in my opinion) someone can start a new one without much work.

Or, maybe I'm just an open source geek with a soft spot for Reddit.



Slashdot is the first one I remember doing this. The audience sizes are arguable, but I'm inclined to think slashdot's audience was higher.

I am interested to read this code because I haven't read much on how they rank stories. Now I can read the implementation itself.


Actually, the coverage on Ars Technica has an interview with co-founder Stever Huffman and he says that the ranking algorithm is one of the things they are not making open source.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080618-reddit-social-...


You read wrong my friend:

> Not all of reddit's code will be released, however. Huffman told me that while about 95 percent of reddit's code base is getting released at code.reddit.com under the CPAL license (the same one Facebook used to open source its own platform), including the rating algorithm that chooses which stories float to the front page

http://code.reddit.com/browser/r2/r2/lib/db/sorts.py http://code.reddit.com/browser/r2/r2/lib/normalized_hot.py


Ah ok, I misunderstood what they meant.




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