Reddit Embraces Transparency, Gives Away Source Code
Our friends over at Reddit have announced that the code behind the social news aggregation site is now open and freely available to the web at large. By giving away the entire code base, interested developers can see exactly how the site works and use Reddit code in their own projects.
The Reddit team says the move is meant to make the social news site “as open and transparent with our users as possible.” Reddit competitor Digg has often struggled with — and received a fair amount of criticism about — the very secretive algorithm governing its ranking system.
For Reddit users, today’s announcement means that there is no mystery — the site and its algorithms are an open book.
As part of the release Reddit is also encouraging developers to submit code and ideas to improve the social news site. You can download the code from Reddit’s new Trac page. The source code to Reddit is governed by the Common Public Attribution License.
It seems every time you turn around these days someone is open sourcing their code, or at least claiming to be “open,” but what often gets overlooked in the coverage is that it isn’t easy to give your code away.
Forget the business side and the potential gaming that Reddit is opening itself up to (which are big concerns as well), just exposing your code to the world is an incredibly intimidating thing to do — everyone on the web can pick over your code with a fine-tooth comb pointing out all your hurried hacks, klugey workarounds you shoved in to meet a deadline and other potentially ugly bits.
While community feedback can help fix those things, just opening up the code must leave developers feeling exposed. Jeff Atwood recently touched on that issue writing, “sharing your ongoing code with your co-workers is scary, much less the world.” But, as Atwood goes on to point out, “it also results in feedback and communication that will improve your code and draw you closer to the project you’re working on.”
Kudos to the Reddit developers for taking the plunge.
[Disclosure: Reddit is owned by CondeNet, parent company to Wired.com and Webmonkey]
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