Reddit ‘Blown Away’ by Reaction to Time Machine Project

Flash back to the final week of March: Reddit programmer Max Goodman and engineer Logan Hanks are furiously tinkering with code and “never-seen-before time travel technology” to build a standout April Fools’ Day project.

In a flourish of creative software coding, the duo hatched Reddit Timeline, a module on the homepage that directed users to pages for specific time periods — past and future — such as the Big Bang, 1990s and the Heat Death of the Universe.

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Even though April Fools’ Day is over, Reddit users can continue to flash back and forward. The Timeline module has vanished from the site, but the period pages known as “timereddits” will live on with crowdsourced content.

“It’s up to the individual mods of the timereddits where they take them now,” Goodman told Mashable. “While we wanted to return the site to normal promptly, we may explore making the timereddits easier to browse again in the future.”

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‘We Weren’t Quite Sure What Would Happen’


News-aggregation site Reddit, which recently roped in an eye-popping 100,000 simultaneous unique visitors, prides itself on the lively community — dubbed the Reddit army — it’s built. That mentality seeped into the creative process of the time machine project.

Goodman and the team behind the timereddits aimed to develop a interactive adventure in which everyone could actively participate. But initially picking the right project wasn’t simple.

“We weren’t quite sure what would happen with these brand new subreddits, created out of thin air,” Goodman says. “Would they be overrun by spam? Would they diverge from their original topics? Would they stay in character? I had a feeling it was going to be a lot of fun, but I was actually floored by how quickly and cleverly people took to the timereddits.”

The community banded together just minutes after the Timeline feature launched at midnight on April 1. Each of the timereddits quickly filled with hilarious posts (see examples below) and hundreds of votes and comments.

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The neon pink-infused 1980s subreddit, for example, featured an entertaining “Holy shit guys, this new game is awesome!” thread that focused on the Rubik’s cube and other popular games from the ’80s.

“That night, we were deluged with requests to get involved and ideas for new timereddits,” Goodman remembers. “The creativity and humor of Redditors is really what made Reddit Timeline work. We are all totally jazzed to see how the community took the concept and ran with it.”


10 Awesome Threads Within the Timereddits


You can spend hours sifting through timereddits. Goodman thinks the 1960s page is “totally groovy.”

“They were all fantastic,” he says. “I was blown away by the quality and creativity displayed on the site.”

1. In Big Bang

Thread: “In the beginning…”

Click here to view this gallery.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, Floriana

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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