Hey there! Joker here representing our Dev team to talk about an incredibly important milestone, then following up with some results from the latest Clear The Queue event!
When we started this thing four years ago, we simply did not expect that we would A) get so many people involved and B) make this much of a difference across Reddit. We have every single one of you to thank for that!!!
The thing about starting a new project from a development perspective is that you must make allowances based on how much you think your system will ever have to handle. If you build and build and build to make the perfect system, it will never launch -- and is therefore imperfect. Or you can get most of the way there, then launch and build on what you have. How far you build before launching is entirely dependent on how long you think the overall system will run.
Well... since we didn't think this was going to be a big thing... we took a lot of shortcuts.
The fact that the subreddit has ever run as well as it has is testament to our wonderful dev team and all the time and effort that have been poured into keeping everything alive -- but as the years went on, the technical debt of these choices continued to grow. Eventually we hit a point where we were delaying new features because we had to keep squashing bugs. We sat down together and decided that the bugs were winning, and it was time to blow away everything and rebuild it -- and do it right this time.
This particular post won't go into the details, but we do have a post where we talk about about a lot of the technical decisions that went into it and more about how the new system works! You can find it over here on our brand new engineering blog as its very first post: https://grafeas.org/posts/to-infinity-and-beyond-redesigning-from-the-ground-up/
Short version:
lots of small moving pieces => one big piece that tells the others where to go
all of our data is now in one location
opened up so many new possibilities for future expansion
made entire experience a little faster (this was an accident, actually)
completely reworked... everything, really
If you have the Beta Tester
flair, thanks for joining us while we were getting started! Your
feedback and help over the past few years have been integral in making
sure that we're delivering the absolute best experience that we can.
Thanks for helping to make the world a better place!
That's it from me for the Dev side; now let's take a look at the CtQ results!
Clear the Queue, Q2 2021
As decided per your votes, we will be hosting our Clear the Queue (CtQ) event regularly at the start of each quarter -- transcribing every post in our queue until none are left!
Last month we had the CtQ for the second quarter, the third official attempt so far. It was a smashing success; not only did we actually clear all the posts, we also did it even faster than last time! In just a little over 9 hours everything was clean and tidy.
A big thank you to everyone who participated -- 26 volunteers in total, with more helping out and giving advice on Discord too!
Here are all the stats in detail:
[26
Participants, 47 Subreddits, 39 Post types, 413 Transcriptions, 38,820
Words written & 242,341 Characters typed, 9:06h Duration.]
We had slightly fewer participants (26 as opposed to 29) and transcriptions (413 as opposed to 548) than last time, but that certainly doesn’t mean we did less work! A couple of super long videos and text posts definitely kept us busy. In fact, we actually typed more words and characters than last time (38,820/242,341 as opposed to 37,875/229,993)!
[Line
graph displaying how long CtQ ran for Vs how many transcriptions had
been done. It’s a consistent, almost straight line in a ~45° angle.]
We worked pretty consistently through the entire duration and a lot of people even stayed from start till the end.
Top 10 contributors with the most transcriptions
[A
horizontal bar chart displaying the participants with the most
transcriptions: Cloakknight: 98, MurdoMaclachlan: 71, Tim3303: 34,
ElliePlays1: 26, knightttime: 23, Impressive-Neck2178: 20, astheriae:
18, Kyle4961: 17, fatalgift: 14, --B_L_A_N_K--: 12, Other Volunteers:
80.]
We have a lot of familiar faces with Cloak and Murdo making it to the top again. However, we also had a lot of new people join in on the fun! It’s great to see so many people transcribing together :)
A full list of participants can be found in the comments. Thanks to everyone who joined in!
Top 10 subreddits with the most transcriptions
[A
horizontal bar chart displaying the subreddits with the most
transcriptions: aaaaaaacccccccce: 35, me_irl: 31, ProgrammerHumor: 29,
blursedimages: 28, CasualUK: 23, HistoryPorn: 23, CuratedTumblr: 22,
technicallythetruth: 21, hmmm: 21, traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns: 16, Other
Subreddits: 164.]
We had a very balanced amount of posts from each subreddit. Pride month definitely pushed the LGBTQ+ subs to the top though!
A full list of subreddits can be found in the comments.
[A
horizontal bar chart displaying the post types with the most
transcriptions: Image: 131, Meme: 57, Picture: 42, Tumblr: 25, Reddit:
24, Twitter: 21, Facebook: 20, Comic: 15, Video: 11, Chat: 10, Other
Types: 57.]
Similar to last time, image posts which take a bit more effort transcribing have dominated the queue again. Popular social media posts like Tumblr and Reddit were still represented a lot though.
Top 10 contributors with the longest transcriptions
[A
horizontal bar chart displaying the participants with the longest
transcriptions (in characters): Tim3303: 16538, knightttime: 15271,
astheriae: 6950, Impressive-Neck2178: 3466, MurdoMaclachan: 3403,
halailah: 2383, part-time-ceo: 2171: Cloakknight: 1790, ElliePlays1:
1419, fatalgift: 1401.]
The queue challenged us with some mega posts, but we didn’t let that keep us down! A very detailed post about medieval medicine on Tumblr and a gigantic video that was completed in a joint effort by knightttime and Cloak were just the tip of the iceberg.
Transcription length vs. transcription count
[A
scatter plot displaying the median transcription length of a user in
characters (x-axis) in relation to the number of transcriptions the user
made (y-axis). The transcription length ranges from 0 to about 800, the
transcription count from 0 to about 100. The user points are spread
quite evenly in the 200-600 length range and the 0-20 count range, with a
cluster at 300-400 length and 0-20 count. Notable outliers include a
~(0, 0) point (probably an error in our stats generation script), a
~(200, 99) point (Cloakknight) and a ~(400, 71) point (MurdoMaclachlan).]
As we always say, quality goes over quantity! We saw many volunteers trying out new challenging post types and putting extra care in their transcription. Well done!
And that’s all the stats we have this time. If you didn’t get the chance to join in, don’t worry! We will do four CtQs every year, so you will get another opportunity soon. Keep your eyes open for announcements on Reddit or Discord.
As always, a big thank you to all volunteers for putting so much work into making the internet more accessible for everyone. Your help is highly appreciated!
See you all for the next one!
Wanna see how much we've grown?
Number of registered volunteers: 4620
Number of completed transcriptions: 185,466 bug in script. It's about 30k lower than this.