A popular page is pulling away from the social news-based website Reddit.
Parker Ruhstaller, the creator of the LifeProTips subreddit, is launching lifeprotips.com in October, making content more accessible and organized.
The idea for LifeProTips started as a side project: Ruhstaller wanted to put articles and tips from all over the Internet into one location.
The subreddit started out with only 30 posts and a banner before he left it alone and forgot about it. In the time he was absent, it gained a lot of attention.
He got phone calls from friends saying they saw ads for the page. Within three years, LifeProTips became a default subreddit with more than a million subscribers.
Eduardo Mondragon, an 18-year-old freshman from the Gator Engineering at Santa Fe program, started using Reddit when he was in the eighth grade. He used Reddit to answer questions about God and atheism and found other subreddits he enjoyed.
He has used LifeProTips to keep cool in the summer without air conditioning: When he asked how to stay cool at night, someone suggested putting his pillow case in the freezer before going to bed.
It worked.
Ruhstaller said as LifeProTips became more popular, people began to take advantage of the page, and low-quality posts appeared.
Reddit uses a system, called karma, where the more links someone posts, the more points that person obtains. This resulted in fake tips just so people could gain karma.
“For some reason, people have this affinity to gain karma on Reddit, which is really weird,” Ruhstaller said. “People are way into it.”
As users took advantage of the site for karma and the page grew, it became too difficult to manage.
He hired moderators to help keep the page under control and set some rules, but not all moderators had the best intentions.
Once a subreddit has more than 100,000 people, trouble starts to brew, and the page becomes difficult to handle, said Gary Phillips, the creator and a moderator of the FloridaGator subreddit.
He’s been on Reddit for eight years and has moderated a page that had 40,000 suscribers for five. Eventually, managing the page becomes a full-time job without pay.
“After a while it’s not fun anymore,” he said.
Ruhstaller said despite hiccups with moderators and rude users, LifeProTips has had relatively smooth sailing.
Many users wished the tips were more organized and easy to find. Where this was next to impossible to do on a site like Reddit, it was much simpler to accomplish on a separate website.
His motivation for launching the website is forming a closely knit community that can make people’s lives easier. He believes the information available on LifeProTips is basic knowledge that everyone should have to make their lives easier.
“When someone uses something you use and talks about it, that’s worth more to me than money,” he said.
[A version of this story ran on page 10 on 9/25/2014]
