Reddit to stop publishing its main source code after nine years in the public domain

Popular social media website Reddit has removed its main source code from the internet after nine years in the public domain.

Access to the code was made public in 2008 as the company attempted to improve uptake of its services, but will now be replaced by smaller chunks of code instead.

The company admitted the move on, of all places, Reddit: "When we open sourced Reddit (and as you can see in the initial commit, I'm proud to be able to say "FIRST") back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization1 and the future of the company was very uncertain.

"We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do.

"Nine years later and Reddit is a very different company and as anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed, we've been doing a bad job of keeping our open-source product repos up to date. This is for a variety of reasons".

These reasons include the fact that keeping the code base public means it is more difficult to develop new features on the QT, such as the recent addition of video support.

Additionally, the site is moving "further and further from the canonical state of the open source repository" and moving to a "more service-oriented architecture".

This isn't the end though, the smaller code bases including baseplate, rollingpin, mcsauna, as well as the more well known open-source repositories.

This all shows a simple case of a company that has had to "pick a lane". Reddit, now being far bigger than it ever anticipated, has realised that if it intends to keep up with other forms of social interaction, it needs to evolve at its own pace.

If you need any guidance as to why that is, you need only look at News Corporation's neglect of MySpace, which essentially killed it off.

Reddit is looking to make itself attractive going forwards, even though it claims to have no plans to have an IPO - it still needs to have a value and that means taking back control.

Redditors expressed concern last year after plans for closed-source mobile apps were revealed.