The Reddits (6 minute read)
The Reddits (6 minute read)
"I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it," writes PG.
Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit's founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.
Discovered through https://tldr.tech/, a daily technology briefing newsletter.
Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.
Steve Huffman: Hold my beer.
Dude, no one is leaving Reddit. I know I’ll get downloaded because that’s the circle jerk here but Reddit still has a huge amount of active users and frankly there is no good alternative yet.
I'm sure that's some kind of logical fallacy.. argumentum ad populum? I don't know.
But yeah I'm sure some people stuck around. They're outnumbered by bots and other fake accounts now though. The only thing reddit has today that's worth a shit is what it had before which is why Pinhead Steve sold the data.. which is getting reddit investigated by the government now too.
Well over a decade there and I left. Everything I had put in to it was overwritten and then deleted before that, all you'll find now is a few days worth of calling MicroSteve out.
This article reads pretty bizarrely to me.
Del.icio.us does absolutely seem to be the same design as reddit if you look at old screenshots, and predating Reddit by 2 years definitely makes reddit look like a bit of a ripoff. I'd argue both are just an evolution of the forum format so not too special.
Aaron Schwartz seems to take a very big place in reddit's mythos and it feels weird seeing him take up only a single paragraph - the author is only telling their own story, though, so it only makes sense if author didn't know him. It does change my perspective of reddit hearing that Steve and Alexis were aiming to be your bog-standard startup from the getgo and Scharwz only came as a later team addition.
Article feels a bit like an advertisement for investing.
Interesting article—is this person saying that they or their colleagues had the idea for Reddit and they had the founders implement it?
Also, the second half of the article is pretty baffling. What ideas has Steve Huffman brought to the table?
My sense is that Reddit today is mostly the same as it ever was. Sure, there have been some tweaks: it has a sleeker interface, better algorithms, can natively host media now. But those are not really new ideas, just obvious extensions of what the site was used for. All those employees have to find something to work on.
The only thing objectively better about today’s Reddit compared to the past is that having a larger user base allows for more niche communities to exist. Otherwise most of the big changes the company has tried to enforce have been flops or largely neutral.
It’s quite possible the author has an investment in Reddit. It simply a blog post, not journalism.
But yes this is the first I’ve heard that it was someone else’s idea.