How Reddit was created: ‘I wanted to make the world suck less’

http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/28/the-inside-story-on-how-reddit-was-created-i-wanted-to-make-the-world-suck-less/

by johnkoetsier • 14 years ago

13 18 14 years ago

dreamdu5t2• 14 years ago

What are we supposed to learn from this?

I love Reddit, but I find their story depressing. Everyone has fun personal projects that they make, but a lucky few will have them become wildly popular without much planning for reasons they can't foresee. I don't feel like I can learn anything from that, and it makes me feel very unlucky and that fate is largely out of my control.

chromic• 14 years ago

The article is quite superficial, so not much unless you were clueless to the beginnings of reddit. That said, a lot of things are actually out of your control. You can't make everyone like the thing you want to work on and people often don't even know what they want to see next. Its not about doing projects just because they are fun and lucking out. These guys were actively trying to make a successful product and had to pivot from their original direction.

brandoncapecci• 14 years ago

There were countless sites that copied "social news" after the decline of Digg though. All were trying to be successful and really only one succeeded.

tomhoward2• 14 years ago

Did you watch the video? If you watch it through to the end, you see the determination, conviction and sincerity that these guys have, which would have put them ahead of anyone else trying to do something similar (eg, Digg, in the long run).

No one denies that luck plays a big part in how successful any given startup will turn out to be.

But everyone can do things to make their chances of success higher, and the magnitude of that success greater, through the way they conduct themselves and the decisions they make about what they do.

dreamdu5t2• 14 years ago

You're implying that projects that aren't successful lack determination, conviction, and sincerity. This is not the case at all.

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

I wonder how much those fake users really did towards pushing reddit to it's growth spurt.

double051• 14 years ago

They spent their time populating the site by hand because ultimately they knew that's how their users would do it.

The accounts they used weren't fake, they were just the two guys building a site with a lot of test accounts.

kami8845• 14 years ago

>The accounts they used weren't fake

Uh, yeah, they were. They intentionally created _false_ accounts of people with different names to give the impression that a lot of people were already submitting content to the site.

hermaj• 14 years ago

This has always been the case on Reddit. The list of top 10 users ranked by their comment karma is made up of less than 10 actual people.

leak2• 14 years ago

So, I'm a bit confused. How is Reddit considered a success story by it's founders? Wasn't it sold off really early to Conde Nast? Didn't it only start to blast off into success-o-sphere like right after Digg started dying? Wasn't Conde Nast not providing resources to the team which, forced them to ask for donations (reddit gold) from the community to build more servers/hire? I mean, it all sounds like a big barrel of luck that it even survived.

grimboy• 14 years ago

Reddit gold is a freemium model, not donations. Are Conde Nast meant to continually bankroll something that doesn't generate profit?

SwellJoe4• 14 years ago

It was sold quite early, but for a double digit million dollar pay out. For a while, it was the biggest YC exit. It has been spun back out into an independent subsidiary, which Alexis is involved in again in an executive role (Steve could have been, too, I'm sure, but he's working on Hipmunk).

What do you consider success for fresh out of college 20-somethings, if having a few million bucks in the bank, and having built one of the biggest sites on the Internet, isn't success?

leak2• 14 years ago

I guess I was saying that a lot of things happened that were indicators that the site may have not been what it is today. I don't know how much money they have in their bank accounts but I'll bet all mine it's not millions from the reddit sale. I just get annoyed by the hype of a vision and someone be responsible for something that can't really be explained. If it really was that for them, as jay-z put it, they could create another one.

How Reddit was created: ‘I wanted to make the world suck less’

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