How Reddit Was Built. Alexis Ohanian Interview

http://blog.mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-was-built-with-alexis-ohanian/

by schindyguy • 17 years ago

88 22 17 years ago

blog.mixergy.com

SamAtt• 17 years ago

I never knew there were people out there who thought Reddit copied Digg. In fact, I'm not sure anyone can copy anyone in this case. It isn't like having people vote a news item up or down is a revolutionary idea in and of itself. What makes Digg, Reddit and yes Hacker News special is the community that was built around them. That, imho, is the innovation in these sites. Founders creating an enviornment in which a vibrant community can flourish.

AndrewWarner• 17 years ago

In a previous Mixergy interview, someone with inside knowledge suggested that Reddit copied Digg. It's been suggested in other places too, so we cleared it up.

But this interview goes beyond that question. I wanted to learn where the seed of an idea comes from and how it grows from that tiny thought into a real business.

baddox• 17 years ago

There's no way reddit copied digg. Sure it's feasible that they were inspired by the idea, but the sites are fundamentally quite different. Digg.com is just a chronological feed of stories that have fulfilled the front-page promotion requirements. Reddit, on the other hand, is an actual ranking of stories, so an extremely popular story stays on the front page longer and gets higher up on the page.

vaksel• 17 years ago

even if it did copy digg, who cares?

10ren3• 17 years ago

Articles being voted up/down is kind of a revolutionary idea, in that it could have been developed years earlier, but it wasn't. Why not? (maybe people tried it, it didn't take off and so we didn't hear about it)

philh• 17 years ago

One factor might have been ajax. Being able to vote without having to reload the page is a big deal, but it's only relatively recently that the techniques to do that have become common knowledge.

Not that that stopped slashdot from doing it with comments. It could probably have been made to work with articles as well; quite possibly everyone just thought editors were better at selecting interesting links to publish. The innovation was social rather than technical. (HN's system of articles selected primarily by voting, but with more than cursory editorial oversight, seems to be another social innovation. Did any earlier site do the same thing?)

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

Actually kuro5hin.com did the same thing several years before.

I have said in the past that reddit's early marketing blurbs sure seemed similar to digg's. But I never really meant it to be taken as a substantial criticism. Everyone copies (and more importantly modifies) other people's ideas all the time.

It's not like google was the first search engine.

brlewis• 17 years ago

Does the video mention Lisp?

arebop• 17 years ago

No, it's mostly about what founders can learn about startups from reddit's experience.

beza1e1• 17 years ago

Writing your WebApp in Lisp or another trendy languages like Scala, Clojure, Erlang, etc. is a nice story for viral marketing, because the communities around those languages are desperatly looking for "killer applications" and "success stories". That's a lesson i learned from reddit.

kn0thing4• 17 years ago

I really should start trying harder to mention Lisp in every interview. Heh.

axod• 17 years ago

Cool interview, some really interesting points. I'd be interested to know what Steve+Alexis think would have happened if Wired hadn't bought Reddit.

Would they have been bought by someone else? Would they have worked out advertising models etc and become a profitable business, or something else?

Did they have a 'plan B'? Get more funding and go after more users?

kn0thing4• 17 years ago

We'd become ramen profitable from our licensing work with Conde Nast before the acquisition and had enough to live (modestly) on for another year.

We were slow to put ads on reddit, putting FederatedMedia on only the comments pages, and generating a few thousand a month from just those pageviews (a small% of our traffic).

That said, if that deal had fallen through, we'd have likely just powered on. I can't speculate whether or not we'd have gotten acquired by someone else, but I'd been discussing the idea with a couple other properties.

Maybe we would have gotten serious about selling merch sooner ;)

For reasons I hinted at in the interview, it really was the right time for an acquisition.

shafqat• 17 years ago

Can you elaborate on the licensing work with Conde Nast? What was that and how did you get to the? Thanks!

Disclaimer: I read comments first before clicking the link, so haven't seen the video.

10ren3• 17 years ago

Paul Graham, with all his knowledge of the industry, didn’t know that Digg was out there either?

It sounds kind of weird to me that he wouldn't... and yet, for my startup, I also wasn't aware of some very similar projects (and a good thing too, or maybe I wouldn't have started)

greendestiny• 17 years ago

The interviewers disbelief that food money is so important reminds me of my first experience with startups. When I was an undergrad I worked for a doomed startup, and I remember with all the various government and other sources of support out there, absolutely noone was willing to pay for rent or food. I mean the money had to specifically be for hardware or the like, but the biggest hurdle is the day to day money. Even living with your parents you need to buy some of your own food. It's not in the least bit trivial.

Fuca• 17 years ago

i will watch this tomorrow, hope he explains how he faked the community at the beginning

kn0thing4• 17 years ago

I wasn't asked. But Steve and I had a bunch of usernames we'd log into for the first few weeks to submit cool links. I must have had about 10 that I'd cycle through (such is the life of the non-programming cofounder in the first month of a social news site).

The day when neither of us had to submit anything was a great one - it happened during that summer and gave us hope that the damn thing might actually work.

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

Are you saying that's a bad thing? Getting traction is extremely challenging. Most startups reliant on UGC do this, in the past we've done it with Amazon MT too.

I don't think it's something to look at negatively when you take into consideration the judgmental nature of a consumer. Most consumers don't know or care how new a product is, if it looks inactive they won't use it. Faux-ing a small amount of activity at the start gives you a chance to set a tone and direction for user-generated content, and helps overcome the initial bias of a new site.

How Reddit Was Built. Alexis Ohanian Interview

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