I don’t really want to listen to the podcast, but I do seem to recall that Reddit drew heavy inspiration from the delicious popular page. digg was talked about a bunch but much smaller…<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389494" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389494</a>
Listened to this episode on a road trip yesterday and really enjoyed it. If you do a "part 2", I'm curious to hear more details about how they pulled off the growth of Reddit, broadening from an initial niche community into a wider collection of communities. Thanks jl and clevy!
Steve Huffman, aka 'spez'?<p>Wasn't he the guy who got caught anonymously rewriting user comments?<p>Secretly editing user comments, without a trace. As CEO.<p>...<p>Seems weird that this hasn't been brought up yet - maybe it was covered in the podcast?
Most of social platforms are nothing but feature AOL back in the day. They got a different look and feel.
Some are cross over of ICQ and AOL (WhatsApp)
AOL messenger
Chat rooms (discord, telegram)
Twitter is nothing but public chat room.
I’ve often wondered how the Reddit cofounders feel about selling so early. At the time they cashed out, they made single digit millions. If they had held out, they would have made 100-1000x.<p>Edit: After googling, the short answer is they regret it. Both founders do mental gymnastics to try to manage their regret, but it's apparent they regret it. Sources below.<p>My personal takeaway is to try to hold on to some percentage even when selling out e.g. rolling over 30% of your shares into the new entity.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6qlUG3EbtU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6qlUG3EbtU</a>
<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/alexis-ohanian-reflects-on-selling-reddit-for-10-million.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/alexis-ohanian-reflects-on-s...</a>
I once emailed Steve with some questions about software technology choices and architecture for a new project I was on, in the early days of Reddit, and he replied with some advice.
When looking up Digg on wikipedia I found this gem:<p><pre><code> Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose:
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling
together features from more popular sites and departing from
the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
</code></pre>
Apparently nobody can resist the allure of VC meddling.
<a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...</a><p>This is an old article with a similarly themed discussion. I'll have to listen to the pod cast to see whether anything changed in the retelling.
I ask myself on a weekly basis when old.reddit.com will disappear. And there is nothing more cruel than the new Reddit, UI-wise. Even Twitter's "threading" of conversations appears to make more sense, even though I have still not figured out how it works.
The story of Reddit would make a good TV show, kind of "The Social Network" crossed with "The Crown". So many ups and downs, and many cross overs to other things happing in tech and the wider world. You could easily fill three or four seasons.<p>"The front page of the Internet"
I didn't listen to the entire podcast, but I'm sure he didn't mention a single thing about Aaron Swartz one of the co-founders.<p>Edit: at the 34:00 minute mark he mentions him.
I tried Reddit for a while but overall the site is not that different from any incarnation of Twitter. The main difference is individuals vs. subreddits, and if you're careful selecting interesting individuals on Twitter / interesting subreddits on Reddit, you can often find a fair amount of useful content, but the effort is barely worth the bother, it feels like looking for needles in a haystack.<p>If you're just passively absorbing content on either platform both are equally poor quality, not all that different from watching MSNBC, CNN or FOX - i.e. heavily gamed by advertisers and propagandists.<p>What Twitter and Reddit also have in common is a low-quality in-house search engine and a restricted API for search, which I assume is an attempt to control exposure of content by administrators, subreddit moderators, etc.<p>Twitter: "Please note that Twitter's search service and, by extension, the Search API is not meant to be an exhaustive source of Tweets. Not all Tweets will be indexed or made available via the search interface."<p>Reddit: "You can search subreddits and posts, but comments aren’t available to search via the public API."<p>They appear to want to <i>feed</i> users content algorithmically based on some profile/agenda, and not just let users go wandering around <i>finding</i> content based on their own criteria.
I don't see a transcript and I'm not going to listen to a podcast so I'll just ask here: does he discuss how they seeded their site with fraudulent accounts/posts?
Step 1: convince your main competitor to piss of its entire user base.<p>Step 2: ? <- could be interesting to see if they did something special here<p>Step 3: get Obama and other major celebrities to establish you as a media company brand.
This is a nice time to remind everyone that Aaron Swartz died while fighting for a freer internet and a freer world. He is, by Paul Graham, considered a founder of reddit but is rarely mentioned in these stories.<p>Instead of trying to go for broke and grind till he could cash out, Aaron put his skin in the game for what the internet should become. Which gets more relevant everyday that the internet megacorps consolidate power, control information, and shape the public discourse. Reddit is one such site. They should be embarrassed by how they dismissed the ethical dilemmas of operating reddit in favor of making a profit.