Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

"The site will go dark on June 23rd."

(1) Two years is too little time to create a Reddit alternative (2) shutting it down in less than 30 days is really bad.

View on HN

I think both sides on "too little time" are right. It's certainly true that going slow and steady and waiting for the incumbent to show weakness is sometimes a viable strategy, and that it can take a long time for communities to grow from a handful of users to millions.

It's just that when you take $8M+ of VC money, they don't want to wait around. They want "dat hockey stick" within a couple of quarters. I think it's wise and honorable for Imzy to recognize that they're unable to satisfy those conditions and bow out instead of continuing to blow investor money and keep the staff on a dead-end job.

Imzy is offering data export, which is unusually good for a shutdown of such an early-stage startup.

Reddit took off within months of its launch. ~30 days to download data is pretty standard.

Reddit spammed fake comments for months in order to gain traction...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-reddit-got-hu...

(I'm not proposing Vice as a great source, but it's the first thing that came up on google.)

I first checked them out the day they opened (July 05), and was using them daily by January 06. There were definitely real people and a growing community by then.

I wouldn't attribute their success to fake accounts, although the fake accounts were probably necessary to seed the community. Rather, they took off once they added comments (Dec 05, IIRC). It's the same story as Whatsapp (messaging), YouTube (related videos), and AirBnB (pro photos): there was one feature that they really needed for product/market fit, and once they added it, people started using the product on their own.

Steve Huffman himself attributes early success to the spam campaign.

Yep, because otherwise the site would have seemed like a ghost town despite growing because of the 1-9-90 rule. They had to keep submissions going until they attracted the 10% of users that makes a community truly come alive.

Reddit gained traction because its frontpage was accessible to everyone (no signup) and it updated more frequently than Digg. The stuff you read on reddit turned up on Digg later and slashdot days later. Eventually you stopped going to Digg because you'd read everything already on reddit.

Last I heard (in 2016), reddit was not yet profitable, but were working towards it.

Feel free to provide them another round of funding. 2 years is plenty of time.

Agreed about two years. I feel they jumped the gun to make it into a business when it was just a site.

Reddit was already sold to Conde Nast after 16 months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com