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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

They faked it until they made it, they created fake accounts and submitted / commented to pretend there was activity when there wasn't. A community needs people to work.

Alexis has some good stories / info on his blog: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle...

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If you want to know what the non-technical co-founder did those first couple of weeks, it was a lot of submissions under a dozen or so usernames. Fortunately, Steve & I only had to do that for a few weeks. The first bump we got in traffic was from a Paul Graham essay, which gave us a great initial community -- setting the bar rather high, actually.

edit: also, that link from my blog pretty much sums up why I think we succeeded.

Everything in kn0thing's blog is obviously spot on. However, don't underestimate what a little bit of luck can do when combined with smart + hard-working people.

I can see the fundamental flaw here. Anyone can think of a better way to solve it? I am no fan of real name policies, but this is still a horrible solution.

One of the reasons I was so excited to help Steve & Adam launch hipmunk.com was that it was a totally anti-social website. If I could run all the marketing/pr/community-etc stuff and achieve a similar result with a site that was devoid of any community, maybe we were on to something.

Fortunately, launching hipmunk was 100x easier than reddit because unlike in 2005, there are far more platforms for people to share things they like online today (reddit being one of them).

There was a certain lull point in Reddit, where it was still great for what it was, but it had lost the intellectual early adopter set but had not yet become the cultural juggernaut that it is now. Maybe it was right before the Digg exodus? I'm not quite sure of the timing, but guessing you know what I mean.

Do you have any input on what happened to take Reddit from where it was two or three years ago to where it is now?

Consistency. The power of user-created subreddits took years to really gain momentum. For the first year or so I was spending a lot of my time raising awareness for communities we'd created that seemed like obvious fits (like /r/gaming) doing things like running house ads and being a good moderator of the subreddit -- things that our awesome mods are now doing themselves.

I encourage you to subscribe to subreddits like http://truereddit.reddit.com/ if you're missing the old days. There's a wealth of great, smaller subreddits that maintain the intellectual roots. http://philosophy.reddit.com/ too!

By consistency, I mean even after Steve & I left, the team continued to maintain the course and endured a lot of ups and downs in the process. What they've done is really impressive.

I think the Digg exodus is what really pushed it over in terms of numbers.

Yup, I saw him speak.

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