> ... we wanted to fund Steve and Alexis, so if their idea was bad, they'd have to work on something else
> There needed to be something like del.icio.us/popular, but designed for sharing links instead of being a byproduct of saving them. So I called Steve and Alexis and said that we liked them, just not their idea, so we'd fund them if they'd work on something else.
So PG is saying the seminal idea behind Reddit wasn't even conceived by the original founders? If so, it's not clear to me the post's concluding sentence ('Steve is not out of ideas yet') offers much solace.
But I disagree that the idea responsible for Reddit's success is link-sharing. I think Reddit's success has a lot more to do with the ease of creating a dedicated discussion forum for any given topic simply by navigating to `reddit.com/r/[topic]`. Wikipedia already uses this approach for article creation, but there wasn't anything like that for discussion forums (in the US at least[1])
[1] Baidu Tieba preceded Reddit by 2 years, and Reddit is commonly referred to in China as the 'American Tieba' (e.g.: https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2024-03-21/doc-inapaxhk7062...)