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Comment by markkat | Hacker News Reader

I never read advice books, but I think I'll make an exception here.

If you have a moment, I'm curious, at what point did you feel that Reddit was starting to run on its own steam, and did it happen before or after you expected it to?

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Well, when Steve and I got about a month into the site, neither one of us had to vote or submit links one day and we knew, "holy shit, this might work." But it wasn't until much later, maybe a year or so into user-create subreddits, that we really saw it chugging along. Maybe around the time /r/IAMA was created, because early subreddits like proggit and /r/gaming were made by me and Steve (as well as HEAVILY promoted on site with house ads, esp in the case of the latter, before it got enough momentum as its own community).

When something like /r/IAMA spawned, we knew that all the work we'd done to curate our own Ask Me Anything interviews with celebs (we took the top 10 questions and asked them on camera -- here's one of the early ones we shot w Adam Savage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8jqea8R-bE) was no longer necessary. The community at IAMA could do it themselves.

Subreddits have always been the 'secret' reddits continued growth and I hope that as a platform, we can keep expanding in to all kinds of online communities.

e.g., my gf just turned me on to /r/blackgirls

Thanks for the response. I've always been impressed by the way you've busted ass for these sites and didn't let doing so turn you into a goof.

I think as interested I am in what you did, I'd be just as interested in what you decided not to do.

Also, I wonder if the secret sauce to subreddits is the user 'buy in'. Once you've got a Reddit, you want people to visit it.

Anecdotally, I've always asked subreddit owners/mods I've met about this. Turns out many of them obsess over stats just like Steve and I used to (and shortly thereafter, Chris, who built our first real-time stat engine that was both blessing and curse because of how we obsessed at times). The more we could do to make redditors give a damn, just like we did, the better things got.

Steve is one of the most reluctant feature guys I've met and while it's frustrating at time for a guy with too many ideas like me, it's so important to know what not to build into a product -- it makes him such a great programmer. So creating a subreddit was dead-simple. No bullshit. The hard part was going to come (actually growing it) and we could still do more to encourage new subreddit owners and give them tools to help get the word out (we've long promoted user created subreddits using house-ads that I'd design, but that doesn't scale). There are even subreddits like /r/newreddit that redditors made to promote, you guessed it, new subreddits.

So - 'buy in' for subreddits was in part by setting the tone well with the ones we created, like /r/programming, before it was open to users -- this created an unintended air of importance the day we launched it. "Subreddits: now not just for co-founders to create!"

I've been really impressed by local subreddits of late, esp in surprising markets like /r/Grandrapids for instance - there's something awesome happening here: http://www.reddit.com/r/grandrapids/

Thanks. That's definitely some good advice, and stuff to think on. As a user I remember being initially taken aback by subreddits, but it was a brilliant move for those reasons.

I'm already following r/michigan, but I'll check r/grandrapids out. So many people say good things about GR. I'm in Ann Arbor, yet I never get over there.

Rad. This is a bit dated, but the to-do/-eat/-drink list was all sourced from /r/grandrapids redditors: http://www.hipmunk.com/guides/usa/michigan/grand_rapids

Researching it made me want to go!

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