How Reddit Was Built. Alexis Ohanian Interview
blog.mixergy.com
blog.mixergy.com
But this interview goes beyond that question. I wanted to learn where the seed of an idea comes from and how it grows from that tiny thought into a real business.
Not that that stopped slashdot from doing it with comments. It could probably have been made to work with articles as well; quite possibly everyone just thought editors were better at selecting interesting links to publish. The innovation was social rather than technical. (HN's system of articles selected primarily by voting, but with more than cursory editorial oversight, seems to be another social innovation. Did any earlier site do the same thing?)
But here's my point: I thought it was technically cool, but I didn't do anything with it. Not even a demo. So this is a striking example for me that it really matters how familiar you are with a concept, before you can start using it as a basis of inventing something else. Progress takes a long time, and proceeds in steps. There's a tantalizing possibility that, maybe, knowing this could give you a simple way to leapfrog a decade ahead...
I have said in the past that reddit's early marketing blurbs sure seemed similar to digg's. But I never really meant it to be taken as a substantial criticism. Everyone copies (and more importantly modifies) other people's ideas all the time.
It's not like google was the first search engine.
It sounds kind of weird to me that he wouldn't... and yet, for my startup, I also wasn't aware of some very similar projects (and a good thing too, or maybe I wouldn't have started)
Would they have been bought by someone else? Would they have worked out advertising models etc and become a profitable business, or something else?
Did they have a 'plan B'? Get more funding and go after more users?
We were slow to put ads on reddit, putting FederatedMedia on only the comments pages, and generating a few thousand a month from just those pageviews (a small% of our traffic).
That said, if that deal had fallen through, we'd have likely just powered on. I can't speculate whether or not we'd have gotten acquired by someone else, but I'd been discussing the idea with a couple other properties.
Maybe we would have gotten serious about selling merch sooner ;)
For reasons I hinted at in the interview, it really was the right time for an acquisition.
Disclaimer: I read comments first before clicking the link, so haven't seen the video.
We've never spoken publicly about the terms of the contract we signed with them, but it put us in good ramen-eating shape for the next year or so. In hindsight, this great deal was likely part of the wooing process. But it worked :)
The day when neither of us had to submit anything was a great one - it happened during that summer and gave us hope that the damn thing might actually work.
I don't think it's something to look at negatively when you take into consideration the judgmental nature of a consumer. Most consumers don't know or care how new a product is, if it looks inactive they won't use it. Faux-ing a small amount of activity at the start gives you a chance to set a tone and direction for user-generated content, and helps overcome the initial bias of a new site.