all that matters in reddit history to me is the turning point when Digg botched their v4 design execution and caused a huge exodus to Reddit, who was struggling at the time. Changed everything
This is totally incorrect, BTW. Our traffic was already double Digg's at that point. Their v4 failure caused a noticeable but small bump in traffic.
What do you think made people stick in those early days without much happening on the site?
Mostly word of mouth.
> Was it just google traffic?
Google was a good source of traffic, but I seem to recall it being only 10-20% of new users.
> What do you think made people stick in those early days without much happening on the site?
The community and content. Which is hopefully what gets them to stay now. :)
The first announcement was by Paul Graham to comp.lang.lisp. AFAICT on that first visit, the only active users were the two founders (spez and kn0thing), PG, and spez's girlfriend, along with their sockpuppets. It was pretty boring while it was voting-only, but they kept at it, and once they added comments they got a small but fairly active userbase. The initial users were very technical, usually early-adopter programmers, and it drew heavily out of the Lisp/PL-theory crowd. I think that Reddit's YC batchmates also brought along some users, eg. there were a bunch of Semantic Web folks that presumably knew Aaron Schwartz.
I had first heard about reddit in the summer of 2005 while holding my first ever job as a programmer doing python work, which I would consider as a "tech circle". I remember that I was a little bummed when the front page first got rid of technical-related content and forced me to go to programming.reddit.com instead. That and the fact that people like Paul Graham were still being judged based on their programming merit not on any crazy start-upy valuations certainly made reddit a very techie community in the beginning, at least from my point of view. And I almost forgot, many people were actually pretty upset when reddit switched from Lisp to Python (in December 2005, I even wrote on my blog about it), because python felt "less pure". Funny times.
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=digg%2C%20reddit&cmp...
It could be that Digg "power users" moving to Reddit helped it gain even more traction.
I know that isn't entirely true, but yes, for the most part reddit's popularity in the press exploded afterwards because the press needed something new to write about.
http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_score_reddit....
http://minimaxir.com/img/reddit-statistics/all_comments_redd...
In fact, that was a main reason cited be people at the time as to why they liked reddit over other options -- because we didn't artificially inflate page views by forcing reloads.
Jul 2010,"7,275,451","279,891,841"
Jan 2011,"12,284,583","590,531,477"
Feb 2011,"12,654,137","594,987,855"
Mar 2011,"16,925,815","1,133,827,794"Fortunately you had just turned up a bunch of new servers just days before.
We call that "capacity planning". ;)
Personally, I don't buy too deep into v4 causing Digg's death. It certainly helped, but stuff like seeing "mrbabyman" and a dozen other power users controlling all the content became tiresome well before v4. Reddit was a little refreshing as I could post in a subreddit and have my content get a fair shake at being seen. That's still true today. My blog and my old webcomic have both been at the top of /r/comics and /r/android. The traffic and exposure was very nice and I think the upvote process is mostly fair. With sites like Digg or Slashdot there's zero chance my stuff would have gotten any exposure.
And when it comes to uniques, my memory's pretty foggy, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Digg actually had more than we did at that point.
That said, you're absolutely correct that we were far from struggling, except in terms of getting approval from Conde Nast to buy more AWS power, or to hire, or to get any support whatsoever from their ad sales team.
[0] http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/08/28/kevin-rose-resp...
[1] https://github.com/drunken-economist/reddit-10-year-data/blo...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/d8d1f/dear_entire_mai...
My recollection was that when we visited them shortly after, we were shocked to learn just how much bigger we were. But we might both be right. It was a while ago.
What I remember Digg being shocked about when they invited us over for lunch was that they filled two huge floors and we filled... my Toyota Yaris.
Digg v4 forced me to take a deeper look at reddit and since then my life has gone downhill :)
Not sure this makes sense in context. They fucked up I concur but I don't think snafu fits the situation.