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Comment by drspacemonkey | Hacker News Reader

According to kn0thing, it's a shame, "but so it goes". And then there's the implication that they're all sitting back and enjoying popcorn while Reddit consumes itself.

http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3bwgjf/riama...

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What's really sad is that reddit and Alexis were, arguably, the most successful Y-Combinator startup, and now they've fallen by the wayside as cronyism and personal agendas take over. Alexis let this happen, though. Not that I blame him, I'd have taken the money too.

I'm not sure by which objective measure that would be true besides potentially being the most visited by consumers and having the most cultural-currency. From a business perspective, they are far from being the most successful and I'm guessing the last round of funding came with quite a bit of goals that needed to be met including getting the community under control and sanitizing it for mainstream America.

By far and away, Airbnb is the most successful Y-Combinator startup. It's not a close race between Reddit and Airbnb. After that is Dropbox and Stripe perhaps. I don't think Reddit ever quite stacked up to these types of companies in terms of potential. Reddit is a link-aggregator, the very definition of a poor business opportunity (they don't own anything, and hardly control anything on their own site).

Airbnb is carrying a $25 billion valuation, and has a legitimate shot at justifying it in the coming years. They own their segment like an eBay or Uber, their network effect has won.

Was Reddit once the top start-up out of Y-Combinator, years ago? I'm skeptical of that having ever been true as well.

Heroku?

Heroku was acquired for $212mm. Not even close to the valuation of AirBNB.

Reddit was part of the first batch of YC and was sold for a large amount for Conde Nast, so it makes sense that at that point in time they were the most successful.

Although they're really really really not by today's standards, as you point out.

reddit was the first to release anything online[0]. It's probably fair to say at that point, they were the most successful. I think it's arguable that reddit is still the most successful of those, though Loopt may have been acquired for more money. Here's what happened to the rest:

* Memamp - desktop search: failed to launch, remaining founder hired by reddit

* Infogami - something between a blog and a wiki: merged with reddit, became reddit wiki

* Firecrawl - security software: pivoted and became TextPayMe - mobile payments: acquihired by Amazon, merged in to Amazon Payments

* Loopt - mobile location sharing: acquired by Green Dot for $43.4 million

* Kiko - online calendar: launched shortly before Google Calendar, sold to Tucows for about $250k

* Clickfacts - advertising fraud detection: operated independently for years; now appears defunct

* Simmery - can't find anything on what this company was making: defunct

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/vJmLVd9lJyk/1...

Seems another business model for the internet is : Create authentic community, sell out community to corporate highest bidder who can then eliminate unwanted controversial discussion. Reddit could have monetized like craigslist and made tons of money. Idiots.

I'm sure someone from reddit is reading this on it's old second cousin.

Enjoy my special occasion popcorn /u/kn0thing

http://i.imgur.com/6qa9K4R.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rZ8f3Bx6Po

10 years of reddit. Funny that 10 years of reddit gold is equivalent to 1 hour of Pao's $600/hour rate. That was before she was CEO.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-ban...

I think it's more like a "haters gonna hate" type of comment. Whatever kn0thing says, it won't be good enough to placate the masses with their pitchforks so the best thing to do is sit back and wait till it all blows over. Generally, reddit has very short term institutional memory, by next week new users and admins will be like "Victoria who?!"

Seems very tone deaf. He had to know saying something like that would only stoke things more.

Didn't people say similar things about Digg's short-term collective memory right before their ... "mishap"?

I'd say people who think Diggs change was anything similar to the current reddit changes has a very short memory.

Nature of the changes != collective memory span of the community.

Nature of the changes is what made Diggs mishap matter. The attention span didn't matter because people were gone before they stopped caring.

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