Not perfect, but it really was pretty damn close to 100% accurate.
884 karma · joined March 5, 2007
I trust you saw this? http://www.redditblog.com/2013/04/reflections-on-recent-bost...
http://thedrilldown.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/kevin-ros...
reddit has doubled in traffic literally every year since Steve & I launched it. Granted, it was smaller in 2010 when we left, but I've been an advisor since (and gotten up to a few other things since - like helping Steve launch hipmunk and investing/advising in a 100 or so startups) but the core reddit product is for better/worse still the same as it was when we left.
I'm excited to work with Ellen, Dan, and the entire reddit team to develop reddit with the vision Steve & I had in creating it, but with the benefit of 10 years of experience & learning from it.
One can't honestly or realistically generalize 130,000,000 people other than to say they have an internet connection and are literate.
As I said, there are half a million communities and the way it works (which sadly is lost on a lot of people -- our fault) is that one subscribes to communities (or unsubscribes) based on taste and interest. If someone doesn't want to hear from r/politics on an issue, unsubscribing (unfollows to use twitter's nomenclature) is exactly what one does.
Again, I'll point out that one can't generalize a platform with 130M people. One needn't look further than r/religion, r/christianity, r/conservative, r/islam, r/Judaism (I could go on) to find those communities.
I challenge anyone to actually use reddit for a week, subscribing to communities with content that most resonates with them (unsubscribing from the ones that don't) and not have a positive front page experience.
Have you done this?
It's not like all forum-software-innovation stopped in June 2005 when the 2 of us launched reddit to the world.
The hard part is going to be quantifying "quality of submissions" in a scalable way. We thought a lot about this and while it's not perfect, the vast majority of content on reddit across those half million communities is indeed good.
It's a fascinating problem that I hope someone can solve -- improve on Steve's hotness algorithm!
The core problem is people don't even understand how the site works (subscribe to communities you like). That's something the team is still working on improving in a non-annoying way. Mobile is going to be a big part of it, I think.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080410190800/http://reddit.com...
reddit is a platform for communities like twitter is a platform for individuals. There are a half million communities now on reddit and our onboarding experience should do a better job exposing people to the communities they love (kinda like twitter does but less ham-fisted).
e.g., There are Cleveland Browns fans who've visited reddit every day for years and don't realize there's a r/clevelandbrowns community that they'd love, not to mention r/cleveland and r/foodporn or whatever other communities they'd dig.
That's the vast majority of reddit content but we're not doing a good job exposing it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1l4aiq/reddit_is...
To wit: 2 years ago Kat was my right-hand and now she's a partner + runs outreach at YC.
That and I'm really excited to be a voice for Y Combinator (and startups) in D.C. -- in addition to just being an advocate for the open internet as a citizen.
Patreon is the next stage in the evolution. It is my belief that this platform will spur the second renaissance for creators who can at last focus entirely on their art without just one well-funded patreon (e.g., Harper Lee and To Kill A Mockingbird).