

How Reddit Was Built. Alexis Ohanian Interview - schindyguy
http://blog.mixergy.com/no-reddit-didnt-copy-digg-heres-how-it-was-built-with-alexis-ohanian/

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SamAtt
I never knew there were people out there who thought Reddit copied Digg. In
fact, I'm not sure anyone can copy anyone in this case. It isn't like having
people vote a news item up or down is a revolutionary idea in and of itself.
What makes Digg, Reddit and yes Hacker News special is the community that was
built around them. That, imho, is the innovation in these sites. Founders
creating an enviornment in which a vibrant community can flourish.

~~~
10ren
Articles being voted up/down _is_ kind of a revolutionary idea, in that it
could have been developed years earlier, but it wasn't. Why not? (maybe people
tried it, it didn't take off and so we didn't hear about it)

~~~
philh
One factor might have been ajax. Being able to vote without having to reload
the page is a big deal, but it's only relatively recently that the techniques
to do that have become common knowledge.

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?)

~~~
10ren
I worked out how to do this with an invisible 0-size frame, over 10 years ago.
From another frame, you put data in the invisible frame (in a form, or as an
URL) and submit it; then read the data back. Of course, it was awkward, and
maybe there were some cross-browser issues (I don't recall, but such issues
were the norm).

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...

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10ren
_Paul Graham, with all his knowledge of the industry, didn’t know that Digg
was out there either?_

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)

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greendestiny
The interviewers disbelief that food money is so important reminds me of my
first experience with startups. When I was an undergrad I worked for a doomed
startup, and I remember with all the various government and other sources of
support out there, absolutely noone was willing to pay for rent or food. I
mean the money had to specifically be for hardware or the like, but the
biggest hurdle is the day to day money. Even living with your parents you need
to buy some of your own food. It's not in the least bit trivial.

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axod
Cool interview, some really interesting points. I'd be interested to know what
Steve+Alexis think would have happened if Wired hadn't bought Reddit.

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?

~~~
kn0thing
We'd become ramen profitable from our licensing work with Conde Nast before
the acquisition and had enough to live (modestly) on for another year.

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.

~~~
shafqat
Can you elaborate on the licensing work with Conde Nast? What was that and how
did you get to the? Thanks!

Disclaimer: I read comments first before clicking the link, so haven't seen
the video.

~~~
kn0thing
We built lipstick.com (now <http://weheartgossip.com>) for them. I received an
email one day from their head of biz dev, he'd heard about reddit through a
mutual friend. I called him that day and we spoke for a good while about an
idea he had for a celebrity gossip version of reddit. I told him it sounded
like a fun project to work on and things went from there.

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 :)

------
Fuca
i will watch this tomorrow, hope he explains how he faked the community at the
beginning

~~~
kn0thing
I wasn't asked. But Steve and I had a bunch of usernames we'd log into for the
first few weeks to submit cool links. I must have had about 10 that I'd cycle
through (such is the life of the non-programming cofounder in the first month
of a social news site).

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.

------
brlewis
Does the video mention Lisp?

~~~
arebop
No, it's mostly about what founders can learn about startups from reddit's
experience.

~~~
beza1e1
Writing your WebApp in Lisp or another trendy languages like Scala, Clojure,
Erlang, etc. is a nice story for viral marketing, because the communities
around those languages are desperatly looking for "killer applications" and
"success stories". That's a lesson i learned from reddit.

~~~
mhartl
True, but this only works if you then switch to Python and get all the
Lisp/Scala/Clojure/Erlang programmers' knickers in a bunch. (I'm not English,
by the way; it's just that the Brits have a gift for odd metaphors.)

