
Reddit Case Study: How personality impacts success - Sam_Odio
http://www.startup-review.com/blog/reddit-case-study-how-personality-impacts-product-success.php
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pg
This article gets a few things right and a few dramatically wrong. Besides the
obvious howler that I invented Lisp, the major mistakes are:

1\. That the controversy over switching from Lisp to Python was a "turning
point" for Reddit's traffic. Such a minor controversy wouldn't have generated
sustained traffic. And indeed when you look at Reddit's lifetime traffic
graph, there aren't any visible inflection points; it is overall a pretty
smooth upward curve.

2\. The reason Digg got more traffic was not some subtle difference in SEO
strategies, but simply that (1) they started several months earlier, and (2)
they promoted the site energetically to their enormous core audience of 15
year old gamers.

3\. The reason it seems from talking to the Reddit founders that "success was
not so difficult" is that Steve and Alexis are such understated guys. Simple
design always looks like it was easy. Actually they worked quite hard.

~~~
AF
Paul just how much impact do you think that Reddit being initially implemented
in Lisp had?

I mean, sure, relative numbers of Lisp users might have been pretty small, but
the very fact that it was written in Lisp may have gotten fans and detractors
to at least hear about the site (probably the hardest thing to do), and then
once they checked it out start using it.

So how important do you think that was to initial popularity? Is implementing
a site in an obscure yet much-discussed language worth it just for publicity
reasons?

~~~
pg
I don't think it made that much difference. There are probably 100 people who
are such hardcore Lisp fans that they'd become users of any web app written in
it, but not 1000.

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nostrademons
It's not a bad article, but there's a particularly cringeworthy mistake in it:

"Another event that aided the growth of Reddit was a blog post about Reddit
changing the Reddit site from LISP (originally created by Paul Graham) to
Python."

Oh? McCarthy might have something to say about that... ;-)

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mojuba
_[Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman] were able to create the illusion of more
contributors by submitting articles under different user names_

I'm trying to imagine some entrepreneur who opens a new grocery store and asks
his family members to go in and out the store all day long pretending they are
customers :)

~~~
vlad
I heard a story about an author getting all her family and friends to buy all
copies of a new book she wrote from an initial test run of all local stores.
By selling out so fast, the publisher ordered a lot of books nationwide and
the book became popular partially due to the fact that it was available in
every book store the second time around. What do you think?

~~~
mojuba
Well, a possibility of cheating is a signal of a breach in the system. How
exactly that applies to Reddit or to the publishing business must be, I
suppose, some complicated social theory.

