Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit’s founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.
Discovered through https://tldr.tech/, a daily technology briefing newsletter.
Interesting article—is this person saying that they or their colleagues had the idea for Reddit and they had the founders implement it?
Also, the second half of the article is pretty baffling. What ideas has Steve Huffman brought to the table?
My sense is that Reddit today is mostly the same as it ever was. Sure, there have been some tweaks: it has a sleeker interface, better algorithms, can natively host media now. But those are not really new ideas, just obvious extensions of what the site was used for. All those employees have to find something to work on.
The only thing objectively better about today’s Reddit compared to the past is that having a larger user base allows for more niche communities to exist. Otherwise most of the big changes the company has tried to enforce have been flops or largely neutral.
It’s quite possible the author has an investment in Reddit. It simply a blog post, not journalism.
But yes this is the first I’ve heard that it was someone else’s idea.