Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q Um, in July of 2015, Reddit just goes nuts. It's just, moderators start to shut down subreddits. Um, what was going on? You were at Hitmonk. You're not at Reddit. Did you, like, check out Reddit and start to notice crazy stuff happening?
A Well, so, Reddit, a couple of things were happening over the course of 2015. Um, Reddit had just raised fifty million dollars, um, and the CEO at that time, Yushan, basically had a midlife crisis and left abruptly. And so, Ellen Pau took over, and Reddit went through a series of crises that year, mostly content related on the site. The, the toxic users Had kind of gotten out of control. And, and so it's just kind of one thing after another, and Reddit just getting killed in the press, and everybody just feeling like, what is going on? And at the same time, Alexis and I were kind of repairing things. I don't, I don't remember exactly how it started. I know from my point of view, I just had this thought of like, hey, where's my best friend?
AI assessment note: “Reddit went through a series of crises that year, mostly content related”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So, so you go and you meet Paul, and what, what do you start doing? You start, like, brainstorming with him?
A Basically, yes, and so we were talking about, like, things we could build, and there's a couple of websites that we both liked at the time, one of which was Delicious, and so Delicious Uh, it was a social bookmarking website, and there was a, a page on Delicious called Popular. And on Delicious slash Popular, you could see things that were being bookmarked that day that were popular, and things that were being bookmarked more often would hang around a little longer. The, the thing is, when you bookmark something, it's because you can't finish it in one sitting. So it's reference material, it's, it's things you can't get through, things you want to come back to later. So Delicious Popular was basically this really cool index of the most boring content on the internet on any given day. And so, uh, and then we also left Slashdot. Slashdot, news for nerds, stuff that matters. It's still online. And Slashdot had this incredible community. You know, you go there for news every day, but really the magic of Slash. lived in the comments section. And so the idea was, can we take the, um, mechanics of Delicious, user submitted, and, and kind of this top, billboard top 40 effect, and combine it with good content and a good community. And that was the genesis of Reddit.
AI assessment note: “Basically, yes, and so we were talking about, like, things we could build”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So how did you get the word out? I mean, how did you actually get real users?
A Well, so Paul did that for us. He, um, was like, hey, you guys need to launch, you need to launch, you need to launch, and I was like, okay, we're almost ready to launch. And then he wrote an essay where he linked to Reddit without telling us. Um, I had my, my, my computer, and then I had a little screen next to it where I could see the error log. Of, of things going by, and all of a sudden, one day, it just starts growing really fast, and I was just like, what is going on? And what happened is Paul just launched us, and so that's basically how it happened. So our first, uh, real users were actually, uh, Paul Graham fans, people who were reading his essays, and that kind of set the tone for the, uh, for the early days of Reddit.
AI assessment note: “our first, uh, real users were actually, uh, Paul Graham fans”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q After Paul Graham wrote that essay and linked to Reddit, was that, is it the moment where it took off?
A No, no. That was the moment when we started getting real traffic. Uh, it was in August is when we started getting real users. Um, I remember that day. We used to, Alexis and I were submitting all the content, and we had a rule back then, um, that all of the content on the front page had to be less than 24 hours old. And the front page was 25 links long. So if there were fewer than 25 links submitted that day, there would be fewer than 25 links on the front page, independent of quality. And, and so sometimes we'd go to the site, and there'd be like seven links there, and it would just be white space, and so I had taken a day off for whatever reason, and that late afternoon, I remember thinking, shoot, I haven't thought about Reddit all day. Um, I bet the front page is completely dried up. It's completely blank, and when I, when I checked, it was full of content from usernames that I'd never seen before, and so that was the day when We realize that this is a thing. These are real users. We're not just propping it up with our fake accounts anymore, and, and that, that was a really special day. I, I still get really kind of excited when I think about it, because that's when our motivation changed, and, and, and that's when Reddit was really born, I think.
AI assessment note: “No, no. That was the moment when we started getting real traffic.”
