Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman explains how primary competitor Digg's controversial redesign caused users to abandon Digg and migrate to Reddit.
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Huffman: Reddit's first 100 accounts were fake profiles created by the founders
“And that's why the first hundred or so Reddit users were either characters from World of Warcraft or pieces of furniture in our living room.”
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Huffman: 2015 moderator revolt effectively shut Reddit down for two days
“All the communities on Reddit, you know, the many thousands of them are created by users and run by users that we call moderators, and they were upset, you know, for some acute issues and also just, like, just general frustration, and so they took their commun…”
What-if
Huffman: Starting Reddit over with perfect hindsight might still fail
“If I went back 10 years ago and knew everything I knew now and had to start Reddit all over again, I don't know if we could succeed.”
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Huffman: Paul Graham predicted mobile food ordering would end lines
“He said, this will be the end of lines.”
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Huffman: Never built a website before writing Reddit's first line of code
“I didn't write the first line of code until June, and I had never built a website before, and we were kind of Paul's special projects a little bit, you know, because of how we got into YC,”
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Huffman: Reddit's first real users came from Paul Graham's essay readers
“So our first real users were actually Paul Graham fans, people who were reading his essays, and that kind of set the tone for the for the early days of Reddit.”