The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 21 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Rea: The r/videos subreddit serves as frontline for internet virality
“Reddit videos, at least at the time, and still to this day can be a sort of frontline for what's going to go viral on the internet.”
Rea: YouTube's algorithm prioritizes videos getting sudden external traffic surges
“And the algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, when you suddenly and massively just get an influx of views from an outside source, it's going to prioritize you in the algorithm.”
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…”
Ohanian: Paul Graham is terrible at naming companies
“PG is terrible at naming companies, but when he nailed it with that phrase, it was special.”
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.”
Ohanian: Regrets early Reddit sale financially, but the money was life-changing
“So I regret from a business standpoint, yes, we sold it early, but I have no regret whatsoever as a decision because I got to make that phone call.”
Huffman: Digg was five times bigger than Reddit before a fatal redesign
“Dig was five times bigger than us. They released a new version of their software that was so Disliked by users that the users came to Reddit.”
Andrew Rea: First Babish Video Was Made Specifically for Reddit's Food Subreddit
“And I made the video specifically for Reddit, for the food subreddit, because I had been posting there.”
Ohanian: 300 million people visit Reddit each month
“Consider three hundred million people will visit Reddit this month. That's almost as big as the population in the United States.”
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,”
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.”
Early Reddit required all front-page links to be under 24 hours old
“Alexis and I were submitting all the content, and we had a rule back then 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 …”
Reddit couldn't afford snoo.com because $4,000 was one-third of its funding
“Unfortunately, snoo.com cost 4000 dollars, which we didn't have. It was a third of our fund, so couldn't afford it.”
Ohanian: Reddit launched after only three weeks of development
“We actually only worked on it for about three weeks before we launched it.”
Ohanian: Reddit founders received $12,000 from Paul Graham for three months
“And this was a chance to basically get 12,000 dollars from an investor we really trusted to just try something for three months.”
Huffman: Reddit co-founders attended therapy together in 2015 to reconcile
“And we actually saw my therapist saw him together.”
Citron: Discord's initial Reddit post yielded a couple hundred signups
“And from that post, we got, I think, a couple hundred signups. Maybe 50 people really started using it, and that was the day we say we launched, because, like, people we never knew were now coming and inviting their friends, and yeah.”