Opinion
Huffman: Digg failed by neglecting its community and chasing Twitter
“I think Digg, Digg seems to be catering to the wrong crowd. Either they're, ah, acquiescing to investor pressure or, you know, just trying to change their product too much. Maybe they're trying to compete with Twitter too hard. But what they're not focusing on…”
Insight
Huffman: Site speed was Reddit's only reliable traffic driver
“The only consistent thing we could do to drive traffic was make Reddit faster. Because sometimes we'd add a lot of features and traffic would go down. Sometimes we'd stagnate for a month or two and traffic would go up. And we're always just like, who knows, le…”
What-if
Huffman: Reddit might not have survived the 2008 recession independently
“Yeah, I, you know, I wish I still owned Reddit now, and had owned it for the last four or five years, but it would have, for everything to have gone right, for us to have the stomach to survive that economy, I mean, who knows, like, Kanye Nast's umbrella helpe…”
Assertion Partly supported
Huffman: Reddit is crushing Digg and is nearly twice its size
“Well, Reddit is crushing Dig now. I think they're almost twice as large as Dig... In traffic... And uniques per month and page views per month. Or is my understanding, you know, I haven't, I don't have direct access to Reddit numbers anymore, but from what the…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Huffman: A 10% speed increase boosted Reddit page views by 10%
“If we made the site go faster by 10%, page use would go up by 10%.”
Insight
Huffman: Long headlines and minimal censorship drove community bonding
“Allowing users to have really long headlines, for example, was one thing that we did that, that other sites didn't, or, you know, not censoring swear words, or, you know, not censoring anything to the extent that we could get away with it, allows the community…”
Disclosure
Huffman: Reddit allowed all non-spam content without tailoring the platform
“To a large extent, it's anything goes. As long as it's not spam, most content will survive. And so that was one of the big philosophical differences between Reddit and Hacker News is, is we didn't want to remove content or we didn't want to tailor the site to …”
Insight
Huffman: Taking outside capital motivates founders by making it harder to quit
“Taking money from other people is, is a great motivator. Especially for me, it would have been tough, or I should say, it would have been easy for me to walk away from Hipmunk at any point. And I'd be like, Adam, you know, hey, this isn't working out. Let's ta…”
Opinion
Huffman: He dislikes the lack of viewpoint diversity on parts of Reddit
“It's not the content that I don't like. I guess it's the amount, or it's the lack of different opinions on some parts of Reddit.”
Insight
Huffman: Reddit avoided centralized moderation because it does not scale
“And one of the decisions that we made on Reddit is that we don't want to be moderators. It's, it doesn't scale very well.”
Assertion Supported
Huffman: Paul Graham asked Reddit to build Hacker News first
“Paul, Paul had approached us before building Hacker News and said, Hey, can you guys make me my own Reddit where people can only upvote and I can have like supreme control over the content? And then we were like, no, that's not, You know, that's not really on …”
Opinion
Huffman: Alexis Ohanian handled Reddit's marketing and goodwill better than Condé Nast
“And it turns out he just did that stuff better than what kind of NASA do for us. And so he continued, you know, I always describe his job as making us seem cool. And that's what he would do is, is he would basically maintain our goodwill, which was one of our …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Huffman: Startups get tons of press just for joining Y Combinator
“Whether or not you build a good product, you're going to get a ton of press just being a part of Y Combinator.”
Insight
Huffman: Founders trying to feign usefulness to avoid embarrassment often succeed
“Most people have a have a desire to not look like fools, and so that they work really hard to at least feign usefulness whether or not they actually have it, and most of them in the process of feigning usefulness build something useful.”
Opinion
Huffman: Paul Graham is an exceptional product thinker lacking social filters
“Paul is, I think he's an exceptionally good product guy. He has a really good eye for what's useful and what isn't. And he's also completely stateless and has no social filter. So it helps that you can go to this guy who will just be like, this is stupid. And …”
Assertion Supported
Huffman: All travel search sites access the same flight data
“All the travel sites have access to the same data, effectively, including us.”
Insight
Huffman: He burned out repeatedly on early Reddit by lacking work-life balance
“One of the things I learned on Reddit was how to not burn out, or I should say, like, on Reddit, I burned out a couple times. I just wouldn't get any work done for a while, because I just didn't feel like working on the same thing. And, you know, one of the ex…”
Disclosure
Huffman: He personally moderated r/atheism to keep Reddit welcoming for new users
“While I agree wholeheartedly with their message, I felt like I was kind of the standard bearer for making Reddit seem welcoming for new users, and so people were like, oh, Spez, he's, I guess he's just some sort of devout Christian who just wants to squash our…”
Assertion Supported
Huffman: Reddit reached nine million unique visitors last month
“I can only speak for Reddit's numbers, and that, they got nine million uniques last month.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Huffman: Paul Graham delivered Reddit's first ~1,000 unique visitors
“So Paul brought us the first maybe thousand or so uniques.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Huffman: Reddit founders initially thought early moderator qgyh2 was a bot
“I know one of the first outside moderators that sticks in my mind is QGYH too. He was this insane Reddit user. I shouldn't say he was insane. He spent insane amounts of time on the site and we always thought he was a bot for a long time because we would look a…”
Assertion Not yet assessed · timeframe Oct 2010
Huffman: Reddit grew 20x following its 2006 sale to Condé Nast
“You know, we have the benefit of hindsight now, and we can see, you know, if we had known that Reddit was gonna grow 20 times since we got bought, you know, maybe we would've played our cards a little differently.”
Disclosure
Huffman: He cried at his desk before finalizing the Reddit acquisition
“The day before was when all, all the lawyers had agreed, and we basically said, tomorrow we're gonna sign the papers. And I remember I got really emotional that day. I was sitting there at my desk in in Boston, and I just cried.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Huffman: Paul Graham insisted early Reddit cram content into the upper-left
“So one of the things he told us very early on, if I don't even think we had launched anything, maybe we had shown him some screenshots, was he insisted that we put as much content in the upper left of the page as possible.”
Steve Huffman