Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman explains the direct relationship between site performance engineering and user engagement metrics in Reddit's early days.
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…”
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 …”