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Reddit is a social news site started by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. The company was one of the first companies to Y Combinator’s business accelerator.

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7 Sep, 2014

Bans hacked photos subreddit

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Reddit administrators ban the page where many hacked photos of naked celebrities landed when they flooded the internet almost a week earlier. Reddit managers were continuously trying to keep the stolen pictures off of that page, but users kept re-posting them.

You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create and what kind of rules you will enforce. But it became obvious that we were either going to have to watch these subreddits constantly, or shut them down. We chose the latter.

11 Feb, 2013

Bill Gates AMA

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bill-gates-AMABill Gates does an AMA on Reddit, where he discusses vaccines, climate change, And Steve Jobs.

Original thread here. A summary of Gates’ answers can be found here.

1 Feb, 2013

Congresswoman posts revamped ‘Aaron’s Law’ on Reddit

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Rep. Lofgren (D-Calif.) posts a revised and expanded “Aaron’s Law” — her proposal to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in honor of Aaron Swartz to Reddit. The new draft addresses some of the concerns that were raised when the first proposal was made public. The bill de-criminalizes terms of service violations and defines what “access without authorization” actually means, the main concern of a number of legal experts such as Lawrence Lessig or the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Marcia Hoffmann, who were concerned about the clarity Lofgren’s original proposal. The new bill also ensures that changing one’s IP or MAC address is not a violation of either the CFAA or the Wire Fraud act.

11 Jan, 2013

Aaron Swartz commits suicide age 26

DeathSuicide0 Comments

Swartz body is found by his girlfriend at his home in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn at around 9.30am. He was 26. Swartz’ attorney confirms in an email to The Tech blog.

The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true

He left no suicide note. Swartz’s mother writes on Hacker News:

Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful. Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable.

6 Jan, 2013

$400M valuation rumored

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TechCrunch hears a rumor that Reddit is planning a funding round that values it around twice 2011 levels.

16 Oct, 2012

Loses job

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As a result of the Gawker story, Brutsch is fired from his job. Brutsch said that he had warned his boss of the article before receiving a call Saturday telling him to not return to the office. Brutsch:

All my remote access has been disabled, my health insurance and FSA were cancelled immediately (so they had to drag someone in over the weekend to do that). At this point, if any of the dozens of death threats I’ve gotten were to make good on their promises, at least my wife would have the insurance.

Brutsch’s supporters on Reddit launch a campaign to donate money to the newly unemployed Brutsch and he released his email address on Reddit so supporters could donate money to his PayPal account.

12 Oct, 2012

Gawker exposes Violentacrez

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Gawker outs Brutsch, a 49-year-old computer programmer from Texas, as the the real-life identity of “Violentacrez”, a Reddit moderator, who had set up more than a hundred sub-forums (called sub-reddits) where users could share links and images of underage girls, rape fantasy and upskirt photos. Brutsch shuts down his Violentacrez username after Gawker reporter Adrian Chen tells him he knows his identity. He returns to the site with the new handle “mbrutsch”. In response to the exposé of Violentacres’ identity, a number of Reddit moderators ban Gawker links from their subreddits.

19 Sep, 2012

May be worth $240M

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Forbes reports that the company has updated its incorporation papers in Delaware. Advance has recapitalized Reddit, taking it out of the Conde Nast division, and allowing Reddit employees to own a sizable minority of newly issued stock. Advance bought $20 million in stock as part of the recapitalization and put in provisions saying that if the company is sold for less than $240 million, the conversion terms will change and Advance will get a bigger piece. It says this implies Reddit is on track to be worth at least $240 million.

29 Aug, 2012

President Obama AMA

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obama-amaPresident Obama participates in a surprise open question-and-answer session on the Web community Reddit, as the subject of one of the site’s regular “Ask Me Anything” threads. Reddit’s site experienced some outages immediately following the announcement, due to increased traffic.

26 Jun, 2012

Make Something People Love

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ohanianebookOhanian publishes an Ebook which includes his thoughts on the growth of Reddit and Hipmunk:

And this marvelous community of communities owes its existence to a massive advertising budget of…$500. To date that is the sum total of money that has been spent advertising reddit. Five hundred dollars, and every dollar of it spent on stickers. Yes, stickers: the soundest investment I ever made. I used to travel around the country a lot (thank you, Chinatown bus), and everywhere I went I took stickers with me. I put them on signs, poles, and even other advertisements.

19 Jun, 2012

Site built with hundreds of fake accounts

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In a video for Udacity, Huffman and Ohanian reveal that they used fake accounts to populate the site in its earliest days. Huffman:

You would go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months and there’d be tons of… fake users

Through those fake accounts, Huffman and Ohanian submitted high-quality content — the type of articles they wanted to read. This “set the tone” for the site as whole, Huffman says and, at the same time, made it look populated.

30 May, 2012

Inc. interview

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Ohanian tells the magazine about his conversation with Graham after Y Combinator rejected his initial pitch:

The next morning, on the train back to Virginia, hung over, somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, I get a call from Paul. He says, “I’m sorry, we made a mistake. We don’t like your idea, but we like you guys.” We got off the train, and I was able to sweet-talk the Amtrak lady into not charging us to turn around. In our conversation, Paul said, “You guys need to build the front page of the Internet.” That was all Paul, and that became Reddit. We built Reddit in three weeks.

The buyout also happened partly by chance:

The acquisition by Condé Nast basically started with a Halloween party, where we met a reporter who introduced me to a freelancer for Wired who told her boss about us. That editor’s husband was the biz-dev guy at Condé Nast. He worked on a licensing deal with us, and everything worked great. So we started talking money. Founders are supposed to be not at all interested in selling. But there is a price at which a founder can’t help being interested.

6 Sep, 2011

Splits from Condé Nast

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Reddit splits from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications. Ohanian return to the board. At this time the site serves 1.5 billion page views per month.

28 Apr, 2011

Reddit eclipses Digg

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For the first time Alexa shows Digg’s reach being eclipsed by Reddit. According to the online ranking service, Reddit is now the 117th most popular site on the web, while Digg has fallen to 138th.

22 Mar, 2011

Condé Nast to spin-off Reddit for $200m

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According to Peter Kafka of All Things D, Condé Nast wants to spin-off Reddit for $200 million. The theory is that taking Reddit outside of Condé Nast’s corporate structure would make the site that much more valuable, and would give it a better chance to compete for capital, managers and employees alongside the likes of startups like Quora, StackExchange, and others.

6 Jan, 2011

Swartz arrested at MIT

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After investigators at MIT began to suspect that someone is illegally downloading material from the JSTOR archive they trace the leak to a basement wiring closet where they find a laptop and external hard drive hooked up directly to a network. The laptop and the hard drive are hidden from view by a cardboard box. Secret Service Agent Michael places a surveillance camera in the closet. The surveillance images show Swartz entering the closet three days in a row. Using his white bicylce helmet as a mask, Swartz attempts to cover his face from the cameras as he tries to retrieve the computer equipment that he left their weeks before. On January 6th an officer sees Swartz attempt to leave MIT property with the laptop and hard drive. At 2:11 p.m. Swartz is ID’d on a bicycle on Massachusetts Avenue by an MIT police officer, according to his own report. That report states that when he encounters Captain Albert Pierce of the MIT Police Department, Swartz jumps off his bike and runs down Lee Street. He runs approximately 400 feet before being handcuffed and charged with breaking and entering.

Dec 2010

Christian vs Atheist fundraising challenge

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Members of the Christianity subreddit hold a fundraiser for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Members of the atheism subreddit decide to hold an alternative fundraiser for World Vision’s Clean Water Fund. Later, the Islam subreddit joins, raising money for Islamic Relief. In less than a week, $200,000 is raised, mostly by the atheism subreddit, though the Christianity subreddit has a higher donation amount per subscriber.

17 Aug, 2010

Huffman leaves to start Hipmunk

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Huffman leaves Reddit to start Hipmunk with Goldstein. Hipmunk is a travel search site that helps people book flights easily by presenting flight results in a visual timeline that allows people to select the best flight for them at a glance. The site is funded by Y Combinator.

2010

YC Founders at Work: Reddit

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Livingston interviews Ohanian about the early days of Reddit. Livingston asks about the “Chicken and egg” problem of building a community with no initial users:

This is one that I have no hesitation in saying, but it always stirs up a lot of controversy. Steve [Huffman] built a really simple system for admins, that is Steve and me, so that when we submitted a link also let us type in a user name. It let us easily and efficiently create lots of fake users. And we were able to browbeat a few of our friends to build up comments. But the rest of our friends and family could not be begged or bribed enough to do it really consistently. The only option we had to resort to was to fake it. But we didn’t have to do it for too long because Paul [Graham] did us a big favor  by [profiling us] us in an early essay.

It was at some point about three or four weeks into it that neither Steve or I had to submit or vote on anything, and the site just worked…We could spend the day just lurking on Reddit, that is just using it like the vast majority of people do and not actually generate content. That was huge. That was when we realized, maybe we haven’t wasted this summer and we had a legitimate community.

4 Jun, 2009

Mixergy interview

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Ohanian talks about how Y Combinator helped shape the idea for Reddit in the early stages:

We approached Y Combinator … with an idea that would transform the way you order food, specifically using a cell phone to do so.  They didn’t really like the idea.  They liked us, but they hated the idea.

They still didn’t have a firm idea, but sat down with Graham and talked about a site that would filter the most interesting web content.

…it was in that conversation with Paul where we developed this idea for creating a way to find out what’s new online.

The idea morphed into the final product:

All the actual mechanics of how that would work, basically happened in the next few weeks, while Steve [Huffman] and I were in a crap apartment, in Bedford, Massachusetts, playing a lot of Warcraft.