reddit

the world's biggest forum.
top 3 communities*:
1- r/funny 62m
2- r/askreddit 47m
3- r/gaming 42m

where one question becomes a 2 a.m. rabbit hole.

reddit almost started as something completely different.

huffman and ohanian first pitched a mobile food ordering idea to y combinator. it got rejected, but they were invited back to try something else. that something became reddit.

in the beginning, they created multiple accounts themselves and posted links just to make the site feel alive. then one day huffman opened reddit expecting the usual empty page and found it full of posts from usernames he didn’t recognize.

real people had finally shown up.

about 16 months after launching, reddit was sold to conde nast for a reported $10 million.

pretty good reminder that sometimes the idea that gets rejected is just the thing that gets you to the idea that works.

might be the internet’s weirdest public archive.

reddit is also a huge experiment in self governance. millions of people join communities mostly run by unpaid moderators, each with their own rules, norms, punishments, and little power struggles. every subreddit is a tiny society trying to figure out how much freedom people can handle before everything turns into chaos.