Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit’s founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.
Discovered through https://tldr.tech/, a daily technology briefing newsletter.
This article reads pretty bizarrely to me.
Del.icio.us does absolutely seem to be the same design as reddit if you look at old screenshots, and predating Reddit by 2 years definitely makes reddit look like a bit of a ripoff. I’d argue both are just an evolution of the forum format so not too special.
Aaron Schwartz seems to take a very big place in reddit’s mythos and it feels weird seeing him take up only a single paragraph - the author is only telling their own story, though, so it only makes sense if author didn’t know him. It does change my perspective of reddit hearing that Steve and Alexis were aiming to be your bog-standard startup from the getgo and Scharwz only came as a later team addition.
Article feels a bit like an advertisement for investing.