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| Meet Snoo. He's reddit's adorable alien mascot. He comes in peace. |
What is reddit?
Reddit is a content community that brings people with similar interests together. But it's much more complex than that. Within reddit, there are subreddits, which can be created by any user around any topic, such as gaming or things that make you go "aww." So reddit is actually more like a giant content community made up of hundreds of smaller content communities that pull people together based on a shared interest in often very specific topics.
Any user can upvote or downvote submitted content from within those subreddits, as well as comment on each submission and upvote/downvote comments. Content is given a score by subtracting downvotes from upvotes, and the most popular, high-scoring pieces make it to the homepage of reddit. Redditors (as reddit users are called) also receive what basically equates to scores, called karma. Karma measures the good that a redditor has done in their online communities. Reddit recommends not chasing karma points, but rather being a good person (at least online) by submitting links that others like and upvote.
As this video by C.P.G. Grey puts it, "If Google is where you go to search for things, reddit is where you go to see the things that people have found."
How did reddit get started?
Reddit was founded in 2005 by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, who at the time were undergraduate students at the University of Virginia. Ohanian told NPR that he and Huffman had no idea when they started reddit that it would grow into one of the top 50 sites in the U.S.
The duo went to Boston for spring break their senior year to see Paul Graham of startup incubator Y Combinator presenting "How to Start Your Start-up." Ohanian and Huffman had originally wanted to create a way to order food from your phone, and Graham loved the idea (over drinks after his presentation). However, after Ohanian and Huffman applied for funds from Y Combinator to get their business running, Graham turned them down.
They didn't have long to be disappointed. Graham told them he liked them, and if they could come up with another idea, he'd back their business. After some brainstorming, they decided they wanted to build "the front page of the web." When reddit launched, it was bare bones -- no categories, no comments and not much content. At first the founders had to constantly post content on reddit to keep things flowing, but soon the community started to take shape.
"The day I woke up and reddit was working on its own, it was just the most incredible feeling," Huffman said.
The story is longer and cooler than that, though. Watch Ohanian and Huffman tell the full story in this video:
Ohanian wrote a book that came out Oct. 1 of this year chronicling his adventures with reddit as a guide for up-and-coming entrepreneurs who may want to follow in his footsteps.
Updates and the reddit community
Although reddit didn't originally allow comments, they were introduced within the same year the site was launched. Reddit decided in 2008 to allow users to make their own subreddits, rather than funneling requests through reddit staff. Reddit announced in a blog post that they were taking themselves "out of the equation" to empower its community to identify what they thought were meaningful topics for successful subreddits.
In 2012, President Barack Obama hosted an AMA (acronym for Ask Me Anything), putting reddit and its wide open Q&A format in the spotlight. Forbes calls the Q&A sessions the "Barbara Walters’ tell-all for a new generation, where the questions are actually probing and the celebrity actually matters to the fans." Lots of celebrities and public figures have hosted AMAs, but any user can say "I am a ____. Ask me anything." -- as long as you are an interesting person and you can prove you are who you say you are. Forbes also recommends making sure you set aside enough time (an hour at minimum) to interact with redditors. And be real; people will care about you, not whatever you're trying to promote. Lastly, expect criticism and a fair share of things out of left field. You did say redditors could ask you anything.
However, the president's AMA still stands out. As reported on the company's blog, the POTUS IAMA is the only time in recorded reddit history that a link surpassed the home page in traffic, with a whopping 30 percent of redditors on specifically the IAMA versus an average of 15 to 20 percent of users on reddit's front page.
Let's put those percentages in perspective: as of Oct. 9, 2013, reddit had 81,341,088 unique visitors in the past month, with 4,691,122,722 page views. Pew research found in July 2013 that 6 percent of adults online use reddit. The highest demographic of users is 18- to 29-year-old males, and men are twice as likely as women to use reddit.
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| Whoa. |
Reddit supports anonymity, which often has a bad reputation on the internet. And things are definitely said on reddit that one could argue the user would never say to another in real life, especially some of the misogyny that is unfortunately rampant on parts of reddit. But there are also some really good people on reddit. Reddit's Secret Santa is home to the largest gift exchange in the world. Also, take a look at the Random Acts of Pizza subreddit that allows users to order pizzas online to send to strangers in need.
"Reddit is one of those communities that really is shocking to me," co-founder Huffman said in the how-reddit-started video. " It's so big, but it still has its heart in the right place and generally wants to make the world a better place."
The reddit culture is further dissected in this video:
The business side
You might think impressive traffic and high profile users mean that reddit is a huge company with a fat wallet. That's not so. Reddit has about 28 employees. Its parent company is Advance Publications, which also owns Conde Nast and Advance Digital. Even though reddit is owned by a large company, Advance Publications must allocate money for each of its divisions based on revenue, and reddit admits it is not yet profitable.
Reddit CEO Yishan Wong says he hopes the site will break even at the end of 2013. Although reddit could easily increase revenue by allowing almost (and sometimes entirely) obtrusive ads in the same way many publishers do, Wong knows that "mainstream" way of advertising would chase many redditors away.
So to try to raise revenue, while not detracting from the user experience, reddit introduced premium membership program reddit gold in 2010. Premium members receive benefits like notifications for when you're mentioned in a comment and the ability to turn off ads. Membership is $3.99 a month or $29.99 a year. You can send reddit a postcard, which will be featured in their postcard gallery, for a free month of membership.
I don't think I'm ready yet to commit to a gold membership plan, but I'm certainly looking forward to getting more involved in the reddit community, and I hope this post has helped any new redditors out there better understand the internet's front page.
TLDR? See a much shorter break-down of reddit on my Prezi.
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