Would you rather fight millions redditors or one unicorn? - reddit growing up story (1)

When foreign media reports on Hong Kong's social platforms, they always use "Hong Kong version of reddit" to describe the Lian Deng forum . This statement has made me somewhat interested in reddit . ) Reddit has encountered major events and problems in the past (well, of course, reddit has not participated in the anti-extradition movement), and the scale and influence are far greater than the former - after all, reddit is a website traffic ranking 18th in the world (2019 December Alexa number ), an online social platform with over 100 million users, its influence naturally expands geometrically. I just saw the book "We are the nerds" earlier. The author Christine Lagorio-Chafkin tells the story of reddit's turbulent growth in the book. Even if the reader has not used reddit and is not familiar with American politics and network ecology, But as long as you have a little exposure to Internet culture, you will probably feel familiar with the various Internet phenomena in the book, and the story of reddit seems to be the history of the development of an Internet community.

Back in 2005, Steve Huffman and college classmate Alexis Ohanian both had ambitions to start a business. They initially conceived a mobile phone ordering program, and wrote it into a plan to participate in the Y combinator start-up training program. The concept is nothing special in today's eyes, but think back to what it was like in 2005: when the iPhone was not available, cities were not yet 3G networks, and people didn't even use smartphones (Palm! Windows CE!) Many technical obstacles need to be solved to achieve mobile ordering. For this reason, the jury of Y combinator ultimately rejected their plan. However, Paul Graham, head of Y combinator, and his future wife, Jessica Livingston (who is also a member of the jury), appreciated their talent and discussed other options with them. In the end, Huffman and Ohanian decided to develop a Digg -like network for users to share. The website linked above, which the duo hopes will become the "Front page of the internet" -- a slogan that still appears in the title bar of reddit today. The duo has Huffman in charge of technical development, while Ohanian handles design, publicity and more. Under Graham's constant urging, reddit was launched on a certain day in June 2005. At that time, the website could only post links and even did not have a message function, but it included at least two very important designs: Upvote/Downvote (for netizens). Give positive/negative comments to posts) and user points (called "Karma" on reddit), which is the prototype of reddit.

Heading into the fall, they welcomed two other key members: third founder Aaron Swartz (whose storied but sad story deserves a separate article ) and Chris Slowe, who became reddit CTO years later. Chris Slowe was doing a PhD in physics at the time, and he wanted to get involved in start-up work outside of research, so he chose to join the reddit team part-time. He does research in the lab during the day, and writes programs in the reddit studio in the evening (the book refers to him as a "lived on caffeine and adrenaline, and he loved it."). His thought at the time was: If reddit fails, at least I can go back and concentrate on my research...

With the efforts of this 3.5-person team, reddit has continued to grow, and the number of users has steadily increased. Its growth momentum has even attracted the favor of Google and Yahoo: they were invited to the company headquarters to "visit" - euphemistically The visit was, in effect, a "Tech Interview," where both companies learned about their talents and ideas. For Internet giants such as Google, they still hope to acquire potential startups, but at the same time they pay more attention to attracting outstanding employees, and this is the so-called "Acqui-Hire" in the industry. However, Huffman and Ohanian are convinced that reddit still has profound development potential, so they are not very interested in the two companies' testing, but they both believe that getting the two companies' beckoning is an affirmation of reddit, which has laid a foundation for their development. Strong heart.

Faced with a wide variety of content, reddit did not use tagging to categorize information like many websites, but chose to use subreddit—a sub-forum opened within a forum—to categorize it. The idea came from Huffman, who later opened the function of opening a subreddit to users. Users can open a subreddit as long as they have a certain level of experience and Karma. Gradually, this function has become a major feature of reddit. This setting also reflects the spirit of reddit's autonomy and openness - users can build virtual communities and set rules in their own way in the forum, and then users act as administrators and manage themselves. Since the requirements for opening a subreddit are not high, small groups scattered all over the place can form a line to warm up by a fire, so reddit is full of strange discussion areas, and some inappropriate content involving violence, pornography, extreme remarks, etc. will inevitably appear. Under reddit's non-intervention policy, they can safely exist in the forum, and their hot content wanders in the gray area of law and morals from time to time, and the design of its own corner strengthens the stratospheric effect. Of course, these problems are not unique to reddit, but when the number of users of reddit reaches a critical point in the future, these problems will erupt like a well. .

In 2006, although the number of reddit users continued to increase, cracks began to appear in the company team: Swartz no longer focused, or even stopped the program development work on reddit, which made Huffman to undertake all the engineering projects alone, and everyone was so fond of Swartz dissatisfied. Under the circumstances that the personnel problem could not be solved, and the manpower and resources were also tight, Huffman and Ohanian invariably came to the same conclusion: sell reddit while it is still valuable. In the end, the media group Condé Nast completed the acquisition on the day of Wansheng Festival in 2006, and the purchase price was estimated to exceed 10 million US dollars. This price is not an alarming figure among the acquisitions of IT startups, but it is enough to make Huffman and others become millionaires after working for more than a year (don't forget "million" is US dollars), They were 23 at the time, and Swartz was 19.

After the acquisition, reddit was still run by the four of them (the acquisition stipulated that they should stay on reddit for at least 3 years), but Swartz, who continued to slow down, was fired by Condé Nast at the end of 2007. Although reddit has successively added staff (Slowe finally became a full-time employee after reddit was acquired, and should be the number one employee of reddit), the increase in staff is far from keeping up with the speed of website growth. At this time, reddit has become a website with 120,000 page views per day (the figure in mid-2008). The popularity of the Internet allows netizens to use the platform to mobilize in different forms. Of course, some popular topics can be posted in the subreddit through the comments of netizens. At the same time, netizens can also use reddit's scoring mechanism (including Upvote / Downvote and Karma) to help fuel the flames. Reddit's algorithm will calculate the hotness of the topic based on the number of comments and Upvote. The hottest will be displayed on the forum homepage (r/All). Many topics are hyped on reddit and then spread into hot topics on the Internet, and even affect people's thoughts and actions in real life. An otherwise unremarkable photo, an inadvertent post, or a ticket-playing spoof creation may trigger a domino effect once it gains attention on reddit.

In 2007, Greenpeace held an online poll, inviting netizens to choose a name for a humpback whale, in order to draw the general public's attention to the protection of whales and marine life. As a result, the name " Mister Splashy Pants " won overwhelmingly with the support of a group of redditors. In 2009, some redditors discovered that there was a loophole in the website of the retail store Sears, and users could change the display name of the products on the website by changing the URL, so netizens flocked to the website to spoof it (of course, there is no lack of indecent content), and also posted screenshots on reddit. Declare "victory results". Sears was extremely dissatisfied with this, so he complained to Reddit's parent company, Condé Nast, which also has a partnership, and asked reddit to delete the spoof comments and screenshots. Ohanian, who knows the mentality of netizens, knows that deleting the article will only lead to further backlash from netizens, but under the pressure of Condé Nast's management, he has no choice but to obey. When some netizens complained to reddit after discovering that the post was deleted, the reddit team responded in the forum that the decision came from Condé Nast. As soon as a reply was posted on the forum, sparks flew like an exploding pot. On the one hand, the disgruntled redditors "carried forward" their spoof masterpiece. On the other hand, a large number of netizens blew up Sears and Wired (Condé Nast one of its magazines), the incident took a long time to subside. Similar incidents will still happen from time to time in the future, which also makes many companies and politicians have a love-hate attitude towards reddit. But it is undeniable that reddit has developed its unique ecology and culture, and its influence will only increase day by day, and these online and offline conflicts and actions are only a preview of the challenges that reddit will face in the future.

Despite frequent controversy, the reddit team insists that speech control should not be carried out if it is not illegal (so when the parent company ordered the removal of a post that spoofed Sears, the reaction of reddit employees was also quite dissatisfied), this spirit and Swartz attach great importance to this spirit. The belief in freedom of speech is in the same line, and on a practical level, reddit's humble resources cannot censor all the content on the site. This orientation is also in line with the policies pursued by many social network bodies (such as Facebook) at the time. Similarly, it is not that they have not noticed the existence of fake news and extreme speech, but they dare not take the risk of "obstructing the freedom of speech", and they do not want the company to bear the heavy responsibility of censoring the authenticity of information and whether the speech is excessive, so they choose Let netizens decide for themselves whether their speech is appropriate or not. However, with the sharp increase in fake news, navy messages, and extreme remarks, the outside world is increasingly dissatisfied with reddit's laissez-faire approach. Reddit and other online platforms must maintain a "no censorship, no deletion" policy while developing. Policy seems to be getting harder and more expensive.

After reddit was acquired, Huffman and Ohanian, who had been working together for a long time, began to have gaps. From time to time, the two sides felt that the other party was taking care of themselves, and the bureaucratic structure of the parent company Condé Nast put more constraints on reddit (such as the long recruiting process, monitoring reddit Content, etc.), the work was not going well, and the two of them started to fall in love. As a result, both of them left Reddit after a 3-year term (2009). Reddit will experience the next three years of CEO hanging years. The magic is that the number of users and traffic of reddit continued to grow during this period (Huffman and Ohanian expressed helplessness...), among which, in 2010, reddit's competitor Digg underwent a major page revision, and a large number of users expressed dissatisfaction and initiated "Quit Digg Day" , Many users switched to reddit, and Digg, which was once the first to get points, has never been able to shake the leadership of reddit since then.

After the two founders left, reddit turned to Erik Martin in 2011, Ohanian returned to reddit as a consultant, and the company continued to launch different services and features. For example, in May 2009, reddit launched a subreddit: r/IAmA (Note: "r/" means this is the subreddit name, and "u/" means the username). Before this, there have been people in reddit who have carried out "you ask me and answer" activities from time to time. They may be experts in a certain field, strange people, or even a must-have netizen who has no ink but pretends to be an authority. They use the reddit platform to anonymously answer all kinds of strange questions from netizens. At the beginning of the session, they usually post an opening post in the forum "I am <XXX>, ask me anything.", and gradually this activity is called "Ask me anything" ("IAMA" or "AMA" for short) ). This new r/IAmA is a dedicated subreddit for Q&A sessions, and reddit invites celebrities to participate from time to time. With the rapid increase in the number of reddit users, its influence has also increased, and many celebrities are also willing to interact with netizens through this platform, which makes r/IAmA a highly concerned part of reddit.

Among them, the Obama AMA in 2012 was a milestone for r/IAmA. For many American politicians, reddit is like Voldemort, a name that cannot be spoken or touched. Redditors make politically incorrect remarks from time to time, or add swear words or insert an indecent photo in the message at any time. If a politician wants to confront this group of rebellious but creative netizens head-on, it will be a little careless. It can cause a PR disaster, so not many politicians have been willing to do AMAs on reddit since the inception of r/IAmA. But with the help of Ohanian and the campaign, Obama posted on r/IAmA on August 29, 2012: "Hi, I'm Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything.". His digital team immediately posted a photo of Obama sitting in front of the computer on reddit to prove the identity of the sender. This unannounced AMA (because the engineering team was afraid that the crazy traffic would overload the system) made netizens doubt the identity of the sender. , until the reddit administrator repeatedly emphasized that the protagonist of the AMA is indeed the head of the United States, the traffic of reddit suddenly skyrocketed . At the peak, the platform has to process 100,000 page requests per minute. The traffic is so large that some netizens can only see the website. Instead of updating the page in real time, many people are even more unable to leave a message. While the engineering team was busy with traffic and dying servers, Obama and reddit's community management team were also racing against the clock, picking questions for Obama to answer (the team picked out questions from the massive comments and put them on Google In the Sheet, Obama will finally choose to respond), and also monitor netizens’ comments and delete spam, foul language and offensive remarks. Obama, who has never used reddit, answered questions from netizens personally on the computer. In the end, he answered 9 questions in more than 40 minutes, and ended with a trendy picture that originated from his funny expression and was very popular on reddit:

Although Obama 's answer in the AMA was not outstanding, and he avoided all the "high-risk" questions of netizens, this historic AMA (the first US president to participate) was enough to impress netizens well. In the next day or so, the topic received more than 5 million views, becoming the most read topic on reddit at the time, not to mention that he earned enough exposure in major media. If I had to be picky, a lot of netizens, reddit staff, and the Obama team felt it was a shame they didn't ask Obama the following "a million questions":

Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?

Are the questions boring? Maybe so, but this is also the interesting part of Internet culture, and this "boring question" - or should I say this "boring question" that was not asked - continued to attract public attention after that, and even the Atlantic Monthly published it. Discuss in a long article .

In addition to celebrities participating in r/IAmA, ordinary people can also answer questions from netizens on r/IAmA or r/AmA. Among them, r/IAmA stipulates that users need to submit identity certificates to the administrator. On the contrary, r/AmA does not seem to have relevant regulations (not entirely sure, welcome corrections from experts), but it also increases the degree of anonymity, so there are more eccentric people on the board. Characters participate in AMAs. To a certain extent, these ordinary people's Q&A sessions are more interesting than the celebrity version, because you may meet some people in the area that you never thought of, or even if you know, but probably will never meet in your life, and you have less identity scruples Make the answers of these ordinary people AMA more straightforward. On one night r/AMA included these people: Dyscalculic (they're like dyslexia who just can't understand numbers), a boy who lost his body to a 19-year-old babysitter before he was 11 (! !!), prostitutes, people who have lost their sense of taste forever... Let's not say whether these protagonists are real, but how can ordinary people get in touch with these people from different backgrounds in one place?

reddit's growth story: to be continued...