Reddit began after its founders' food-ordering app idea flopped
Reddit's founders arrived at Y Combinator with a different plan, a mobile food-ordering service called My Mobile Menu. When it failed, the two college roommates built a site where users vote posts up or down instead. By 2019 it counted about 430 million monthly users, and its name is simply a pun on read it.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, roommates at the University of Virginia, heard programmer Paul Graham lecture in Boston during spring break in 2005, and afterwards he invited them to apply to his incubator. After My Mobile Menu went nowhere they launched Reddit that June. Aaron Swartz came aboard in November when his company Infogami merged in, and he helped move the site's code from Lisp to Python using web.py, a framework he had written.
In October 2006 the founders sold Reddit to Condé Nast, owner of Wired, in a deal said to be worth between $10 million and $20 million, and the team relocated to San Francisco. Swartz disliked the corporate culture and was fired in January 2007. Huffman and Ohanian left in 2009, and Erik Martin, a community manager who became general manager in 2011, was credited with keeping things running. That same year Reddit became an independent subsidiary of Advance Publications, and under Yishan Wong, chief executive from 2012 to 2014, its user base climbed from 35 million to 174 million.
Both founders eventually returned, Ohanian as executive chairman in November 2014 and Huffman as chief executive in 2015, when he launched official phone apps. A 2021 funding round valued the company at more than $10 billion, and a March 2024 share listing raised $600 million. Roughly 10% of revenue now comes from deals licensing its data to Google and OpenAI for training AI models.
The site leans on volunteer labour. Unpaid moderators create and police each subreddit, work estimated at 466 hours a day and worth $3.4 million a year. Rankings depend on a post's age, its balance of upvotes and downvotes, and its total vote count. Cleanup is mostly about spam: in 2020 Reddit took down about 6% of all posts, and more than 99% of those removals were flagged as spam.
Source: Reddit
