A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:12:24 · Pablo Srugo
[00:12:24] S1: When I look at Reddit, at least I think the most powerful asset you have is this incredibly strong community, and more so than maybe any other social network frankly is the defining feature to the point that communities now subreddits can move markets. It's pretty incredible. How did you get that going? Everybody wants to build a community, but it's so hard to do. I'm just curious in those early days, I remember stories of seeding the threads and stuff, putting things there to get conversation started, but do you remember how you guys got that going in 2005, 2006 because it's easy once there's content but it's hard when it's a blank page?
00:12:55 · Chris Slowe
[00:12:55] S0: Yeah, 2005 was – I remember really clear this is right before I started where for that first summer, all of the content that was on Reddit was either being submitted by Steve and Alexis or it was being submitted by a bunch of YC and associated because we were the first users as a group. There was a point that Steve likes to talk about where he finally took a day off on the weekend. He just decided I'm taking Saturday off and then he went back to Reddit. I mean, I'm going to butcher his story but he can yell at me later. He comes back to it the next morning and he is like, "It's going to be stale. I'm going to go submit it. I have to dig up a bunch of content and post it." He opened up Reddit and there were 25 fresh links on the front page and he had nothing to do with any of them and it was just like this like, oh, the system seems to be working. From that point on there's no need to start creating this – that particular community, that very first community, which was just reddit.com, started to run itself and it just started becoming this place where interesting content would just appear and bubble up. I think one of the things we got right really early on was the underlying math of just how content became popular on Reddit and how long it stayed up there was very simple. It was optimized for being able to index it on statically so you could actually render really fast. We had it publicly in the open source version of Reddit from about 2008 till 2017. Honestly, that algorithm didn't change markedly for most of the first 15 years of Reddit. It was a very straightforward setup just based on age of the content and the number of votes it got. A lot of the work went into just making sure that the votes that we had good anti cheating logic to make sure people weren't doing things that were inorganic. The core of it was very well established. Later on, that same process worked for communities where we noticed up front that there were a bunch of topical areas that were starting to form, and so starting to peel those off of a front page made sense. There wasn't any real work to seed them because the content was already present.
00:14:44 · Chris Slowe, Pablo Srugo
The real change was in 2008 when we actually opened up the floodgates and just said like, "Hey, if you think you have a good idea for community, go make one." Then that was the initial burst of just all sorts of random stuff that users started coming up with. I mean, that's where actually AMAs, which are a cornerstone of Reddit right now, were primarily something that formed on its own. IAmA was formed around then. Most of the major communities that came later were ones that were just organically created by users and that's actually the best result. [00:15:21] S1: That was almost like adding fuel to the file. There was already momentum and you're just feeding and feeding and feeding it.
00:15:26 · Chris Slowe
[00:15:26] S0: Yeah, a hundred percent. Then to get to the other secret sauce that we have since that beginning moderators, to start with the first version of moderation was we just basically allowed the creator of those communities to have a similar toolkit that we had for keeping track of content. That wasn't much more than just being able to remove content or see reports. Subsequently we discovered as communities got larger, they needed to be able to add more people to the moderation team and so we basically added that permission. The feature that no one really notices that I think had the biggest impact was we gave mods the ability to edit the content on the side of the page where you could actually explain the community and just say what it's about, because you had to be able to say – you come to ran a community, what am I supposed to be doing here? What we found happened very quickly is that they started using that space to start to create rules of how to use the community. You can think of it in the same way that we originally created a politics community because we wanted to get politics off the front page because people were complaining. You wanted to have the opposite of happen where it was actually – because we've been through multiple elections at that point. 2008 was the election that actually kicked it over where people were tired of politics and they're like, "Okay, no more politics here, put it over there." We had the opposite happen where it's like, yeah, only post content to peer reviewed scientific articles in our slash science. Starting to have those be a list of actual rules started creating more structure for communities to create their own culture effectively.
00:16:55 · Pablo Srugo
[00:16:55] S1: Is that the key thing that hooks people and keeps them coming back where they just find themselves so identified I guess in these and there's just something for everyone?
00:17:06 · Chris Slowe
[00:17:06] S0: Yeah, I think that with hindsight, one story we've heard over and over again for users that end up sticking around and becoming Redditors is there's this particular arc that usually goes something like, "Yeah, I noticed Reddit." It kept coming up in search results or I started seeing it in here or I'd ask a question and it would come up. I casually used it for some period of time, usually months to years. Then I found this thing, and then I discovered I was coming back every day. That thing is always very specific to the person. It's like you're a botanist or you're a hobby gardener, and you find a community that's dedicated to your particular variety of gardening and it's like, "Oh my God! I'm going to just going to stick with this forever." Another one that comes up that's also not talked about as much is we actually have really good support communities; so for people who have wanted to stop drinking, for people who have substance abuse, for people going through divorces, those can be very sticky because there's not really a place anywhere else where you can go in and be honest and talk about your actual problems and not worry about it coming back to you as a person. I mean, that's the magical model that we picked early on was we decided that we didn't want to have real names, we didn't want to have association with you. We just relied on the fact that if you're going to waste a bunch of time creating a fake user and a fake persona, if it's entertaining, great, otherwise there's no motivation to go and create a fake persona because it doesn't come back to you. It actually cuts both ways. Even though we are pseudo anonymous, the incentives are such that authenticity is what comes out of that because there's no reason to try to be an influencer.