20 years of Reddit: discussions with karma
A birthday greeting: What makes the Reddit forum platform so successful
(Image: Logo: Reddit, mit KI bearbeitet von heise online)
Where can you still have a balanced conversation about news and political content online – and sometimes even argue without it drifting into insults? Facebook is considered by many users to be almost dead (or a platform for the almost dead – depending on who you ask). X, formerly Twitter, has degenerated into a haven for right-wing trolls, not to mention Trump's Truth Social. Meta's threads are full of banalities. And Bluesky, in turn, is seen by many as a left-leaning bubble.
One fossil of all web platforms is currently best suited for exchange without the discussions tipping over into the extreme or banal: Reddit. However, the service is much more than just a meeting place for discussions. Time and again, the community produces useful community projects. Reddit's content is currently more popular than ever before. AI companies are paying top dollar to train their language models with it. A salute to the community that was founded twenty years ago today.
How the foundation came about
It all started with a failure. In 2005, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, two students at the University of Virginia, had a business idea: they wanted to launch a service that would allow people to order fast food from their cell phones. Back then, long before the iPhone, they would have had to make deals with mobile phone providers and restaurant chains just to get started. Venture capitalist Paul Graham, to whom they presented the idea, was less than enthusiastic.
But he was all the more impressed by the two young men. "They had that look of slightly ruffled surprise that baby birds have," Graham remembers the Reddit founders in his blog. Shortly after the meeting, he founded his start-up incubator Y Combinator. And Huffman and Ohanian were therefore one of the reasons why this hotbed of many important IT companies came into being in the first place.
Graham liked the two potential founders so much that he looked for another project for them. At the time, there was an online bookmark manager called del.icio.us. On its del.icio.us/popular page, it listed the links most saved by its user base. Graham knew this because a significant amount of traffic to his site came from there. Graham envisioned something similar, but as the core of the service, not a byproduct.
When Huffman and Ohanian heard about it, they were immediately on board. Reddit was founded on June 23, 2005. They actually wanted to call the site "Snoo" – as in "What's new?" – but snoo.com was too expensive. So Reddit became the name of the platform and Snoo the mascot.
