![]() ![]() Huffman and Ohanian were collectively the first 100 users, setting up multiple accounts and posting and upvoting links to demonstrate Reddit was being used. But Graham invited the pair to return to Boston for a brainstorming session, and by the end of an hour together, they’d come up with the idea for Reddit: the front page of the Internet! As part of the first Y Combinator class, they spent a summer building it-and playing World of Warcraft (they both hit level 60). At least not on their original idea, which was called My Mobile Menu and involved ordering food by SMS. They raced back to Charlottesville to develop their business plan.įor ten years, Reddit had been unbreakable. Ohanian screwed up the courage to ask Graham out for beers because, well, why not? He accepted, and maybe because of Ohanian’s charisma, or maybe because Huffman’s grasp of code showed promise, he invited them to apply for a new startup incubator he was launching, Y Combinator. In 2005, for their senior year spring break, Huffman convinced Ohanian to road trip up to Boston to see Graham talk about entrepreneurship. He planned to major in computer science and worshipped famed programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham. Huffman was a baby-faced private school teen from the DC suburbs. He’d always been the kind of child who was very comfortable talking to grownups. Ohanian was a loquacious only child from a Baltimore suburb who’d recently undergone the adolescent transformation from the pear-shaped fat kid to a lanky, good-looking teen. Huffman’s history with Reddit begins when he met Ohanian, on move-in day at the University of Virginia. “I thought, this time Reddit might not survive,” he says. And for the first time ever, Huffman worried that it was unfixable. Now, on this July day, Reddit was broken. Nude celebrity selfies starting popping up, while Reddit’s employees played whack-a-mole with the trolls and tried to refute its worsening reputation. And promise you’ll fix things.įor ten years, Reddit had been unbreakable. As Huffman paced the length of his living room that morning, he instructed Ohanian: apologize. (You should never make a dumb joke to an angry online community.) So, like divorced but cordial parents gathering at the bedside of a sick child, Huffman and Ohanian put aside their differences to focus on What To Do Next. And at some point, after hours of answering questions from moderators, he made a dumb joke. He logged onto Reddit to talk with the moderators, but they bridled at what they saw as vague promises and corporate-speak. 'I thought, this time Reddit might not survive.'Īnd instead of making things better, he’d somehow made them worse. Remember that unemployed father who handed out his resume in front of Busch Stadium last summer? A photo of him bubbled up on the front page of Reddit his story spread all over the web, he hired a PR person to field media calls, and employers from around the world bombarded him with job offers. And it can be a powerful attention engine. Much of the content that pops up in other media-from Buzzfeed to the morning news-is discovered on Reddit. It’s a gigantic collection of message boards that are tended by volunteer moderators and viewed by 202 million unique visitors each month, according to the company. “I was like, is this for real? How is this happening? This is insane,” says Huffman. Then Huffman pulled up Reddit-and it wasn’t there. A towhead who, at 31, still looks like a high school sophomore, he’d started a new company, and it was finally going well enough that he’d planned to take a day off in July to go up to Sonoma for a friend’s birthday. Huffman didn’t work for Reddit then, hadn’t worked there in five years. It began on the Thursday night that much of Reddit-the eleventh biggest site on the American Internet, the one that Steve Huffman helped found when he was barely more than a teenager-went dark. ![]()
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