"I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it," writes PG.

Tldr

Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit’s founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.

  • Cheradenine@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    2 months ago

    Call me jaded but the timing of this Puff piece is suss.

    As with all the really great startups, there’s an uncannily close match between the company and the founders. Steve in particular. Reddit has a certain personality — curious, skeptical, ready to be amused — and that personality is Steve’s. Steve will roll his eyes at this, but he’s an intellectual

    Barf

    • bpm@lemmy.ml
      11·
      2 months ago

      The good parts of Reddit came from Aaron Swartz. Everything since then has been these guys trying to squeeze as much money out as possible (remember Reddit Coins?).

    • 𓅂𓄿@c.im
      1·
      2 months ago

      @guts @catculation He was facing federal charges for taking papers and other documents from JSTOR and posting them online for download by using MIT computers. They were really about to hit him with the book. I would look into the details of the case because there is some speculation his suicide was suspicious, but then again his GF said he was depressed and she resented the rumors. That being said, she could have been distraught and wanted closure, or just wrong. A tragedy.

      • 𓅂𓄿@c.im
        1·
        2 months ago

        @guts @catculation He was just in the wrong place. A free speech idealist. You can tell Reddit’s other cofounder was never anything like him, and now he’s just monstrous. I’d make a limited comparison from Aaron to “Hotwheels”, a guy who keeps making imageboards for his free speech ideology, even though he’s a communist his sites are mostly used by reactionaries. Similar to Lemmy, actually. A lot of people who use this software despise the ideology of Lemmy’s main dev.