Who Founded Reddit, Inc.?

The idea that became Reddit was born from a rejection. In the spring of 2005, two University of Virginia seniors — Steve Huffman, a computer science major, and Alexis Ohanian, a commerce and history student — drove to Boston to pitch Y Combinator on a mobile food-ordering app called My Mobile Menu. Paul Graham told them the idea was terrible. But he liked the founders enough to invite them back with something else. They returned with a concept so simple it barely qualified as a startup pitch: a website where people submit links, other people vote on them, and the best stuff rises to the top. Graham said yes. Huffman coded the first version in three weeks.

The early product was aggressively ugly. No profiles, no photos, no social graph. Just links, votes, comments, and usernames. That austerity was deliberate — Huffman wanted the content to matter more than the person posting it. But there was an immediate problem: a voting system with no voters produces an empty page, and an empty page attracts nobody. So Huffman and Ohanian did something that would later become startup folklore: they created dozens of fake accounts and submitted links themselves, day after day, making the site look busier than it was. They were their own first community, performing activity until real activity arrived.

Aaron Swartz entered the picture through a merger. His Y Combinator project, Infogami, combined with Reddit's parent company Not A Bug in early 2006. Swartz was 19, already famous in internet standards circles for his work on RSS and Creative Commons, and brought a philosophical intensity about open information that colored Reddit's early culture. His time at the company was brief — he left before the end of 2006 — but his influence persisted in Reddit's instinctive resistance to gatekeeping and its users' belief that information should flow freely.

Condé Nast acquired Reddit later that year for somewhere between $10 million and $20 million. The price seems absurd in retrospect, but Reddit had no revenue model, minimal traffic by today's standards, and a team of fewer than ten people. The acquisition gave Reddit servers, salaries, and institutional protection. It also planted a tension that would take fifteen years to resolve: Reddit's users thought they were building a public commons, but the commons now had a corporate landlord.

The decision that made Reddit structurally different from every other social platform came in 2008: user-created subreddits. Before that, Reddit was one big front page. After, it was a federation of thousands of independent communities, each with its own moderators, rules, culture, and archive. R/science demanded citations. R/AskHistorians deleted anything unsourced. R/gaming tolerated chaos. R/personalfinance developed a wiki that rivaled professional financial advice sites. Nobody at Reddit headquarters planned this diversity. They just built the infrastructure and let strangers organize themselves.