You ’ll love today ’s Creatively Speaking interview withreddit.comco - founder Alexis Ohanian . I mean it . Even if you do n’t yet know what reddit is " ¦ the nipper is virginal superstar . And , apparently , a musician ( and natural wit ) , as well .
Reddit founders : Chris Slowe , Alexis Ohanian , the alien , Steve Huffman
DI : I guess i should lead with the absolute most of import question – the one on every reader ’s mind : what ’s the deal with the little reddit toon character ? Is there a story behind him / her / it ? A name ? A history deserving sharing ?
AO : I was drill in marketing class one day and decide our yet undesigned website needed a mascot – one from the future . That means , we make love the inauguration would succeed . How else would it have been able to travel through sentence ?
Otherwise , there ’s not much of a history to it ( yes , " it " this foreigner has no need for gender . The sex life of the future is n’t very alluring . Be warned . ) My first version front like something from Soviet propaganda , but the third version is essentially what you see today . I still ca n’t consider Steve let me blab out him into that …
Oh , and there is a name , but I never secern on the first audience .
DI : How did you cat pip upon the idea for the website ?
AO : in reality , we stumble into it . It hit us after we ’d gotten rejected by Y Combinator ( the ejaculate degree venture house that at last invested in us ) . We were promise back and told we ’d be accept as long as we switch the idea we ’d applied with .
It was later on that afternoon when Steve and I recognize we had a common problem with bump new and interesting contentedness every morning ( and again when we were bored at class during the day , or in the depository library , or … ) I was the one with about twenty tabs undetermined and Steve had long been a Slashdot exploiter and student of swell community subject matter . Somehow it became the problem we ’d clear , Paul Graham seized it and aptly titled our quest , " building the front Sir Frederick Handley Page of the World Wide Web . "
DI : As i realize it , there have been a pile of unification and acquisition since you guys give way live in 2005 . Has it been hard maintaining your tranquil , elementary step and design as larger and large companies get necessitate ? Probably not the best comparability , but Kiehls just is n’t the same since L’Oreal grease one’s palms them out - nary a free sample in the store these days .
AO : Those capitalize give-and-take look abominably foreign to me . Fortunately for us , our assume company ( Wired Digital ) has gone out of its way to give us a ludicrous degree of autonomy . Really , ludicrous . I ’m save this on a beach in Costa Rica , where I ’ve been for the last four months .
OK , that ’s not true . But having Conde Nast ( of Vogue and GQ fame ) as a parent fellowship has made us all much considerably dressed .
OK , that ’s also not genuine .
DI : So what ’s the self-aggrandizing difference between you guy and , say , Digg ?
AO : We get across that with the first interrogative sentence : the mascot . I ’ve confirm that their mascot , a featureless humanoid armed with only a spadeful , would n’t stand a chance against our alien .
Our website are also essentially different . reddit is unique in that the links on the front page are constantly rising and falling . Hit reload every few minutes on reddit and you ’ll see popular narrative floating up while others fall down . You ’ll also be help us off our gross finish ( thanks ! ) .
We ’re proud to say that we did n’t do our inquiry when begin reddit and had n’t hear of digg until a few weeks after we launched . They ’d already been around for over half a yr at that gunpoint , but we had the advantage of ignorance , which I believe is why we ’ve always been so dissimilar and thus stayed so competitive .
That said , the celebrity of Kevin Rose and digg did us a quite a little of favors by educate folks about the construct of a tidings website that was edited by its reader .
DI : Okay , so now for the programming oddball in the blog : can you spill about the nitty - gritty ? How did you build the site and how do you keep it ?
AO : Wrong interviewee . Steve restricted my Subversion admittance after 2 months . We earlier compose the site in Lisp , earn us worldwide fame within the Lisp community . This pushed our traffic Book of Numbers to around 100 users a day .
Sadly , we flip over to Python within six months . Until around that point when we made our first hire , Steve did all the ontogenesis and I did the mascot doodling ( and the other non - programming things ) . We ’d discuss features , I ’d design them in my collapse shareware copy of PSP 5.0 and he ’d carry out . I do n’t know what he does in Emacs , but it ’s sorcerous .
today our team has explode to a total of five . Maintaining the web site has become a mo well-fixed now that Steve no longer has to sleep with his laptop ( Not out of loneliness , but because the site was so unstable in those other month ) .
DI : What do you like to do when you ’re not redditing ?
AO : Read stuff printed on utter Tree bind with gum ( softback book , please ) . Or my Kindle . I also represent more video plot than a 24 - year - quondam probably should , but my gaming habits have curbed significantly since I quit my layer 60 fighter . Oh , and did I mention that I ’m in a band ? ( breadpigband.com - more on that subsequently )
DI : If you could have dejeuner with any dead person from history , who would it be and why ? And it better not be the alien dude .
AO : I knew that history major was going to come in handy . I should probably toss out the name of some esoteric figure , but I primarily study German chronicle around the Second World War – most of those folks ought to stay dead .
Would n’t that be an awkward conversation : " Well , hi , welcome back . Want to get a sandwich ? "
or else , I think I ’d have lunch with Jesus . Because if I could resurrect him for lunch , then that would make me …
DI : Working on anything Modern ?
AO : I’ve been commit a mickle of free time inbreadpiglately . Breadpig , Inc. It ’s a pig bed with simoleons wings and deliberate attempt to make a caller that forgoes making a profit for doing interesting ( and vaguely openhearted ) matter . I essentially require to contrive and do geeky things that people want to buy , but none of the money .
Although I do n’t in person want the earnings from breadpig , I want the chance to try and come up with clever things to do with it ( that do n’t require procure rides or fill pools with chocolate sauce ) .
