Reddit.com has quickly and quietly become one of the “big three” sites (Digg and Netscape being the other two) in what is now being labeled “social news bookmarking”. With a team of four, they lead the reddit nation (55K+ users and growing) in breeding the democracy of news relevancy - created for the people and voted (up or down) by the people.
We like Reddit because it’s not glitz and all that web 2.0 (cough, gag, garble, choke) jazz. There’s no complex UI, no rounded corners, no reflection logos, and no BS. In today’s web - simplicity and execution matter most. Users don’t have the time, nor the patience to learn the ins and outs of a new web application when chances are there’s a simpler, easier to use, and more effective application just a few clicks away.
With the recent industry drama surrounding Business Week’s coverage of Digg’s riches and (probably one of the best things to happen to reddit, PR wise) Jason Calacanis’s Netscape offer, Reddit seems to be on a roll. Their user base continues to grow and new features are being released often, and just recently it was published that Reddit is making a profit.Using Reddit.com is addictive. It’s a culture - a non-exclusive community of Reddit believers, that in this mass social web space declare that it’s the user who gets to decide what “is” or “is not” their news. The Reddit team isn’t numb to that ethic, siting that it’s their users that make Reddit what it is today and what it will be in the future. The Reddit team was kind enough to sit answer 55 of our questions. We even scored some insight into their alien mascot.
Let’s get started with getting to know everyone: name? role (not title - there is a difference)? footsize? hair color? And at night you dream about…?
Steve Huffman (SH). I built reddit. Now I maintain it and punish evildoers who seek to harm it. 10 _ Blonde I never remember my dreams.
Alexis Ohanian (AO). I do all the things a hacker shouldn’t have to do in a startup. I also draw the alien. 13 Dark brown Ponies. Actually, that’s not true, they’re unicorns.
Chris Slowe (CS). I bring distinction to the group. 10 _ Auburn I currently don’t sleep enough to dream.
Aaron Swartz (AS) I rolled a 5 10 _ Dark brown I don’t really dream usually.
With 5 words, describe reddit.
AO: Freedom from the press (haha – did it in 4)
CS: Time away from my PhD
The name “reddit” - I’m guessing it’s a mixture of “read” + “edit”? Where did the name come from, who thought of it, and what does it mean to you? also, what were some of the runner ups?
AO: I spent a lot of my college life in Alderman library and happened to be in there trying to name our new news site. Readit.com (as in “read it”) was taken, but reddit wasn’t. The thinking was that people would start saying “I reddit on reddit”. We might be the only ones who say that. Runner ups included poplex, octopop, newsstew/newstew, newsbug, and breadpig. We still own breadpig.com
Why should reddit matter to the everyday Joe/Susan Shmoe user?
AO: The Internet provides a great medium for inpiduals to publish and discover a wealth of content. As a result, there’s a lot of it, and we think reddit is a great mechanism for finding the signal in all that noise.
Before we talk about the reddit team, let’s talk about the alien mascot. Name? Height? Eye color? Place of birth? Age? 
Name: Disputed, but we usually call it “snoo” (as in what’S NEW online)
Height: It’s typically about 40px tall
Eye color: #FF4500
Place of birth: the future
Age: 8
I’ve read that reddit is a very small team. How many are there in total? What is everyone’s background? And, because of the size, does everyone where many hats or are the roles well defined?
AO: There are 4 of us. Steve and I cofounded it last June, he built reddit and I did the other stuff. We merged with Aaron Swartz in January of this year and he began to work with Steve on development. When he’s not doing our stats and recommendation system, Chris is finishing up his PhD right now, but he’ll be joining us full-time in January and we’ll get to call him Doctor. I continue to handle all the day-to-day business, which has helped me grow a nice little collection of hats.
How did reddit team meet each other?
AO: Steve and I lived across the hall from one another freshman year of college at UVA. Aaron and Chris were both working on other startups during our summer with Y Combinator last year. We ended up moving in with Chris at the end of summer and a few months later they were both looking for new projects to work on. We basically just poached talent from the Summer Founders Program.
You guys are located in Boston now, correct? So, reddit isn’t even near Silicon Valley. Do you think that helps?
AO: We love our new apartment at Davis Square. It’s $100 cheaper a month than our old place and the location is impeccable. We also each have a bedroom now, which is nice. I’m told there are a lot of startups out west, but the startup community here in Boston has been quite active and incredibly supportive.
How and where did reddit begin? First, where was the reddit idea conceptualized and where was the development of the final product produced - in your bedrooms an office, etc?
AO: We arrived in Boston (Medford, to be precise) with a basic idea for what we wanted reddit to be, but most of the functionality came about over pizza. At the time, we’d been operating in a bit of a vacuum and had never seen the competitors we’re so often compared to nowadays. All of the development that led to what we launched that summer came about during those hot weeks in our sweltering apartment.
How long was that process of taking the concept and moving it from notes on a piece of paper to the final web site?
AO: We still don’t feel like it’s final, or that it ever will be, but it took about a month to get it from ideas in Steve’s notebook to online.
What are some of the most important lessons (business and personal) learned throughout that entire process?
AO: We’ve learned quite a bit over the last year, not only about startups but also about ourselves. Since there are about thirty more questions to answer, I’ll give you the abridged version. Karma exists: being a “nice guy” in the business world is much better rewarded than it is in the dating world 
This past year has also made me appreciate that – despite the all-consuming nature of startup life – there are indeed more important things in life.
What was the greatest obstacle reddit faced when starting out and what about your greatest obstacle today? (i’m going to assume it’s managing spam and quality control)
AO: Early on, just getting it off the ground was difficult, because a site like reddit is only as good as the community using it. Now that we have a fantastic and rapidly growing one, dealing with spam in an effective yet unobtrusive way is certainly a constant issue. Fortunately, the same community that is quite at finding and producing great content is also quite vigilant about managing the spam too.
If you could do anything different, would you?
AO: I would have pushed harder for breadpig as our website name.
What is reddit’s goal?
AO: To help people find and discuss new and interesting stuff online.
When will know reddit has succeeded?
AO: If our goal is to help people find and discuss new and interesting stuff online, then I think we’re succeeding at it – the test will be to keep it up as the site continues to grow.
Did you ever question your idea and motivation?
AO: The motivation for doing this startup was certainly tested, as was the idea, but at the end of the day we always knew that there was nothing else we’d rather be doing.
Ok, so let’s talk about the recent Slate, New York Times, and Lipstick sites. These have been well publicized, but they previos are different reddit implementations than the latter (nyt and slate are rss feeds into the reddit engine while lipstick is a subbredit). Can you discuss these and their differences, benefits, etc? How did these ventures come about? Is it to early to call them a success or failure yet?
AO: We’ve been quite pleased with lipstick so far, because we were anxious to see how the reddit model would work for an audience that wasn’t nearly as geeky as we were. So far it’s been doing quite well. Discovering the latest celeb gossip has even become a bit of a guilty pleasure for us – it’s like braincandy. We just announced Slate.reddit and we’re looking forward to some more integration on Slate’s end, so it’s too early to accurately evaluate it.
Do you see more projects upcoming like Slate or Lipstick?
AO: We hope so.
What I find interesting about reddit is that, and maybe I’m wrong here, but I would think that sites like Digg or Netscape, with their “bigger names”, would be the ones NYT and Slate and the rest would be seeking out… what seperates reddit from the rest?
AO: We’ve got a really great community at reddit, but this of course is something we can’t really take any credit for. Our comments pages are a great example of this, which is where some of our best content can be found. The recommendation system is another feature we’ve seen mimicked (that’s a good sign, right?) also encourages voting based on genuine interest (instead of groupthink) since each vote helps reddit learn what a user likes. Also, none of our competitors has a mascot from the future.
Do you believe that people will use reddit to find the news that matters to them, versus visiting main stream media news sites line cnn.com, nyt.com, etc? Or is that not even a consideration or concern of reddit?
AO: The Internet has a wealth of places for people to learn about the news that matters to them and mainstream media new sites are certainly one of them.
Mmy concern is that only people “in the know” are using these personalize news ranking websites like reddit. for example, I don’t think my mom would ever use reddit.
AO: Fortunately, both Steve and I can say that our mothers use reddit, but that’s probably because they’re our mothers. Right now, we’re content with most of our users being tech-savvy, since they’re expected to be the early adopters for this sort of thing. There was a time when email was the same way.We’d consider it a major victory if your mother ever told you that she’d “reddit on reddit”.
How many user accounts have been created since you launched.
SH: 56,000
Have you done any demographics on your user base? who are your users, age, language, etc? What are the results?
AO: We’ve got some demographics from a survey FM had us run. Here are some of the more interesting stats:Only half of our users are in the United States. Half of our users are in their 20s. Our most popular language subreddit is Japanese.
Let’s talk about funding. I know ycombinator has played an important role for you guys - how have they helped you in your progress?
AO: They have been incredibly helpful. Frankly, you probably wouldn’t be interviewing us right now if it weren’t for them. We’d had some rather grandiose startup ambitions when we applied to the Summer Founders Program and if it hadn’t been for their guidance (and instance that we change our idea), things would have been much more difficult.
So, we have to talk about the Netscape drama. First, I have to say I loved your mascot/logo redesign the day Jason Calacanis posted his controversial “Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users” blog post. (For those of you who didn’t see it, the reddit mascot was holding a bag of cash the day Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs Inc, offered $1k a month for reddit’s (and other sites) top users.
Actually, here’s the little guy right here:
Ok, back to the question. Has the publicity of the $1k a month offer either hurt or helped the feed the reddit engine? I realize any publicity is good publicity and that the more users you have, the more resources you now have to submit, vote on posts, etc. But, the reason I ask is because I believe the your competitors have suffered somewhat in that their initial popularity opened doors to abuse, spam, and even misuse of the system as a whole - which leads to the overall quality of the site declining, your “reddiquette” being compromised, and eventually your user base becoming disenfranchised.
AO: So far, the system has held up, but preserving the quality of reddit and its community is always a concern of ours.
How much has your user base grown since the calcanis post?
AO: Not exactly sure, but that post certainly got us some attention.
Someone recently posted their digg top user account on ebay. any thoughts?
AO: I wonder how much I’d get for my WoW account on eBay…
Actually, have you lost any of your top users to netscape since the $1k a month posting?
AO: Ousama is the only one that we know of, but he’s still an active member on reddit, so I wouldn’t say that we “lost” him. We can’t blame him for wanting to take Jason’s money.
With or without the recent publicity, what are some of the growing pains that you are suffering from or have suffered in the past? Example, I noticed recent complaints in forums about posts not lasting on the homepage long enough anymore, etc.
AO: Spam and cheating are a constant battle, but it’s an annoyance we were looking forward to back when reddit wasn’t worth spamming or cheating.
How many controllers do you have, if any? Is this completely organic, controlled by the users, or is there reddit staff doing quality controll as well?
AO: There are no controllers; only the users decide what goes on the front page and what doesn’t. Also, all of our users have an equal vote, regardless of their karma; there’s none of that “All are equal, but some are more equal than others” business – we know how that book ended.
On a recent blog post, you attributed your success to not PR or advertising, but from your users. Reddit seems to be very grassroots; very DIY ethics. Where do these ideals stem from?
AO: Y Combinator had a lot to do with that, the “do it on the cheap” ethos permeated through all of the YC startups. That and they also gave us very little money, so paying for PR or advertising was out of the question.
There’s absolutely no advertising on reddit. Why and what would it take for us to begin seeing ads on reddit?
AO: There’s absolutely no advertising on our front page, but our comments pages do have Federated Media ads. We heart FM.
I have seen reddit banner advertisements on valleywag.com - is Reddit active in any advertising compaigns or is that just a kind gesture from the people over at valleywag?
AO: Those ads are part of a deal we have with Gawker Media, they’re good people.
Seems like there’s been a lot going on at reddit. let’s talk about some of reddit’s new functionality. First how does what new functionality get introduced? does the community decide the next features? ( ref: features.reddit.com )
AO: User feedback has been crucial over the last year. Recently, it’s mostly come from emails, but we still try to keep tabs on features.reddit for suggestions and feedback.
Alright, so lets talk about feeds.reddit.com - to me this sounds just a feed reader like bloglines. What’s the difference here?
AO: We wanted to build a lightweight feedreader that could learn using the simple reddit voting-mechanism.
Also, you recently upgraded/improved you recommendation engine. The recommendation engine is unique to reddit. Explain how this all works and how it benefits the user.
AO: It’s constantly evolving, but right now it basically aims to match you with similar uses and recommend you links that were of interest to them. The benefit is a unique view where the links are selected for quality by the masses, but selected for relevance by you.
Seems like you’re adding more and more socialization functionality - friends.reddit.com, comment notification, private email messaging, etc. Discuss what these are, how the system benefits and what was the catalyst for these additions?
AO: Most of our features come from user feedback. “Friends” was simply a means of tracking favorite redditors, which are colored orange and can be easily seen with a quick scan down the front page. Comment notification was in many ways the impetus for messaging, but the in-reddit messaging was also an oft-requested feature. Savvy reporters have even used it to get in touch with us for interviews, but as far as we know, no one has had any success using it as a dating mechanism.
What is reddit built on? Programming language? web servers? OS? Database servers?
SH: Python. GNU Linux. PostgreSQL.
Where is the reddit API? Will there ever be one?
SH: There definitely will be one, but it’s not implemented yet.
I would have to argue that a well designed site is perceived by users as having more integrity than a lesser designed competitor site. Your reddit site is very minimilstic and functional but lacks an aesthetic appeal that most websites go live with. Explain how you’ve succeeded without the slick design and all the bells and whistles these new apps are launched with. Also, I see you even poke fun at the trendy web 2.0 style of design - web 2.0 compliant.
AO: Our focus has always been on building a site that worked well. We hope that our users value that – a site with good and accessible content – over the latest design trends.
What’s next? any other non-reddit related apps in the future? I saw something reddit related over at infogami.
SH: We shall see…
Where do you see yourself in 5 years now?
AO: In the future, driving a hovercar.
Best web application to be released recently? (and by that I mean a tool that you use personally or reddit uses internally)
AO: Farecast: I had to book a flight to DC and I was quite impressed.
What are three sites you must visit everday?(Besides reddit)
SH: XKCD.com
CS: I don’t actually know how to use a computer
What is the best site/blog that we don’t know about.
AO: kittenwar.com, inklingmarkets.com/, giraffegiraffe.com
SH: beedogs.com
Worst job you ever had?
AO: FedEx Package Handler (night-shift), but the exercise was a welcome change and my boss was a good guy. I really can’t complain though, plenty of my coworkers had to do it as a second job because their daytime jobs didn’t pay the bills. I was just a kid trying to make some extra cash.
If you could kill the term web 2.0 how would you do it?
AO: I would keep pumping it with air until it popped.
SH: A bolt of lightning from an ominous-looking tag cloud.
One of my favorite old school punk rock zines (Annoyance, from NJ. It was circulated like 10 years ago, back when a zine was the labor of love; constructed by a word processor, a photo copy machine, and a stapler) would ask interviewees to draw their artistic interpretation of a wombat, because - well, what is a wombat? Give it a try…
Click to view Alexis’s wombat drawing.
What is reddit listening to these days?
AO: Metallica
SH: See above.
AS: Aimee Mann
CS: Nine Inch Nails
How do we get shirts? my wife would love the little alien, wait actually she’s fiercely scared of aliens. scratch that.
AO: Our store. That’s a shame, xenophobia is never a pretty thing.
If you weren’t on reddit, where would you be and what would you be doing?
AO: Until I walked out during an LSAT practice test and into a Waffle House with another college buddy, I was on my way to law school.
Finally, is reddit the nerds vs the jocks(netscape, digg)?
SH: It’s more like the chess club vs. the rubik’s cube club.
Thanks to the Reddit team for taking time out of their schedules to answer these questions. As always, if any readers have comments, questions, etc - please submit a comment below. We’re very interested in your feedback. Cheers!