
#Reddit kingdom new lands full
Links are voted up or down by a community that is full of pseudonyms, which has the odd effect of prompting users to be very intimate and remarkably candid, albeit as avatars. In the context of a company that owns Vogue and The New Yorker, Reddit is a deeply weird place. I don’t know whether it was a brilliant strategy or accidental neglect, but the founders did not leave, the community stayed intact, and the site grew beyond anybody’s expectations.” “Condé gave it enough rope and left the people there to their own devices.
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“Strategically, what they have done should be a model of how to create and support a virtual start-up within a larger corporation,” said Anil Dash, a writer and entrepreneur in digital realms. Then Digg, which had been the leader among communities formed around the aggregation of links, made some poorly received changes and users fled to Reddit. “We paid attention to the community instead.”ĭuring that time, it threatened to become an also-ran in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world of social media.

“We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Steve Newhouse, the chairman of, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone.

That kind of deal is usually a signal that a ritual sacrifice was about to begin in which a clueless old media company snaps up a hot Web property and proceeds to squeeze the life out of what it just bought.īut that is not what happened.

So who are the silky venture capitalists or young lions of Valley technology who own this vast unruly kingdom? That would be Advance Publications, the home of Condé Nast, the magazine company that bought Reddit back in 2006 for a reported $20 million. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web.
