Reddit Creator, Alexis Ohanian, Discusses Website's Success

Alexis Ohanian and partner Steve Huffman created Reddit, an online community to share links, at time when the Internet was filled with such places, but now 10 years later it's the site to beat.

"It's a truly open platform for people to find an interesting link, and if other people like that link, they will vote it up," Ohanian told Press:Here. "It is a platform for an online communities to share links and have discussion on whatever they want, from Welsh corgis to world politics."

Ohanian admitted that he and Huffman didn't do a lot of research before launching and were surprised to find that competing site Digg had been around for six months. However, how they decided to make the site was the difference, he said. "We knew very early on that there had to be sub-reddits for communities."

Ohanian said that Reddit was about communities, not just an interesting link, but a place people could come to share. "Steve and I really had very little plans when we started this," he said. "We wanted to create a place that would be easy for anyone to show up, submit a good link or submit a good comment and get Internet points for that."

Ohanian believed that putting the users above advertisers helped create a community and a group of content users. He said that as the non-technical founder, he ended up doing everything the engineering partner wasn't doing.

In 2006, Reddit was sold to Conde Nast, although Ohanian has the company's executive chairman since late 2014. He said that as the non-technical founder, he ended up doing everything the engineering partner wasn't doing which involved business, marketing and other work.

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