There is a downvote option in Quora

Between news and memes: what is Reddit?

Reddit goes back on Alexis Ohanion and Steve Huffman. The two met at the University of Virginia. Shortly after graduation, they wanted to help the start-up investors Y combinator develop a page called "MyMobileMenu". The idea was blocked, but they had a foot in the door. Only a little later you got start-up capital for “Reddit - Das Titelblatt des Internet” at the same company. physicist Christopher Slowe and the Internet activist who died early Aaron Swartz with his company Infogami joined the development team.

Despite personal setbacks, the young founders continued to work on the project. Condé Nast Publications bought the company and threw Schwartz out a short time later. The other founders also went other ways after their contract expired, which crossed again at the online travel start-up Hipmunk.

While the developers initially used dummy accounts to stimulate activity on the site, Reddit already had 10,926 subreddits in 2008. 2011 the number climbed to 60,191, Reddit stepped out of the shadow of Condé Nast and became under its parent company, Advance Publications, independent. A year earlier, the platform introduced the subscription model Reddit Premium a. For about 6 US dollars a month, premium Redditor get access to the "Lounge", a restricted-access subreddit, as well as a larger range of functions on the user interface.

The company and its founders attracted a lot of attention when they campaigned against the US draft law against online piracy (SOPA) in 2012 and together with well-known websites such as Wikipedia with a so-called blackout as protest took their entire domain offline.

The site administrators are still committed to protecting the freedom of speech and anonymity of their users. This is reflected in both the page guidelines and the Reddiquette (etiquette for Reddit). The transparency reports, which have been published annually since 2014, ensure transparency.

Founding member Steve Huffman returned as CEO in 2015. At that time, Reddit employed around 100 people, compared to 230 in 2017. During all these years, the platform consisted of mostly American users. There is one, however small, German-speaking community. This helped inter alia. in the process of making the most important official documents (such as the Reddiquette) and a large part of the user interface accessible in German. In addition, there are the rules of conduct in seven other languages ​​and around 90 more or less fully translated languages ​​for the user interface - including pirate slang (“Arrrrrrrrrr”).