The Untold Truth Of Reddit

When Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit in 2005, they were two recent graduates of the University of Virginia who had an audacious goal for the site: to be the front page of the Internet. And their site became just as successful as they dreamed. As of March 2017, Reddit is one of the top 10 most popular sites in the world, according to figures from Alexa. But it didn't get to that lofty point smoothly.

Ask Me Anything interviews (or AMAs in Reddit parlance) are Q&A sessions where both celebrities and regular people will field and answer questions posed by Reddit readers. But Reddit didn't create the idea. It started in the 1990s at America Online, of all places.

President Barack Obama's 2012 AMA was the most popular of all time, even if it was a little boring (saying Michael Jordan was his favorite basketball player wasn't exactly groundbreaking) but some other lesser-known AMAs have garnered a huge number of questions, like when someone who played Goofy at Walt Disney World dished inside Disney dirt.

According to a 2015 profile in Wired, when Huffman and Ohanian were in college and wanted to start a business about making food deliveries via text messages, they reached out to famed Internet entrepreneur Paul Graham, who was involved with a startup incubation company called Y Combinator. He rejected their idea but encouraged Huffman and Ohanian to brainstorm another one, which became Reddit.

Graham later hooked them up with 19-year-old Aaron Swartz, an "Internet whiz kid" who had founded a company called Infogami. This company merged with Reddit, and Swartz helped rewrite much of the new site's code into Python. When they sold the company in 2006, Swartz received a share of the money, with the total amount the trio earned estimated to be $10–$20 million, according to Wired.

Swartz quickly got fired from Reddit for not showing up to work. He later started calling himself a co-founder, something that both Huffman and Ohanian disputed, with Ohanian writing that "Aaron had nothing to do with any of this." On the other hand, Graham wrote on Reddit that "the company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made Infogami, and in that situation, the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company."

When Swartz was arrested in 2011 for allegedly hacking into MIT's computer systems to access the JSTOR paid articles database, the Bits blog in the New York Times initially described him as a "Reddit co-founder," but the headline was changed after Ohanian complained. The URL still says "Reddit co-founder," though.

Swartz reportedly battled with depression for several years. According to a 2013 New York Times profile of Ohanian, he was worried enough about Swartz being suicidal that he once called the police after the wunderkind wrote a blog post that appeared to imagine Swartz's suicide. Ohanian had once had a girlfriend who had tried to kill herself, so he told the newspaper that he was "very sensitive to the warning signs."

In 2013, when Swartz was still awaiting trial on the MIT hacking felony charges, he killed himself. A documentary looking at his life called The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz was released in 2014.

When James Holmes shot up an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012, a redditor in the area listened to the police feed and provided updates that kept people posted. He also was sent an image from AdultFriendFinder of a dating profile that appeared to be Holmes. The New York Times noted that other media outlets ran the screenshot without crediting Reddit.

One redditor posted from the theater at the time of the shooting, telling what was happening in real time at the Dark Knight Rises showing. Other people at the scene, and who saw the police raid Holmes's apartment, weighed in. It makes for compelling reading even today.

And The Daily Dot notes how many news stories are generated from what is popular on Reddit. Many digital editors, the site says, lift story ideas from the site, many times without giving credit. It also called Reddit "the first draft of new media history."

Digg was a very similar site to Reddit. It started in 2004, the year before Reddit did, and once had an incredible 40 million unique users. But in 2010, Digg released Version 4. As Search Engine Land put it, "This new version of Digg gave these publishers an extraordinary amount of power on the site and revoked the ability of users to create the news." The Digg controversy definitely helped Reddit. They grew from 1.7 million to 9.2 million monthly users a little more than two years later, thanks in no small part to Digg users fleeing the site for Reddit. Digg had once been valued at $60 million, but it was sold in 2012 for just $500,000.

Ohanian talked to Fast Company in 2016 about "the underdog nature of Reddit." He said, "When we learned about Digg—that at the time was a Silicon Valley–funded startup with at least $1 million in funding, darling of the press, the founder was a celebrity—we were just two 'randos' out of the University of Virginia with $12,000." Ohanian said that "we very much felt like the underdog until we eclipsed Digg," adding that the underdog mentality is "an important thing to preserve."

In 2015, Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, was fired. She managed the popular Ask Me Anything subreddit. Apparently there was a conflict between her and Ohanian, who had returned to the company the year before. Some moderators were so angry that they made their subreddits go private, which hid many of the site's most popular places to visit. This included /r/pics, /r/askreddit, and /r/todayilearned, according to Wired.

The controversy, as well as the tumult at the top with interim CEO Ellen Pao leaving the site after facing much criticism, led to co-founder Huffman returning to the company. He told Wired: "I knew I was going back. Some of my friends were like, 'you're running into a burning building." His eyes grow red here. "I was like, 'I've got no choice. This is my burning building."

In 2016, the New York Times reported that according to employees, Reddit decided to change its algorithm to make it harder for posts from groups like pro–Donald Trump subreddit The_Donald to reach prominence. Later that year, the site banned the potentially libelous /r/pizzagate subreddit.

Reddit and CEO Huffman didn't stop there. In November 2016, he edited the comments of redditors in r/The_Donald who were angry with him, replacing his name with the names of moderators of the pro-Trump sites. This didn't go over well. Huffman told Kara Swisher of Recode.net that this editing was a "prank" done "in the spirit of fun." He shared: "I figured, I'm just going to mess with these bullies, and I have the capability of messing with them, so I'll do so." (Who is the bully here, exactly?) He also claimed, "I wanted to do something. I didn't do the right thing, but that was my mentality."

But not many readers saw much fun in him meddling with people's posts. As one redditor told him: "Now everyone should wonder what other comments you have changed. You've really ruined the credibility of Reddit."

Then in 2017, Reddit redesigned the front page to be what The Verge called "more palatable for first-time users and lurkers who have yet to sign up for an account." In the announcement, the company said that this new page, called "popular," would filter out NSFW subreddits, subreddits that did not want to be in /r/all, and "a handful of subreddits that users consistently filter out of their r/all page." The subreddit that was most notably affected from this change? The one known as /r/The_Donald.