[–] RabidRaccoon 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
In 2005, for their senior year spring break, Huffman convinced Ohanian to road trip up to Boston to see Graham talk about entrepreneurship. Ohanian screwed up the courage to ask Graham out for beers because, well, why not? He accepted, and maybe because of Ohanian’s charisma, or maybe because Huffman’s grasp of code showed promise, he invited them to apply for a new startup incubator he was launching, Y Combinator. They raced back to Charlottesville to develop their business plan.
They didn’t get in. At least not on their original idea, which was called My Mobile Menu and involved ordering food by SMS. But Graham invited the pair to return to Boston for a brainstorming session, and by the end of an hour together, they’d come up with the idea for Reddit: the front page of the Internet! As part of the first Y Combinator class, they spent a summer building it—and playing World of Warcraft (they both hit level 60). Huffman and Ohanian were collectively the first 100 users, setting up multiple accounts and posting and upvoting links to demonstrate Reddit was being used. It wasn’t so different from college that way: you didn’t want to show up at a party if no one else was there.
So they didn't actually invent Reddit until they had a brainstorming session with Paul Graham.
[–] FuttsMcButts 0 points 16 points 16 points (+16|-0) ago
[–] [deleted] 0 points 11 points 11 points (+11|-0) ago
[–] FuttsMcButts 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
<3 I don't know much about most websites but I do like to throw archive links for people that may know something I don't
[–] RedditDead2005-2015 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
It's amazing how they could avoid even a single mention of Voat in that lengthy article about Reddit. I am seeing more of these infomercials disguised as news articles for Reddit. The Reddit site is dead and filled with fluff whenever I run across the site. It's about as hip and informative as being on Facebook now.
[–] TheTrigger ago (edited ago)
It was gradual. I remember when I was one of the most informed people I knew, by virtue of being a redditor, alone. As time progressed, I started realizing more and more people, in real life, were more informed about things going on than I was. I chalked it up to my busy schedule, and not really having time to "spend looking at news and shit".
I was missing everything. It got frustrating, and even started supplementing my redditing with Digg (!) in order to get access to the current on-goings of the world, about a year or two ago. This should have tipped me off. But I kept using reddit, for roughly eight hours a day, like I normally did (mindless desk job, you see).
But it was only when I found voat that it really slapped me across the face. It was like I stepped back in time, to the days when I first joined reddit. People are actually courteous (even when they disagree), conversations are more than endless streams of dated, recycled jokes; people actually take the time to formulate opinions. And even though there's a certain slant, to the overall "narrative/tone" of ideas expressed on this site, it's not to the megalithic hive-mind levels that have manifested over there.
It wasn't until how engaged I became in the comment sections here on voat, that I remembered this is what I used to do on reddit, all the time. On my last year there... I barely commented on anything. There were no good conversations to be had, no engaging debates. It was pointless. I rarely clicked to see the comments on posts, because it was getting to the point where I could reliably guess what the top ~10 comments would be.
You're abo-so-fucking-lutely correct about the
reddit == facebookcorrelation. It didn't happen overnight, it was gradual and I didn't see it coming. Hell, I didn't even really notice it until I started frequenting around these parts. I have a feeling most (if not all) of the people that still use their site are on this same boat; they have no idea just how much the site has changed over time. And if they were to take the time to check voat out, and really give it a chance, they'd quickly realize how bad they have it over there.