How Reddit became the most influential social network in the world, and whether anyone can repeat the success in Russia

Social networks often inflate the number of users to sell ads at a higher price and show impressive reports to investors. This happens throughout their entire life cycle and development. But with Reddit, the story is different: the company started with fakes, and then quickly gained popularity — and fake accounts were replaced by real users.

In the article, I want to understand the phenomenon of Reddit: how the social network became successful and influenced the world, and why no Russian counterpart was able to replicate even a partial success of this service.

The History of Reddit: From Dinner with Paul Graham to Tens of Millions of Users in 2024

The popular social network was created by two University of Virginia students — Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. Initially, the friends wanted to develop a food ordering service via SMS, but they had no money. They had to look for sponsors — that's how they ended up at a lecture by entrepreneur Paul Graham "How to Start a Startup".

At the presentation, Huffman and Ohanian managed to talk to Graham — the friends invited the investor to dinner and pitched their idea. Paul agreed: he listened to the idea and rejected it. But the entrepreneur liked Huffman and Ohanian's approach — and he gave them the idea of a "news social service." Soon the friends came up with the concept of Reddit — a network where users could discuss news, share interesting content, and create something unique.

Graham supported the second concept with money and technology. At that time, he created Y Combinator, and the founders of Reddit became some of the first residents of the business incubator.

During their time in the incubator, the founders created the platform from scratch — they were helped by programmer Aaron Swartz, who is undeservedly excluded from the list of co-founders. The core of Reddit, called "r2," was written in Python. The other parts were on the NodeJS platform with a separate API client. It is unknown how many frameworks, libraries, and other development tools were included in Reddit's stack at the start, but now there are 77.

In 2005, Ohanian and Huffman officially launched Reddit, but they had no idea how to attract an audience. At first, the site was empty. Then the friends decided to register fake accounts, write news and comments on their behalf. This is how Alexis and Steve created the illusion of life within the service.

The guys spent almost all their free time communicating. However, their absurd idea worked: a year later, more than 500 thousand unique, and most importantly, real users were communicating on the site daily.

It would seem like success! But Ohanian and Huffman sold the startup. They did not believe that such hype would last long, so they accepted an offer from the media holding Advance Publications — and earned 10 million dollars for the two of them.

Despite the change of ownership, Alexis and Steve remained in their positions until 2009. During this time, they managed to develop subreddits — threads that helped structure the site. Now users could create discussions based on interests and communicate in separate branches — no one bothered anyone.

Subreddits were integrated into Reddit in 2006, but at that time they were only available to a small audience. And in 2008, they were opened to everyone — and the number of unique users increased to 900 thousand per day.

Immediately after the founders left, Ask Me Anything appeared on Reddit — a subreddit where famous people in the USA were invited and asked questions by the audience. It was one of the few ways to reach celebrities, politicians, athletes, scientists, etc. And the audience liked it — the topic immediately became popular and remains relevant to this day.

At the same time, sponsored content and an advertising platform appeared on the platform, and a year later — the Reddit Gold subscription, which allowed users to get rid of ads on the site.

When Ohanian and Huffman left Reddit, the site ranked second in audience after Digg, the largest competitor with 1+ million daily users. But over the next year, the company managed to grow its asset, and it began to pull away from Digg — so much so that at some point it became unattainable.

In 2012, the company's CEO became Yishan Wong. Before Reddit, he had worked at PayPal and Facebook* as a lead engineer and director of products, respectively.

*belongs to Meta, recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation.

Wong lasted only a couple of years at the company but made many smart management decisions that helped the site grow fivefold. For example, in 2012, the team under his leadership held an Ask Me Anything with US President Barack Obama. Thanks to this, an older audience came to Reddit.

In 2014, due to disagreements with Reddit's board members, Wong left the CEO position — he was not satisfied with the refusal to move the company's headquarters to Daly City. He was replaced by Ellen Pao, who at that time was the vice president of business development.

Ellen lasted a year. Under her leadership, the company got involved in more scandals than ever before. Most of them were related to the blocking of subreddits — such cases occurred more and more often. Under Pao's leadership, the company began to remove "controversial" communities and effectively destroyed the postulate that the site had followed since 2005 — to uphold freedom of speech.

In 2015, Ellen left her position, and Steve Huffman took her place. He returned to the company after six years and the first thing he did was change the monetization rules of the service: instead of Reddit Gold, he introduced the Reddit Premium subscription.

Then Huffman got involved in a scandal, which he masterfully handled. The platform's audience noticed that on the eve of the US elections, someone was anonymously editing the comments of Donald Trump's supporters. Initially, the management remained silent. But when the number of dissatisfied and questioning people increased, the company admitted that it was doing this intentionally.

Eventually, the problem was resolved, and soon Trump was invited to an Ask Me Anything — along with him, Reddit was embraced by Republicans.

Following the election story, there was another, much more positive one. In 2017, the Reddit team launched r/ThePlace on the platform — a subreddit where all users were invited to draw one big picture. They could draw anything on the huge canvas: country flags, cultural objects, symbols, inscriptions, and much more.

Under Huffman's leadership, the company went public, surpassed one billion unique visitors per month, and continued to grow. As of June 2024, Reddit is visited by 91 million users daily. More than 100 thousand subreddits have been created on the platform's servers, and the total number of posts and comments in them has exceeded 16 billion messages.

By the way, during the platform's redesign, Reddit developers thought about the "old-timers" and kept the old version of the site. It can be found at old.reddit.com. The publications there are identical to those on the main page of the redesigned version. A great chance to feel what the very first Reddit was like.

Reddit and the Real World

The huge Reddit community often makes it into stories that are talked about around the world. For example, the famous GameStop stock surge in 2021. It started with a post by user u/ronoron in the r/wallstreetbeats channel. He was offended that corporations were shorting the stock of the offline game store, and he urged people to buy the company's stock.

Millions of enthusiasts responded to the calls, and in January 2021, they drove the price of GameStop from $20 to $350 per share. That month, hedge funds lost about $70 billion.

MicroVision Stock Surge

In April 2021, the community found a new target for a pump — MicroVision shares, the developer of PicoP scanning technology. The effect of the pump was less than in the case of GameStop, but still significant — r/wallstreetbeats subscribers managed to double the share price. However, it quickly began to decline, but the Redditors obviously achieved their goal.

Fundraising

Charity is another trait of Reddit users. So, in March 2021, some of those who made money on the GameStop story donated money to the fund for the protection of endangered species of gorillas. They managed to raise 350 thousand dollars.

The same people donated 100 thousand dollars to Kenya so that the locals could build a "security wall" around the Faraja orphanage — and thus protect it from criminals and child traffickers.

In addition to charity, Reddit users regularly give gifts to each other. For example, they order pizza for strangers online or play Secret Santa at Christmas.

And there are thousands of such initiatives on the platform.

Is Reddit's success possible in Russia

Spoiler: it's unlikely.

I wondered how many Reddit-like services were made in Russia, and why none of them took off. I found the oldest collective blog Dirty (d3.ru), Joyreactor and Yaplakal (sorry), Pikabu, VC. And tekkix, of course. Maybe I missed something, let me know in the comments if you know of other sites and services.

It is worth saying that Reddit was and remains about everything at once: you can discuss IT and digital, economics, game development, movies, music, show business news, memes, and much more.

Russian counterparts are mostly thematic. VC is about business and economics, Joyreactor is about humor, memes, etc. Tekkix stands apart in this row, where a community of people with a professional approach to everything has formed, but still closer to science, technology, and engineering.

What also matters is the content formats. On Reddit, the main thing is user interaction, so the discussion can catch literally everything, even the line "I'm in jail, ask me anything." Try to make a sloppy text on tekkix or VC and prepare a big basket for minuses.

The closest Russian service to the Reddit format is Pikabu. On the site, you can find thousands of communities with UGC content: from science to life stories.

But Pikabu is only oriented towards a Russian-speaking audience, while Reddit covers the whole world.

For comparison, Reddit is read by 91 million people daily. Pikabu — only 3+ million people a day. It is also known that users from Russia and the CIS mostly prefer Reddit. There are so many Russian-language subreddits on it that all of Pikabu would fit in them.

The history of Reddit shows that the platform is not so much about technology and content as it is about the community that creates it. Like YouTube, the service lives off the community and the content it produces. It is impossible to replicate this in both cases without an audience, no matter how technologically cool the service is.

What do you think, what other factors influenced the popularity of Reddit? Write in the comments - let's discuss.