This is a short excerpt from a YouTube interview (Chris Slowe, Co‑founder & CTO of Reddit) in which Slowe discusses attending a European tech conference, reflects on his decision to join Reddit as an early employee (including being paid in pizza), describes transferable lessons about scaling and product evolution, outlines the goals of Reddit’s redesign (modernize and be welcoming to everyone), and is asked about Reddit’s role regarding fake news.
What's your impression of the digital festival?
Oh, this is great. It's my first time, I think, going to a tech conference, honestly, in Europe. And I mean, the venue is great, the people are great. I'm really looking forward to Hack Zurich coming up this weekend.
In fact, what was the best business decision you ever made in your life.
Personally? I think so. Having been an early, basically the first Reddit employee accepting the offer to start working at Reddit, for me was a big one. It was kind of great for personal development. It's also been great as a business overall. What was the worst at the time, deciding to join Reddit, I think being paid in pizza was not a really good idea. It took a couple years for my mom at the very least to think that me joining a startup, as opposed to becoming a professor in experimental physics, was a good idea.
Do you think lessons you've learned at Reddit can be applied to other companies?
Oh, for sure. I mean, like, on the technology side, I feel like we were on the forefront of a lot of the scaling issues that a lot of companies now are seeing. Scaling is hard. It's great to see. There's actually a bunch of technologies that are out there that foster that. I think on the business side, it's always going to be an experience like the. The original intention of what your product is going to be versus what it turns into is always going to be different. And if anything, the experience of learning what your product actually is is the funnest part.
What will tomorrow's Reddit look like?
Hopefully a continually cleaner version of what Reddit looks like today. The part of the redesign that we really want to emphasize was not that we're rebuilding it for the sake of rebuilding it. We're trying to modernize it, to make it welcoming to everybody. And so what I really hope Reddit turns into is a platform where basically everyone feels comfortable using it. And, you know, we've got a good direction, we've got a good staying power, we've got a demonstration. The platform is actually useful for millions and millions of people. And so we'd like to show that it's useful for billions of people.
Cool. Final question. We live in the times of fake news. So as the front page of the Internet, what does that mean for Reddit? Fake news?
I mean, for us, it means that we have to make sure to foster discussions that help to show what's true and what's not. The emphasis that Reddit has always had is around long form text, which means that we try to emphasize and foster discussions and conversations with users, and I'm actually constantly amazed at how much effort and time our users will put into doing things like fact checking basic things. So if anything, it's really for us, a doubling down of making sure that the authenticity that comes from our platform continues to grow and that our users have a chance to actually suss out things that are not true and actually reveal them.
