The clip uses early Reddit as a case study to illustrate “Flintstoning”: founders manually and programmatically seeded content (fake users, scripts scraping headlines) to solve the cold-start problem. Flintstoning is defined as temporary, human-in-the-loop bootstrapping (analogy: Fred Flintstone’s human-powered car) used until organic users sustain the product.
Chapters
Reddit is sort of like a really fun example because in the Reddit case, it was original Reddit. There was no subreddits. It was just one homepage. And Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, what they did was they just said, well, if we don't post content to the homepage, no one's going to view it. So their hard side of the network was the content creators that put in. These days, it's the moderators and the community people and everything. And what they realized was, well, we need to actually get content up there, otherwise there's going to be nothing to do. On the flip side, the problem was if you just saw a million links, all from Steve, you know, or a million links, all from Alexis, that's not good either. And so what they did was they did something, you know, that, you know, now it's kind of like a funny joke within the thing, which is they basically just wrote these scripts and they would just make all these fake users and, and the fake users would just go and just put content on the screen and fill up the homepage. And the funny thing was first, on the days that they didn't run this script, the homepage would be empty and they would freak out. And so sometimes they'd go on vacation and they'd check the homepage and be like, oh my God, Reddit has nothing on it. It would freak them out. And then on the other hand, they were posting all these things and it took them months and months and months of doing this. And it started out with just manual posting. Eventually they added all these scripts that would like, scrape the top websites online and try to grab cool headlines from CNN and try to put them in and headlines from Digg and headlines from other places and put them all in. And then eventually one day, one of the things that Steve talked about is he opened up Reddit and he had forgotten to run the script that day. And right there it was completely full of links and he kind of knew that it was out there anyway. So this whole chapter is actually the case study for a concept that is that I, that I, in the book I call Flintstoning, which is, you know, Fred Flintstone, if you remember the old cartoon, the Flintstones, they had a car. And if you got in the car, you just like, you know, use your legs and you'd kind of. It was a human propelled, you know, sort of automation. And really, this is not just another way to say that these were all kind of human in the loop, you know, type bootstrapping methods in order to solve the cold start problem, and you only use it for a while, and then eventually you get enough users and the product gets far enough along that then you can let go and your community takes it over for you. And so I love the Reddit example for that reason.
