INBOUND 2015 I&E: Alexis Ohanian "Building a Community of Communities"

All right. Hi, everybody. How's it going? Hello. How many? I know HubSpot's a pretty, pretty international company. We got probably people from all over the world here. There's probably a good number of Boston folks representing, right? The quietest Boston people I've ever heard. It's interesting how there was this calm around Boston today. I was walking around with my younger sister and it just seemed like everyone had this smile on their face. And I realized it was because of Tom Brady. But a great relief on this fine city. Reddit was actually started here in technically Medford, Massachusetts. Medford as it's locally known. And it's actually really, it's kind of fun to be back here 10 years later because in late 2005, or perhaps early 2006, I don't remember, I pitched Reddit at an event. It was an intimate event somewhere in some random classroom at mit and met this dude named Dharmesh who is pitching this company called HubSpot. In the last 10 years, obviously Dharmesh and company have been very busy where I recently rejoined Reddit full time about a month and a half ago, and I hope to one day also have an entire conference hall and convention center taken over for some kind of Reddit related con. But clearly HubSpot has been a tremendous success. It's been really great for the Boston ecosystem and it's just cool to see what has come from really just a pretty humble beginning and it's just, it's kind of awesome. So anyway, 10 years later I'm here, I've done some other things. I've invested in about 100 or so startups, written a book, started some other companies myself, but now I'm back full time, like I said at Reddit, a company that is a community of communities. And I'm here to talk to you all about building those kinds of online communities and some of the lessons that we've learned from some of the successes as well as the struggles of over the last 10 years. But first, some background. Like I said, mascots are awesome. And I've started a few companies, all of which have cute mascots. Not required, just something I love doing. Reddit as of last month, just keeps growing. Last month we set a new record. August is usually a down month, but 202 million uniques, which actually would put Reddit as now the fifth largest country in the world. We're Brazil size. Yay. So obrigado for any of you Redditors who helped make this possible, or Brazilians as well, or I guess Portuguese? Yeah, say HubSpot's international 7.8 billion monthly page views and the 10th largest site in the country. And again, it started from a little thing in an apartment in Medford. Steve and I had just graduated from college and we were working on something we hoped would hopefully be a front page for a few people. Didn't expect 202 million, but back then there was just one community. There was just one front page. In fact, most of Reddit's early users were just me and Steve with different usernames. We didn't have comments, so it's not like we're having discussions with each other. That would have been a little creepy, but all the submissions were different usernames that were just us. Because back in 2005, Reddit kind of just looked like an ugly blog. There was no notion of social media. This idea that people would spend their days sharing links and voting on links that they thought were interesting, let alone discussions, seemed pretty crazy to a lot of people. And so for the first couple of weeks we just populated that front page with usernames to make it look like there were people there. So that someone who came up for the first time and saw this weird, ugly looking website sort of at least understood that it was this platform for a community, not unlike a web forum of yesteryear. And over time, that community grew. And then programmers, who were some of our earliest users, Reddit was first written in Lisp, started complaining because there weren't enough programming links on the front page. So we created R programming, which was the first of what would become tens of thousands of communities. And it wasn't long thereafter then, that we realized, all right, we can't do this ourselves, we'll just let users create them and moderate them, run them. Not unlike a WordPress blog. Except instead of spending all of your time creating content and a little bit of your time managing your users in the comment section, a moderator would do the exact opposite, spend almost all of their time doing community management and a little bit of time creating content. But this story really started when I got my Internet connection in ninth grade, because that changed my life, because I realized on the Internet I could do anything. I could write websites for people who didn't know. I was a kid. In my parents house, I was just someone who had a skill that they didn't have. And I honed that skill using free resources and forums from total strangers. I don't know the real names of most of the people who provided my education, whether it was HTML or Quake 2. In fact, some of my best relationships, frankly, were online with people I never met in real life. And back in 2000, in the late 90s when I was doing that, it probably made my parents a little concerned. But here we are today, and that's the sort of thing we almost take for granted. So many of us are standing on the shoulders of giants, whether it's someone who put together a little tutorial for how to make the perfect risotto on YouTube, or just someone who wants to, you know, hear us out about how we're feeling. And this was something that is still on the precipice of seeming normal, right? For 202 million people every month, it's sort of taken for granted, right? There are relationships being made on social media platforms that are as real as the relationships we have in meatspace, sometimes more real. Think about that. There are relationships we can have with people whose names we don't even know. We know them as fluffy bunnies 72, that are more meaningful and more honest and more real than relationships we have with people we see every day. And that's exciting because it means people can connect in a way that they really haven't before, in a way that is more true to who they are. And, man, I could have been a lawyer. So I'm really happy. I wasn't. That's what I was going to be until I walked out of an LSAT and I was a history major who just didn't know what he was doing. And I didn't have ask historians to tell me what I should do with my life. But fortunately, I had a good friend named Steve, and we wanted to solve the problem of lines. We hated waiting in them. And I don't know if this is the vintage phone here, but we were going to build an app to let you skip lines. Fortunately, we got rejected by Paul Graham and Y Combinator. That was my mobile menu or mmm. And instead, we were told to work on something that solved our problem every morning. So, like any good Y Combinator founder, we thought, all right, let's get to work. And so we spent three months here in Boston writing code and getting users. Or in our case, like writing code, getting users and pretending to be users for the first couple weeks. And Steve and I launched this thing after about a month of feverish programming. We. We did have a mascot before we had a website. Not proud of that, but that was where my head was. This was actually the very, very first version of Reddit that never saw the light of day. We were going to call the website SNU back then, as in, like, what's snuh? Because then we would tell people, oh, we have this website that's called snu. And they would say, what's snu? And we'd say, exactly. But we could not afford that domain name. It cost us $4,000, and we did not have that kind of money. So we said, forget it. We'll call the mascot Snu and we'll come up with another name. And fortunately, Reddit R E D D I T was available, and I was able to get it, you know, $7 a year, whatever the fee was. And then the first version of Reddit went online, and the very first submission was a link to the Downing street memo, which Steve promptly downvoted. You can see I have negative one. Karma jerk. Steve was the technical mind, is the technical mind behind Reddit. He got the office with the view, obviously. Least I could do. This is the last department we were in before we were acquired by Conde Nast. And at that point, Reddit just kept growing every month. Literally, like every single month to this day, it just keeps growing. And back then, and even to this day, the only money we've ever spent advertising was a few hundred dollars on stickers, which we put all over Boston. And somehow this managed to turn into something that we've had the President use. But what makes it really interesting, and what I want to come back to and really focus on, is the fact that the reason this platform has really taken hold is not just because, oh, the President shows up or Edward Snowden shows up, it's that any one of us can step up to the digital microphone, so to speak, and ask a question. And if enough people think that question is good enough, it gets surfaced and then it gets answered. And I've started to see more and more of these as we enter political season. More and more of these comparisons of the kind of questions a political candidate gets when they come online to an ama, versus the kind of questions a political candidate gets when they go on CNN or the traditional sources of journalism. And that's not to say there isn't a role for them, but it certainly makes us wonder if, like, cable news is really the model that is best designed to surface the most important discussions. I would argue it's probably not. But there's another side of it, too, which is the fact that, you know what? Maybe a vacuum repair guy is as interesting or more interesting than the most powerful person on earth. This is actually. This vacuum repair guy actually is arguably more interesting than the President. If you look at the traffic that his AMA got. I don't know if you remember the Breaking Bad reference about the vacuum repair cleaner. So he showed up to do an AMA not long after that episode aired. But he's a genuine vacuum repair guy. And so you can imagine sitting in front of his computer, he spent hours, countless hours answering people's questions about their vacuums. Now, I don't know much about the entertainment industry, but I would wager there aren't a ton of studios looking to film a show called Ask the Vacuum Repair Guy. And I would wager that as much success as Stephen Colbert has with his late night show, he'll probably never ask this guy to be on. But that's the beauty of the Internet. If this person has an interesting enough story to tell, well, why shouldn't it bubble up? And that's something that we really want to try to focus on and something that when Steve and I came back about actually two months ago now, we really wanted to realign the company around. This is one of a handful of ways we've tried to bring this content to as wide an audience as possible. This is a weekly hand curated newsletter. We've got a small team that just simply pulls some, some of the most interesting content from across Reddit that never made the default front page. Fun fact, the vast majority of people who use Reddit are missing out on the best content because the default front page is only a small sampling of what you're into. I call this the Buffalo Bills problem because we have these Buffalo Bills fans who love the site but have no idea there's a Buffalo Bills community. There's a few, but the Bills in particular are such a, such a beleaguered fan base that they deserve to know that there's a community of others. But we spun this up a few months ago as an interesting experiment. We had literally never sent an email before to anyone at Reddit. Think about that. Marketers in 10 years, 7 point whatever billion page views and zero emails sent now. Back then, 10 years ago, we actually just thought it was kind of a jerk move to send someone emails for no reason. Facebook obviously proved that to be false and showed that the world loved it. And so many of these websites really relied on it for traction and for user engagement. We had never done it before. And so the initial concern was, will people like it? Well, the data is in our open rate and click through rates are about as high as I've seen. And what's really exciting about this was we took an approach that was okay, what do users want let us try to build it and then let us do our best to just bring value. If we're gonna send our first email ever from Reddit, let's make sure it doesn't suck. And you know, we're striving to make these even higher. But it's not a bad, not a bad look a few months in. And similarly, we've done this with editorial. We've wanted to say, okay, we know that so much of what the agenda is online is dictated by what bubbles up on Reddit, right. So many of the stories that bubble up there end up either in a buzzfeed article a few hours later or they end up on, like the local news a day later. So maybe there were ways that we could tell those stories ourselves and give attribution to the actual creators. Right. Actually let users speak for themselves. And so the easiest way to do that was to initially launch a podcast called upvoted broken. 1.5 million downloads, 4 and a half or so stars on the app or itunes store. And it's been one interesting foray and one that we're going to pursue further in other editorial ways to say, look, we know you all are creating amazing stuff. How do we further amplify it? How do we do that while still giving you credit? Which is so important and something that is kind of lost in this digital age is we all rush to be the first person to gank that photo and put it on our Instagram feed in order to one day become an Instagram celebrity who somehow is able to command million dollar endorsements just by lifting content without attribution. It's curious, but it's something we take very, very seriously because we know that without our users there is nothing. And so we think that there is a way to actually do this kind of editorial curation to highlight this stuff and surface this stuff and let you know, oh, by the way, there is a community called R Slow Cooking and they have some of the best crock pot recipes ever. It's true. There is. And that is also true that crock pot got us through that first winter in Boston. For some reason, no one told us it was going to be really, really fucking cold. And then we've also found ways in the last couple of months to really work with some of the amazing people who love Reddit. And Arnold's probably one of the best examples because he really gets how it's this open press conference to the world and he really loves engaging about issues that he cares about. And the numbers don't lie when a simple pep talk to a gym goer on R Gainit, which is also a pretty niche community of people I understand trying to bulk up. A gym member there had a terrible day. He embarrassed himself at the gym. I have only read about what the inside of a gym looks like, but supposedly there are heavy things to lift. He dropped it. People kind of laughed at him. So he went online to the one community where he felt he could share this embarrassing story. He didn't think he'd feel good sharing it on Facebook. So he came to R Gainit and lo and behold, Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up and wrote this nice, thoughtful two paragraph pep talk telling him, look, you walked into the gym, you did more than 99% of people, so go back in there, suck it up. I'm proud of you. I'm paraphrasing and I'm not going to do the Arnold voice, but maybe I will now. But you could just imagine, right? You're hearing Arnold is just like, yeah, go back in there, I'm proud of you. And we got him on the podcast too. He's amazing. There's a little Conan, I don't know. But anyway, the point is this pep talk bubbled up on a really tiny subreddit, a really tiny community on the site. Within about three hours it had half a million views, which was good start. It was a pretty good start. We amplified it through our social media channels. We had our director of outreach push it out to press. And over a four day, it might have even been a holiday weekend. Over a four day period, over a weekend, it proceeded to generate another dozen or so press hits everywhere from like Bleacher Report to ESPN to even a couple international publications. Because it was human, because it was real. And so when we could go back to Arnold's team and say, oh, hey, by the way, that 15 minutes you spent really making someone's day, it also exposed that to, you know, millions of people, everyone wins. And it's those kinds of moments that somehow we've, I don't know, lost in a world of social media where every social media platform is actually incredibly antisocial. Like, as a thought exercise, think about, think about the stuff that you've been posting on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. These are great platforms, don't get me wrong. But if we think about the behavior that we usually take on these platforms, if we acted like that in real life, most people would probably hate us. What is so interesting is when people ask, well, how do I, what's the Reddit Strategy. What's the way to do it? It's actually really. It's not too. Not too tough. It's like imagine. Imagine your having a conversation in meatspace, in the physical world, and then act that way on the Internet. If you walked around all the time just saying, hey, look at this photo of my lunch. Hey, throw back Thursday. Look at this photo of my student id. Literally did that five minutes ago. Like, if you walked around doing that, it'd be weird. No one would like it. And the behavior is actually quite similar. And what we found, too, in the last couple of months, just working with journalists to try to figure out how do we get them the content that they love. We created these embedded posts, not unlike embedded tweets, so that if you find a really good dad joke like this one, you can very easily share it with your audience. But more interestingly, journalists are starting to realize that this is a source. This is a virtuous cycle of content. This is a New York Times reporter who had a story about the criminal justice system in this prison beating that was being actively discussed. I can't remember the subreddit, but the reporter chimed in and said, hey, I'm Michael. I actually wrote that story. There's a bunch of other amazing stuff I couldn't fit in because I guess there's only so much room in the paper with you run out of ink. I don't know. Couldn't print it all. So we started sharing it with the community there, and this snowballed and it helped lead to other story ideas, and they got really meta because he wrote a story about talking about the previous story for the New York Times. But this is the kind of behavior we're going to expect more and more of, because when journalists really want genuine engagement and really want views and visibility, they want a platform that's not ephemeral. And so how do we do a better job growing that? And that's the challenge. That's the thing we've got to figure out. Because like I said, Reddit has managed to grow in spite of a ton of things over the last 10 years. And one of the things that was most exciting and that I would say Steve and I are most hopeful about, is the fact that we can bring some stability as well as some vision for where this can go in the future. And so we've got communities like Game of Thrones, we've got communities like R. Mexico, Slow cooking, like I was telling you about. They're as wide and diverse as the World Wide Web itself. NFL is particularly Interesting this time of year, unless you're a Redskins fan. Blep. Just a subreddit full of photos of cats sticking their tongue out. Love a good blep. I'm clearly a cat dad. And then they just rolled into the shop, which is like the modern day, like the digital car talk. It's so cool to see all these different communities. I don't understand half the things they're talking about because these are all mechanics laughing at the ridiculous things that roll into their shops. But it's a real glimpse into where this is all headed. And like I said, it's really pretty straightforward. The big challenge for us has just been, okay, how do we engage and how do we grow these communities now that they're in the tens of thousands, now that they are far beyond what we could have understood. Right? We. We can't possibly have enough people within Reddit Incorporated to understand all of the different forums that are going to spring up as those 202 million people continues to grow on its way to, hopefully a billion one day. And so that's the part we're trying to figure out. And then the part that I encourage all of you to think about is not the. The stock photos for person holding megaphone are ridiculous. So I just decided to paste all of them in. So absurd. But this is how. This is how every other social media channel essentially works. I know everyone says, no, no, no, jab, jab, jab, right hook or whatever, there's some of it. But, like, at the end of the day, if we all look at every one of our pages or Twitter accounts or Facebook groups, this is what we're doing. At the end of the day, the nature of the platform is not a discussion. It's, hey, follow me. It's like some kind of weird Pied Piper situation, right? That's not how people act in real life. Like, I am as an Armenian, I'm incredibly proud of Kim Kardashian and her millions of Instagram followers. Like, that's awesome. It's awesome. But that's not a really good analog for real life. And yet this is how we treat every single one of these platforms. Because I understand, like, that's the competition, right? That's what the boss wants to see. Did the followers go up? Did the engagement go up? And I understand that, but really, right. Whether we want to admit it or not, the way our brands succeed or fail is that adage that I remember being taught in, well, pretty much every movie, as well as a couple business classes I took, which is that what is it? Word of mouth is king. Word of mouth is everything. Word of mouth is the thing that matters.

Right?

The reason you buy the ad at the super bowl is so everyone can talk about it the next morning at the water cooler. Right? Word of mouth is a thing that we have to win over. That's what we have to create. So why not be in the place where the actual authentic conversations are happening? Reddit is the digital global water cooler for discussion. And so it's like a giant, I don't know, cocktail party in that regard. One way or another, people are talking about your brand. One way or another, people are talking about you. One way or another, people are talking about. About the thing that you care about, that you're trying to promote, that you're trying to market, whatever that thing might be. Join those conversations, engage in those conversations. And it's actually not unlike the thing that we do all the time, the thing that we're probably going to do tonight at the networking event later. Right? These are all very common, human things. And so trying to figure this out is not. There's no blueprint for it. And it's something that we're still trying to figure out ourselves. There has never been a platform for this many disparate, diverse, large communities, ever. 22 million people. That's great. Like, I can't even fathom. It's Brazil. I can't even fathom that. And so we're trying to understand how we can improve the tools to allow moderators as well as users to have the best experience possible. Now, presumably most of you know about the blackout that happened about two months ago, two and a half months ago. One of the big things that we strove to do in the last two months has been specifically focusing around the long neglected moderator tools and community tools that, frankly, Reddit Incorporated had been talking about for years. I mean, it's, you know, to go back to the sort of WordPress analogy from earlier, you know, what WordPress is to the editors who start a WordPress blog, is a majority curation and creation process. Right? You spend most of your time writing blog posts or creating interesting stuff and a little bit of time managing a community. Reddit, sort of the inverse of that as a moderator of a subreddit. You spend the vast majority of your time managing a community and a little bit of time doing that editorial. Now, imagine if the tools for WordPress for content creation hadn't really improved in like six years or seven years. People would be pretty frustrated. Well, that is exactly the case for us the state of mob tools hadn't progressed in about that long. And after too many promises that didn't go fulfilled, that's what happened. So we made sure in the last two months to start that dialogue again, to actually start posting very specific launches announcements, to actually make real substantial iteration to those mod tools that have been neglected for, for so long. And this is still a process. We're still two months in. But what's been so important for us, and the thing that, frankly, we lost sight of, was how important those tools are to the functioning of the entire network, right? Like I said, there are tens of thousands of active communities or active subreddits on the site. And like I said, they are far vast, far more vast and diverse than any team of people could conceivably keep track of or, or think about, in the same way that you couldn't imagine following every Tumblr blog or WordPress blog or Twitter account. And so it's imperative that we build those better tools, that each one of those communities can do a better job actually running and growing themselves. And so the way that we're thinking going forward is actually taking it back to 10 years ago when we were thinking in that little apartment of how we would grow this site. And so the things that really drove us when we were the community managers of Reddit, when there was just one community on Reddit, right, We looked at things like traffic, we looked at things like analytics. We actually had terrible analytics back then because there's no Google Analytics back then. So it was a homebrew, and we barely knew page views and uniques, and that was it. That's an area where we're working to improve, to get more of that data back in real time to moderators so they can better understand the things that are working on their communities. Again, to use the WordPress example, imagine if you were a blogger, not just using outdated tools, but essentially flying blind on what blog posts were working and which ones weren't. We have a really rudimentary traffic set that we're going to continue to improve. And along with that, just the way that we interface with users, the way that we use moderator mail, and the tools that we can build around that which handles the vast majority of that community discussion that makes these subreddits actually function is eight years out of date. So that's the thing that we're working to improve. And the good news is all the signs are positive. The growth continues to grow, as I guess growth does, and the improved discussions happening. Places like this are a Good indication that we're on the right track. But, you know, we're still only two months in and so it's going to be interesting to see where it all grows. And for all of yours perspective, there have been marketing successes on Reddit. They are some of the best examples of marketing online because they are genuine and they are real. Right? They're entrepreneurs who show up on like R Beards or R beard porn to amazing communities and offer free advice for beard maintenance that ends up turning into an actual beard brand that does like beard oils and colognes and all this stuff. These are legitimate, real businesses. The stories can be found and we'll probably profile them at some point on Upvoted. But they all start the same sort of humble way because the founders don't have budget budget because the founders don't think about super bowl commercials and they aren't thinking about how they can optimize to the very penny that cost per acquisition. They just want to start something and all they have is themselves and some specialty something that they know a ton about. And so they offer it just like that person at the cocktail party who doesn't make it about them but just wants to help you. And oh yeah, so you know that advice I've been giving you, it's. It's because I actually kind of obsess over xyz. And here's the thing I made again, this is not. This is the same thing that has worked for thousands of years of business. It is remarkably anti social media when you think of the way that most social media platforms work. But it is absolutely the way the brands will be born or destroyed or grow or weaken online because those conversations are happening. And today we're the size of Brazil. In another few months, hopefully, whatever the fourth biggest country country in the world is, these things will continue to grow. And the good news is we have all been trained for all of our lives thus far on how to use is just the basic fundamentals of showing up and having a conversation and being who you are and hopefully trying to bring some, some value to the discussion. But like I said, we've got a lot of work to do on our side in terms of the tools that we need to keep building. And we made some progress, but it's only been two months and we have a lot more to do. But we want to help because at the end of the day, we know that the things that will enrich these individual communities are the things that will enrich Reddit as a whole, because it's not this Monolith. Like I said, it's tens of thousands of disparate communities and some of you all are members of a lot of them, I presume. And I recently, recently learned about a particular one that just really made me happy that I will share with you all. The fact of the matter is, of all of this stuff that exists online, there is still this wonder of what's going to be next, what's going to be the new thing. And the thing that has proven time and time again to be so valuable for us has been the fact that we strove to build a platform that was fairly agnostic. It was pretty easy for someone to come up and say, hey, I have this idea, you can ask me anything. Let's just put a little AMA at the end. That wasn't invented by anyone at Reddit. That was a random user who came up with it. There wasn't a plan to have a community full of people doing original fiction writing. It just happened because one day someone said, hey, R writing prompts, we're going to make it a thing. If you have a cool idea for a writing prompt, go for it. And a bunch of, you know, writers, amateur and professional, will take a stab at writing something right. Millions of people are joining every day on R writing prompts to read and produce original written content. There are entire startups built to try to do that. And it happened almost as an accident because some user, some random user just had a good idea. And then my particular favorite R invisible bicycles. Because who would have expected that, that photoshopping the bicycle out of a photo of a celebrity riding a bicycle would be so amazing. But it is. And they'll probably get a book deal and I wish them all the best. That's the serendipity of it. And so in any of the platforms you look to build, please also try to build in that same kind of ability for serendipity, for chance. To give you an idea of just how much of an impact it had before we had permalinks with actual SEO friendly text in them, we had a series of sequential numbers and letters. So bear with me, when you'd create a post on Reddit, you would, it would generate a permalink to that comments page that would be like ABC123. And some user realized the next submission sequence. This was when Reddit was much, much smaller. He or she could predict that, oh yes, it's going to be ABC 1, 2, 4. That was a terrible example. But anyway, and essentially created the first self post. So before that Point. The only way, the only thing you could submit to Reddit was a link going somewhere else because we thought, oh right, we're a link aggregator. People are gonna find a cool New York Times article, they'll link to it. Everyone's happy. This user said, no, no, no, let me try this, let me preempt. Let me guess what the permalink is gonna be for the comments page. Type that in as the URL so that when someone clicks on it, it just takes them right back to that comments page. Now this inadvertently or I guess advertently created the first self post, which is this idea of just posting text into Reddit. Ask Reddit threads, AMAs. There are countless examples, writing prompts of how this is being used every day. This random mistake that we didn't expect, that some clever user came up with is now the majority of traffic on our site. The majority of traffic on Reddit is to original content, text written and submitted to Reddit. And that's bonkers because it wasn't in our product plan. It was something that a user came up with. And it's those opportunities we never want to lose sight of and we want to create more of them because we know that's where all the value is. So I believe We've got about 10 minutes ish for Q& A. I'm also accessible on the Twitters as well as on Reddit, of course, at u. Nothing. That's a zero. But please thank you for your time and ask me anything. And there is a microphone there. Somebody's going to ask you about censorship. So yes, I'm going to be that guy. Okay, what I'm asking about also, is this about. Is this about Madarasia? Wait, what? What censorship? And there are lots of cries of censorship. So I. Please be specific. Subreddits. Okay. Which you got to be really specific here. Was this the like, Was this the harassment policy that took down fat people Hate? Okay, all right. What. What is the question? So what's your, what's your stance on it?

How's that?

Ah, okay, so my stance on it is. Is actually, it's what Steve echoed about a month ago in his recent content policy update, which is that we've taken a very specific stand on harassment because what we saw was happening not just on Reddit, but also beyond and was becoming incredibly problematic for users of the site. There are very specific guidelines, and we try to be pretty thoughtful in how we laid them out with our recent content policy update. When it comes to something like harassment of users, we Just don't have any tolerance for it. That's not why we built Reddit. And we were very, very specific. You can see there's a lot of words that go into defining exactly what we qualify harassment as. The good news is it actually happens very infrequently, and we've been so precise with the actual wording of what constitutes it that it hasn't been too much of a big issue. The policy happened, obviously, a handful of subreddits were taken down, but in the interim, you know, the site keeps growing. One of the things we're really keen on, we have a brilliant data team that looks into things. Think of it like a Reddit census or like Reddit morale, to try to understand how the users are behaving, how the, you know, is. Are the changes we're making supported by data are people using the site more. And the good news is all of them are trending in a positive direction. So things like that give us a lot of encouragement that we're making the right, right choices. But, you know, it's something we're always analyzing.

Sure. Hi, my name is Brian Wish. I'm 22, just graduated from Georgia Bulldog. Yes, sir.

Nice.

I'm four months into my startup, which is a online community which has people share stories through writing, photography, music, video in a hyper local community in Athens. And I've been at this four months, and I've had a few of the advisors on my team say, you know, you need to have a clear vision of where you're going and how you're going to get there from a product marketing monetization plan. So if you can kind of think back 10 years, I mean, can you talk about that vision? Or if you had a vision and then if you imagined it turning into anything like what it's blossomed to today.

Oh, man, your advisors are going to love this. We had very little of a plan. We had. We had notebooks full of ideas for product, and I probably had a few notebooks full of ideas for community, as well as Steve, for that matter. But we did not have any formalized plan. The thing that actually YC was really good at, we had just graduated from college. We had, I mean, didn't know what the hell we were doing, but we were focused relentlessly by our advisors on writing code and getting users. And that was the, like every morning, the obsession. Can we make something that 100 people are going to love and come back to? Can we make something that 1,000 people are going to love and come back to and that like I have since invested in and advised hundreds of thousands of founders at this point. And losing sight of that early on is a big. It's a pretty crushing blow because there's a lot of other fun things you can do that are like playing house at a startup. Like they're not actually helping your business. But it feels good to have cool looking business cards. I wasted a day drawing cool looking business cards. Stupid. Writing code and getting users shipping product, testing what effect it has on the users you do have and then learning from that and iterating again and talking to them as often as possible. Like, if far, far more startups will never get to the point where they've made something that even a thousand or ten thousand people really want, that it's not even worth thinking about a lot of the more detailed planning until you've at least got that core. Because there's the gift. And the curse of it being such a playing field online is that you're competing with literally everything. Like you're competing with every cat photo for people's attention. You're competing with my app, you're competing with a hundred other apps in the room. We have a wealth, an infinite wealth of choice online. And so it forces us to be really, really good. So focus on that first and tell your advisors, screw the plan for now. For now. Planning's not bad. It's just, you know, sure. Thanks. Hello.

Hi. Sponsored content. As a marketer, I got really, really excited. Was it ebay recently? They gave away drones.

Whoa, I did not know that. All right, okay.

Very impressive marketing campaign.

Good job, ebay.

Total marketing boner when I saw that.

All right, I'm going to quote you to them.

Do you have any more insight or stories? Success stories on sponsored content?

Netflix recently did an amazing one. So this is success stories for sponsored content on Reddit. Netflix did an amazing one where they were just gilding people left and right. Reddit gold is a really interesting way to engage. It's like showing up at the cocktail party with really great wine. Assuming the wine is a digital currency that gives you some bonus features, but you can't drink it. But it's finding ways like that to basically show up at the party. Be like, hey, R Drone community or R Whatever community, tell us about your blah, blah, blah, here's some gold. It's an easy way to introduce yourself to it and sort of like bring something to the party. I really like this cocktail party metaphor, but you can use whichever one suits your fancy. But it's the kind of thing where it's like, you don't. Especially if you're, you know, if you're new to the site or maybe there aren't a ton of discussions happening about your stuff. Anyway, it's kind of like moving to a new neighborhood and showing up at the block party. And the difference between showing up with a six pack or showing up trying to sell someone a car. Like, even if you are the used car salesman, you don't show up trying to sell people a car. You don't walk up to the house and be like, your car sucks, let me sell you a car. Like, no, you show up with some beer or you show up bringing something that will get a discussion going and engage in it. But we have an amazing team of folks who are also standing by to help with that because we want content to be great, because we want our users to be happy. And we love success stories like that because we know our users are happy and, you know, presumably advertisers are too. So you should email me or PM me on Reddit and I'll introduce you to some of those cool people. We'll do some cool stuff. Thank you.

Hey, I'm Faris. First off, great story. I love how transparent you are about how you started in the early days of Red Reddit, how you and your co founders got together, picked different usernames and started creating content. Fake it till you make it, you know. So big applause for that. I was wondering how you took it from there. Like, what were your next steps and what was your strategy from kind of reaching out to your influencers and kind of creating this other community of moderators that created other communities which made Reddit.

Oh man, I have so little helpful advice here. A lot of it, a lot of it's a relic of 2005. So like, part of the reason, part of the reason we for the first month had our just were submitting ourselves or part of the reason it was a struggle to get going was there was no social media. Like, there was no Twitter, there was no Facebook. There were no ways to get discussions going out naturally. So aside from me like begging third tier tech bloggers to write about us, like, we had, we didn't have. Like, I emailed, I ran a forum, a php BBB forum in college, and I emailed the 500 or so people we had and like, you know, 10 of them signed up, we emailed all our friends and like two of them signed up. If I could go back in time, one of the things we would have done more thoughtfully is what you're suggesting, which is actually thinking through and building out those mod relationships. From the very beginning, the way we launched that was basically we were. We had written the code to create a subreddit within a few months, and we did it ourselves. It was only for me and Steve. We only had access. We did it for R programming, R gaming, R Science, some of the sort of obvious communities that were already bubbling up on the default Reddit.com front page because we wanted to show, like, look, this is not a monolith. Like, there are these different communities in each one. They could be talking about the exact same article. Believe me, when the page Patriots news came out, the discussion on R NFL was very different from the discussion on R Patriots, which was very different from, like, R Jets, if they even have a subreddit. Sorry, Gary, but the point is, like, that was the thing. That was the thing we got right that we knew was the future. We knew that's how we were going to succeed, but we did not in any thoughtful way start to grow those things. And so we basically flipped the switch one day and just said, hey, go make your own. Make your own Reddit. That blog post is in there, and I recently revisited it because we were still a much smaller site too. So it just. It was not the most thoughtful launch of it. And really, for two years, we were still trying so hard to grow those communities. We run house ads for various communities. We still do, but back then it was like a big driver to try to just get people to be like, oh, right, there's a very obvious community here called R Whatever Science. Go check it out. And now we're in this position where we have these default communities, we have this Buffalo Bills problem, and hopefully we're going to finally be pushing Forward on mobile. AlienBlue has already gotten some big updates in the last couple of months, more to come, and we're keen on improving that kind of subreddit discovery. I don't ever want there to be someone who tells me, and I've gone everywhere talking, getting to talk to Redditors. I don't want anyone to tell me how much they love the site. And then for them, and then for me to ask them, oh, what are your favorite subreddits? And for them to be like, I don't know. I just read the front page because it breaks my heart because I know that there's something that they love, they just haven't tapped into yet. So subreddit discovery will solve a lot of that. And then we just, like I said, on the whole need to do a better job building those mod relationships. So I'm sorry, I have no advice, just lamenting. But it's something that we need to be doing a better job of because those are the things, right? The new whatever the new Invisible Bicycles is opens right up to a whole other group of people who are just intrigued by Photoshop Bicycles. We want more of that to happen.

This question was kind of similar to mine, but I was just intrigued by the fact that you guys never spend any money on advertising besides some stickers. And if you're willing to share, I'd love to hear more about kind of the early days and what you did. You mentioned emailing some communities you're in. I was curious if you were doing stuff offline, reaching out to friends and family or leaning on the Y Combinator community. How did you guys hit that first spike?

So today the YC network is vast. Back then, it was like we were the first batch we had. I'll never forget, I emailed everyone. I had an email for, like, I probably spammed my whole address book. And two people, neither actually. Both my parents signed up, but then two people actually used it, Connor and Morgan. Thank you. Connor and Morgan. They both got a shout out in the book specifically for that because they were the only two people who actually were like, yeah, okay, we'll create an account and we're submitting stuff. And I'm grateful, but that's the reality, right? If you create anything, only your parents are really going to care about it. Even today, when we can hit everyone on our Facebook or Twitter or whatever, the thing that saved us was there were a few up and coming bloggers who randomly wrote about us. Not even like tech bloggers, not even like Gigaom or TechCrunch. TechCrunch literally didn't even write about us until the day we got bought. It was actually just random people who were like on their TypePad blog, who were just like, hey, I found this cool site called Reddit. And we'd chime in on the comments and say, thank you so much. This is so great. And it meant a lot to us. Because again, remember, some of you may not Even remember what 2005 was like. Like, it felt so validating as a kid who had never made any web app before, to have some stranger on the Internet write a blog post about this thing that you had made. And so the least we could do is engage. And the thing that finally got us over the hump about a month in was actually a blog blog post by our investor Paul, and he had a fan base on his website. He would write these essays periodically, and he linked to us in one of them. And that was enough. That was a few thousand users. And that was enough to get, like, sort of traction, at least so that we didn't have to keep submitting under fake usernames. But today, there isn't a real corollary to that. I mean, today, companies launch on product hunt and get 10x that traffic, 20x that traffic, 100x that traffic. In some cases, that's great. The downside is, of course, there's more competition for people's attention than there was in 2005. So we had that going for us. But, yeah, unfortunately, this stuff keeps changing, and it's great that it does. But the things that we did were tactically not that helpful. Strategically, though, obsessing over those users and anyone who cares about your site enough to talk about it, even negatively, is worth engaging to a certain extent. Got to know where to cut it off. This I'm being told to stop. Is that like a serious stop? Okay. All right. Out of respect for everyone else who's waiting out there, if you all want to come talk, we can talk. Or if you want to get at me on Twitter or Reddit. Thank you, all of you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your inbound conference. Thank you.