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ALEXIS OHANIAN: I don't want to keep ranting.
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Alright, questions from the Internet.
@KelsiJayne asks why would someone use Hipmunk over discount airfare site Priceline?
Well, KelsiJayne, you'd use Hipmunk because you were sorting for the best possible flight
your money can buy.
We sort our flights by agony, not price.
So we can find you the cheapest flight, but we know that most people are willing to pay
a few extra dollars to avoid a long layover or some awful flight circumstances that we
all know are agonizing.
So at the end of the day, we want you to have all the best options available and be able
to find them in the easiest, most efficient way possible.
And so unlike Reddit, actually, where we want to keep people on the site for as long as
possible.
With Hipmunk, we take great pride in having people come on, find the flight they want
and then go back to looking at cat photos.
@Rodshire from Twitter: There's a proposed New York law that would ban anonymous posting
online.
How would Reddit adapt to that and do you think it would reduce cyberbullying.
Yes, I saw this this morning and it is absurd that the New York state legislature would
try to ban anonymous online posting.
I'm not even gonna imagine Reddit having to adapt to that because this needs to be crushed
before Reddit should have to and I think that our representatives value free speech enough
to not ever banning anonymous posting online.
I think there are things we can do to reduce cyberbullying, but I don't think that this
would be at all effective.
@NickiAndCarrico What do you do in your free time?
Do you have any?
I love Reddit!!!
Aw, thank you.
That was with three exclamation points which I hope I conveyed in the way I said it.
Um, well, play with my cat.
And I'm not just pandering for the Internet here.
I really have a wonderful black cat.
Her name is Karma.
I wanted to name her Up Vote, but it was down voted by my girlfriend.
I'm serious it's true.
And I read.
Occasionally watch some movies.
I don't have tons of free time, but I do enjoy—I do enjoy just unplugging in my free time because
I spend the rest of it on the Internet.
And thank you for Redditing.
My thank you for Redditing had 4 exclamation points on it, so I out-did you.
@Tim_Sportz What's the biggest problem that CISPA poses?
Oh, where to begin.
The biggest—the biggest issue here is SOPA & PIPA were so soundly defeated because, in
part, they were so, so bad and what opponents of the Open Internet are now going to do are
pass a lot of much less awful bills.
They're still going to be bad, and they're still going to be the wrong thing, but it's
going to be a death by 1,000 cuts and so I think the biggest problem that CISPA poses
is that it is going to be one of many attempts to try and regulate or impede in open and
free Internet and we need to stomp out every single one of them and actually put into place
the things that will safe guard against CISPA or whatever the future acronym is going to
be.
So, I mean, specifically just the idea that any kind of due process would be circumvented
and that a y'know website operator could simply hand over without any question or any due
process or any good reason, your private data is not something any of us are okay with.
Okay, Reddit questions.
Jewl202, Does he think the Instagram sale was over-hyped?
Well, yes.
There was lots of people talking about it.
Do I think it was overpriced?
I know that's not your question, but I'm going to answer it.
Um, I think it's too soon to tell.
Here's the thing, I'm not gonna quickly dismiss it just because of the billion dollar price
tag, only because if you look at something like Yahoo trying to acquire Facebook for
a billion dollars a few years ago, if Yahoo had done that, they would have looked like
brilliant people.
Now just because it's an obscenely large price tag doesn't mean it's going to outright fail.
You could however look at things like Vevo which was acquired by AOL for I think $750
million was essentially an epic fail, but I do think it was over hyped, I just think
we have a tendency with the Facebook IPO was over hyped—a hunger right now in media popular
culture for pretty much anything Internet and tech and especially when it's something
many of us use.
When millions of people are using a service and then they hear it's worth a lot of money,
that just sort of helps perpetuate the story, but so yes, over hyped.
Over priced?
Probably, but I don't want to outright dismiss it because it could have been a viable competitor
to Facebook and Google undoubtedly helped bid up the price.
SweetBabyJ, what are three essential skills for someone who has an idea for a startup?
The best thing you can do for yourself is to know that everyone has ideas.
Ideas don't matter.
Execution does.
And the best skill that you can have is the ability to actually execute your ideas, and
by that I mean if you're building—if you're thinking about a web app, learn how to code.
If you're thinking about building an iPhone app, learn how to code.
At the end of the day, even if you don't decide to start a company right now, learning how
to program or even do a design is one of the most valuable skills you can learn in this
economy.
The great thing is, if you have these skills, y'know, a weekend project that you just work
on for fun can become something much bigger.
You don't have to feel this pressure of oh I need to go start a company today.
It's just fun projects.
So, yes, the top skill for someone with an idea is just being able to build stuff.
Being a designer and a developer and you can go on Code Academy right now and start learning
Javascript.
The other skills—drive, hustle, whatever you want to call it—willingness to do anything,
really.
Because you're gonna have to do really, really menial stuff.
I was responsible for ordering the Chinese food, for making sure the trash was taken
out, like that's just the thing that has to be done in a company when there's only one
or two people.
You're doing everything.
You're the janitor and you're the CEO and just having a willingness to do this no matter
what is extremely valuable and y'know at the end of the day, it's a fairly irrational decision
to start a company given success rates, given the hours, given everything else, but for
people who are right for that, it is so incredibly rewarding and really knowing that being able
to build stuff, being able to hustle and just do whatever it takes are the two most important
things.
The third, oh gosh, mascot creation, we already talked about that earlier, uh patience.
Maybe that's what it is.
Waiting tables for 2 years at Pizza Hut taught me—probably taught me just as much about
running a business as my undergraduate business degree did.
Because there is so much you have to account for when you y'know everything in a company.
You just have to be responsible to your customers, to your employees, to everyone and if you
have a high tolerance for it and you're a earning much, much better place.
So go wait some tables while you're learning how to program.
AidsinaBarrel, really?
A general consensus of those of us who like to bitch and complain point out daily the
decline of content on Reddit.
What do you think you could have done differently while building Reddit to negate some of the
atrocious user-to-user issues?
How do you make an online community sustainable?
How do you fight eternal September?
You should look up eternal September, it's one of these interesting Internet memes.
We've heard it since like month 2 at Reddit.
People have been telling us the site jump the shark.
One of the the things that has protected Reddit in its growth has been the ability to create
your own subreddits.
So y'know if you feel like—this happened on the Gaming Reddit—the gaming community
said it's not about games anymore, it's all this retro gaming, so they went off and created
the Games Reddit.
The marketplace is efficient enough, that if enough people want their own subreddit,
they can just go make it and it thrives.
What we can do a better job of is discovery.
One of the things that I think Reddit fails at right now, that we're working on, but fails
at right now is to help a new user realize that there are communities right now on Reddit
that have—they run the gamut—in terms of topics.
There's a collection of communities for pretty much any Internet user, just within Reddit
and it's a matter of making it much easier for him or her as a user to just discover
them and then join them.
I am Alexis Ohanian, start up guy, and you're watching THNKR.