Now that you've got a pretty good idea of the architecture decisions we made on Reddit
and how we kind of grew the site and stored data differently over time,
what I'd like to talk about is now we actually grew the site from a social point of view--
how we got users and how we maintained the feel that Reddit has.
It's hard for me or anybody to really take credit for growing Reddit,
because it's a social thing and even if Alexis and I started over today knowing everything
we know now, it'd be very hard to get a site like Reddit off the ground.
Social websites require a little bit of magic to work, and we were fortunate enough to have it.
We did a lot of very important things that I think helped,
one of which was in the beginning Alexis and I submitted all the content.
If you go to our Reddit submission page now, it basically boils down to two fields.
In the early days it was just two fields.
You basically had a field called "URL," which is the URL of the site you were submitting,
and "Title," which was the title of that site, and that would be the link you submitted to Reddit.
If Alexis and I went to the page we had a third field called "User,"
and we could type in a name here, and when we hit submit,
we would automatically register this user if that name didn't exist
and submit the content as that user.
You'd go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months,
and there'd be tons of content.
I shouldn't say "fake content," but it was fake users. It was really all just Alexis and I.
That did two things, and I think this is important to any site where you want to have a community feel.
The first thing it did was it set the tone.
Websites have this kind of inertia, and we submitted content
that we would be interested in seeing.
That meant the content on Reddit, at least for us and for our peer group,
it was good, interesting stuff.
We wanted a site with the most interesting content online, and s owe did our best to find it
and then we submitted that content ourselves.
So when you show up to Reddit, you kind of know what the site is all about.
The other thing it did was it made the site feel alive.
Users like to feel a part of something.
If they showed up to the website and the front page was blank,
it just looks like a ghost town.
You don't want to live in a ghost town. You'd rather live in New York City. Most people would.
That's why New York City is so big and ghost towns, by definition, aren't.
That was really fortunate, and I don't know what made us do this.
In hindsight it's really easy to say this was how it happened,
but at the time I think we were just embarrassed to have an empty website,
so we submitted the content, and it worked.
I remember the first day a few months in when we didn't have to submit any content,
and that was such a magical day for us, because then we knew the site was working on its own.
It was really, really cool. It took a while to get there.
We really kind of had to will this into existence.
Another thing about the site is it didn't have any comments to begin with.
I don't know that this helped or hindered us. It was just we didn't get around to writing it.
I think the only thing I want to say here is that people look at Reddit,
and if you get into it you quickly realize that the comments are what makes Reddit work.
That's where the really incredible community lives.
And Reddit grew quite a bit before we even had a comment system.
That came later, and it just kind of goes to show how it's not always obvious what
the most important part of a site is, and it's better just to kind of get something online
and start experimenting with it than to build the whole system out and have it fail.
We didn't have any categorization. What we wanted users to do was submit links.
We didn't want them to have to think about categories, think about tags.
Those are all decisions, and the more decisions you have the harder it is to interact with the site.
We had categorization on the site--I should say--for about one day.
I added it one night, and Alexis took all the links that had ever been submitted to Reddit
and categorized them, so when users came the next morning everything would be ready to go.
One of our first investors and advisers was like why did you add categorization.
That ruined everything. Get rid of it, so we did.
Alexis ended up--he wasted all of that time, but that was really good advice.
Not having categorization meant users could just show up and submit content.
The serendipity of the front page was really interesting.
Another thing we did was we didn't collect emails.
Every site on there had this signup process
where you'd have to like enter your email address and then confirm an email--
all those sets you have to do.
One of those steps involves you actually leaving your browser to go to your email program
or go to Gmail or whatever just to become a member.
If you want members and you want submissions, why would you add all the barriers
like required email addresses?
We figured we're not going to spam people. We don't have any emails to send.
Why would we need their email addresses? So we didn't collect them.
That allowed users to register that much faster, I think, was a contributing factor to our ability to grow.
Another big thing we did was no censorship.
We didn't care what content was submitted to Reddit.
Unless it was like overtly racist, we just let it be, especially if it was critical to us.
That created this kind of sense of community, this sense of trust.
That's what ultimately, I think, allowed Reddit to grow to this tremendous size
is the users believed in us and wanted to be a part of this community.
When we made mistakes, even when I goofed one the password hashing thing,
for example, they would stick with us because they realized our heart was in the right place.
We just wanted to make a site that was new and interesting .
We didn't want to sell our users. We didn't want to ruin the site.
We just wanted to have good content.