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How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

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Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#21

Post by notatoad »

[deleted] wrote: post #13
batista wrote: post #2

>"I want to stay hungry," says Alexis Ohanian. "I really believe my resources are best used to help projects that make the world suck less." I hate this kind of over-indulgence. What "resources"? He built a social news website and had a strike of luck. It's not like the guy is an Einstein or a Tesla. Or that Reddit is something bettering society. It's a glorified internet forum. Imagine how stupid things like this wo…

[deleted]

The story I heard was that Alexis and Steve went to PG together with a somewhat different idea, and PG suggested that they make reddit instead. Steve was the coder, and Alexis was the community manager - a fairly important job when the business is to build an online community.

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#22

Post by silentscope »

pnathan wrote: post #15
jcurbo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real strength of Reddit is joining the subreddits that pertain to your interests, but I agree that maybe cleaning up the 'default' subreddits is a good idea. There are plenty of people that just lurk with no account or never change the defaults.

agreed - while I occasionally enjoy /r/funny, I default to technical subreddits, and it's a very high-quality newsfeed.

An old reporter adage: news is something someone doesn't want to hear.

In that regard, I don't think reddit is really news in a hardcore sense. It has cool shit, fun articles, hilarious threads, party facts for days. But news? News, and obviously this is a big generalization, is inherently uncomfortable to read.

Reddit is a feature factory, not a newsfeed. You can learn a lot from it, but I'll politely disagree about the usage of news--not that your opinion is wrong, mine's just different.

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#23

Post by beambot »

dalore wrote: post #17
peterwwillis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that the default is supposed to be low-quality is depressing.

The idea is that you can make it "your" front page of the internet with just the topics that interest you. If you go by the default it's got the most mass market appeal because of popularity but if you're someone who reads hackers news that is not what you want. So customize it. The internet has become popular and just like pop music it will appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Reddit isn't required to make "your" front page. Personally... I just go into my browser settings and change it to whatever website I want.

More seriously, iGoogle is pretty good after being customized. I personally have email, calendar, and reader placed prominently (among others). I'd really like a hackernews synopsis too, perhaps something like hckrnews: http://hckrnews.com/

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#24

Post by freehunter »

dinkle wrote: post #19

As I understood it, it was Steve who built Reddit and Alexis is the guy who did everything else (like draw the logo or act as community manager in the early days). I remember Alexis giving a talk on exactly this, he emphasized the importance of letting the engineers worry about building things and not all the trivial things that might get in the way of the goal. I'm not down playing his role or achievement but we sho…

Yeah, he gave a humorous, somewhat tongue-in-cheek speech to aspiring founders (the speech was pretty controversial on Reddit, for obvious reasons). Paraphrasing what he said since I can't remember the exact words, he basically told them to come up with an idea, get it funded, hire some rent-a-coders, and relax on the beach with your profits. His expressed, slightly sarcastic view of founding a web startup was to do what you do as the architect and let the construction crew do what they do.

He actually made many good points, if you can sift through what his many jabs at the programmer types.

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#25

Post by kn0thing »

tylermenezes wrote: post #6
peterwwillis wrote: post #5

What the front page of the internet looks like today: * Image with overlayed snarky text * Another image * Another image... * The Daily Show clip * Another image * Another image * News article about Julian Assange * Another image * News article about guy doing something strange (which is actually really old) * Reddit question thread about Tarantino films * Youtube clip * "Ask Me Anything" request thread * Story on mo…

You can log in and customize it. The default set of subreddits is bound to be low-quality.

I cannot upvote this enough. Thanks.

edit, with bonus explanation! We need to do a better job helping new(and old) redditors realize the thousands of communities they could be joining for a diverse blend of content that interests them. When Steve and I started reddit, we had no categories because it was simple -- and Steve loves simple. Now that we've got scores of vibrant communities discussing links about things ranging from cute animal photos (/r/aww) to philosophy (/r/philosophy) and many things in between, it's up to us to build a more intuitive UX that guides users to them and helps them assemble a personalized front page.

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#27

Post by kn0thing »

freehunter wrote: post #24
dinkle wrote: post #19

As I understood it, it was Steve who built Reddit and Alexis is the guy who did everything else (like draw the logo or act as community manager in the early days). I remember Alexis giving a talk on exactly this, he emphasized the importance of letting the engineers worry about building things and not all the trivial things that might get in the way of the goal. I'm not down playing his role or achievement but we sho…

Yeah, he gave a humorous, somewhat tongue-in-cheek speech to aspiring founders (the speech was pretty controversial on Reddit, for obvious reasons). Paraphrasing what he said since I can't remember the exact words, he basically told them to come up with an idea, get it funded, hire some rent-a-coders, and relax on the beach with your profits. His expressed, slightly sarcastic view of founding a web startup was to do…

That was a 100% satirical talk.

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#28

Post by debacle »

Adaptive wrote: post #18

We are doomed to reinvent Usenet until we finally break the cycle and improve upon it. This has all happened before and will happen again.

slashdot, kuro5hin, metafilter, digg, reddit

I'm sure there are many more that fit into the timeline, but they're all pretty much the same thing - an avenue for 5% of the people to have serious discussion and 95% of the people to be idiots and attention whores.

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#29

Post by dageshi »

peterwwillis wrote: post #5

What the front page of the internet looks like today: * Image with overlayed snarky text * Another image * Another image... * The Daily Show clip * Another image * Another image * News article about Julian Assange * Another image * News article about guy doing something strange (which is actually really old) * Reddit question thread about Tarantino films * Youtube clip * "Ask Me Anything" request thread * Story on mo…

I find it depressing when holier than thou hipsters pop up to whine about how depressing popular things are... which seems to occur with increasing frequency on HN nowadays.

Re: How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet

#30

Post by kn0thing »

dinkle wrote: post #19

As I understood it, it was Steve who built Reddit and Alexis is the guy who did everything else (like draw the logo or act as community manager in the early days). I remember Alexis giving a talk on exactly this, he emphasized the importance of letting the engineers worry about building things and not all the trivial things that might get in the way of the goal. I'm not down playing his role or achievement but we sho…

Yep. Steve & I debated just about everything (even business cards) but he actually built reddit and I did everything non-technical from logo doodles to ordering pizza.

I didn't have any input in the article, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find me writing/speaking about reddit and not also mentioning Steve in the same breath. One of my most-viewed writeups on the subject of 'why reddit won' hopefully indicates the amount of respect I have for everything Steve did: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle...

There'd have been no reddit without him -- and it shouldn't come as a surprise that I jumped at the chance to join hipmunk a week before launch to do my part to help with its branding & marketing.

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