Reddit Case Study: How personality impacts success | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Case Study: How personality impacts success

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20 pointsSam_Odio11 comments

This article gets a few things right and a few dramatically wrong. Besides the obvious howler that I invented Lisp, the major mistakes are:

1. That the controversy over switching from Lisp to Python was a "turning point" for Reddit's traffic. Such a minor controversy wouldn't have generated sustained traffic. And indeed when you look at Reddit's lifetime traffic graph, there aren't any visible inflection points; it is overall a pretty smooth upward curve.

2. The reason Digg got more traffic was not some subtle difference in SEO strategies, but simply that (1) they started several months earlier, and (2) they promoted the site energetically to their enormous core audience of 15 year old gamers.

3. The reason it seems from talking to the Reddit founders that "success was not so difficult" is that Steve and Alexis are such understated guys. Simple design always looks like it was easy. Actually they worked quite hard.

Paul just how much impact do you think that Reddit being initially implemented in Lisp had?

I mean, sure, relative numbers of Lisp users might have been pretty small, but the very fact that it was written in Lisp may have gotten fans and detractors to at least hear about the site (probably the hardest thing to do), and then once they checked it out start using it.

So how important do you think that was to initial popularity? Is implementing a site in an obscure yet much-discussed language worth it just for publicity reasons?

I didn't find out about Reddit being written in LISP until it wasn't anymore.

My vote's that it was popular because it was good.

I don't think it made that much difference. There are probably 100 people who are such hardcore Lisp fans that they'd become users of any web app written in it, but not 1000.

Nobody is using ourdoings.com because it's written in Scheme. They use it because they're busy with activities that lend themselves to photography (e.g. traveling or raising kids), and they don't have a lot of time to share/organize. Lisp hacking is not a photogenic activity.

If you want to leverage a language for publicity, you need to pick something that hackers in that language would want to do.

I really have to challenge point 2. The way you write it completely downplays the hard work digg & co put into their product. It was innovative and successfully branded. Not so simple IMHO. Neither do I think digg was intentionally marketed to 15 year old gamers. Of course, correct me if I'm wrong; I well may be. If kevinrose here is kevinrose, he'd have a better story to tell.

Specific groups can be attracted to a site by a graphical look of a site alone. I think Digg vs. Reddit is exactly about that.

The only thing that I still don't get is excess of politics on Reddit. Maybe it's just those who are interested in politics have one thing in common with most geeks: the lack of artistic taste :)

It's not a bad article, but there's a particularly cringeworthy mistake in it:

"Another event that aided the growth of Reddit was a blog post about Reddit changing the Reddit site from LISP (originally created by Paul Graham) to Python."

Oh? McCarthy might have something to say about that... ;-)

[Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman] were able to create the illusion of more contributors by submitting articles under different user names

I'm trying to imagine some entrepreneur who opens a new grocery store and asks his family members to go in and out the store all day long pretending they are customers :)

I heard a story about an author getting all her family and friends to buy all copies of a new book she wrote from an initial test run of all local stores. By selling out so fast, the publisher ordered a lot of books nationwide and the book became popular partially due to the fact that it was available in every book store the second time around. What do you think?

Well, a possibility of cheating is a signal of a breach in the system. How exactly that applies to Reddit or to the publishing business must be, I suppose, some complicated social theory.

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