Besides general luck and timing, there are two other factors reddit had going for it.
1) It was never the hot social media site, and still to this day it's a dark horse with even some of my peers not "getting it." We're finally seeing it get the user base and mass market usage of other social media platforms. But it's been an extraordinarily long process. So it was never a hot place to work that attracted product managers / MBAs / status seekers that would come in and META the site. And I think even the investors and/or owners didn't know what to do with it, and were kinda content to just ignore it and let it do it's thing.
2) General incompetence. Search broken for decades. Videos broken for decades. Limited features for decades. Inability to make a native app that's usable. Not to say that I mind the UI of old.reddit.com. But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything. The only time the acted with expedience was when controversies occurred. Yeah, they're finally rolling out new stuff, but it's only been in the past 2-3 years that dev on the platform has picked up.
But the thing is, this is the REASON Reddit has become as important as it is. A "competent" startup would of enshitified reddit and it would of died 15 years ago. Just like Digg. Instead we got almost a decade where the site looked like the frontpage of hackernews. And in that time, users kept creating high quality text content. And that content brought other users. And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic. This is not something that could of occurred in the sort of time frame most startups or VCs operate in. And now they're trying to play a game that doesn't exist anymore (social media in the 2010s), and destroying the site with bad UI, hostility to the primary content creators, changes to the algorithm to prioritize engagement vs. nurturing quality content. It's sad, but I'm happy Reddit existed for as long as it did.
> But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything
This is actually the killer feature that has made Reddit so successful - not much has changed and the content keeps coming in. Same reason HN has still continued to do well.
> And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic.
That's what was interesting about the CEO's statement about their IPO, talking about how the future of Reddit is AI. Umm... I think what makes reddit great is you can actual get genuine humans discussing things they are passionate about. AI generated text seems like the opposite of this.
I wouldn't read too much into that, every tech company wanting to IPO in 2024 has to satisfy clueless investors with talk about their AI strategy. If this was 15 years ago they would be talking about investing to 'harness the efficiencies of the cloud' or something...
I don't know, if you take a look at the Reddit discussion here you'll find a lot of people who look down on Reddit users. The very same people probably Google "search term reddit" to get anything useful, but think of redditors as peasants. They don't appreciate them. The founders seem like they are part of this self-perceived "landed gentry" and may very well do something stupid with AI.
Yeah, it's ironic that they're finally developing new stuff... and it's all absolute user-hostile garbage. My prediction is the IPO bombs hard and they're eventually sold off for scrap as training data for LLMs.
1) It was never the hot social media site, and still to this day it's a dark horse with even some of my peers not "getting it." We're finally seeing it get the user base and mass market usage of other social media platforms. But it's been an extraordinarily long process. So it was never a hot place to work that attracted product managers / MBAs / status seekers that would come in and META the site. And I think even the investors and/or owners didn't know what to do with it, and were kinda content to just ignore it and let it do it's thing.
2) General incompetence. Search broken for decades. Videos broken for decades. Limited features for decades. Inability to make a native app that's usable. Not to say that I mind the UI of old.reddit.com. But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything. The only time the acted with expedience was when controversies occurred. Yeah, they're finally rolling out new stuff, but it's only been in the past 2-3 years that dev on the platform has picked up.
But the thing is, this is the REASON Reddit has become as important as it is. A "competent" startup would of enshitified reddit and it would of died 15 years ago. Just like Digg. Instead we got almost a decade where the site looked like the frontpage of hackernews. And in that time, users kept creating high quality text content. And that content brought other users. And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic. This is not something that could of occurred in the sort of time frame most startups or VCs operate in. And now they're trying to play a game that doesn't exist anymore (social media in the 2010s), and destroying the site with bad UI, hostility to the primary content creators, changes to the algorithm to prioritize engagement vs. nurturing quality content. It's sad, but I'm happy Reddit existed for as long as it did.