Highlights 

• 2005 - Reddit is launched. The first version didn’t have comments, nor categories. For the first few months, it mostly contains content posted by its founders under fake accounts
  
  
• 2006 – subreddits are introduced to the platform. One of the most popular is NSFW which accounted for around 10% of the traffic. Other popular subreddits are programming, science, and then politics
  
  
• 2008 – users are allowed to submit their own subreddits. After a period of steady growth, that contributes to an exponential growth of the platform until at least 2012
  
  
• Dec 2010 – the number of pageviews reached 250 million
  
  
• Feb 2011 – a milestone is reached: 1 billion pageviews per month

When did Reddit get founded?

It all began in June 2005 when Reddit launched. The site was originally coded in Common Lisp by Steve Huffman. However, initially, it was supposed to be an SMS-based software, created to enable its users to order food by text messages.

Who came up with the idea of Reddit?

Two University of Virginia students, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, came up with the idea of Reddit as a part of their time in Paul Graham's startup incubator, Y Combinator. 

Graham advised boys to make a news-like "board" with links instead. That's how the idea of Reddit (coming from "Read It") was born.

The concept was simple: users would add links to other sites, and others could tell if those links are cool or not.

How did Reddit get popular – guerilla marketing

Guerilla marketing in the early days of a startup or product is not a rare thing. For Reddit, that was faking the traffic, but also buying $500 of stickers and posting them all over Boston, Massachusetts.

Fake accounts and posts

Reddit’s founders knew that they are developing a social site and that meant it needed a society around it. With such platforms, a community is one of the reasons you join the platform but in this chicken and egg problem, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian posted links from fake accounts (each of them had 50 separate accounts).

The platform’s functionality was to add a link and text but as admins, they had a third field that created new users. This design wasn’t to spam the platform, rather shows that it’s alive on the first page and set the tone for the content they would like to be posted on the platform.

Users who joined later quickly got this standard and if something was odd, they made it disappear. These fake accounts were gradually phased out as the user base grew.

Niche down, simplify, dominate, then expand

Founders clearly had visions for numerous features but in the beginning, they focused only on the core feature of posting links.

That was to such an extent, they didn’t even ask users for emails at registration, and it didn’t have any categorization (it did at some point, but investors advised to get rid of that). That had been justified by the two goals of the platform at that time – get as many registered users as possible and get quality content posted frequently. Hiding this functionality behind registration would prevent newcomers from contributing to that goals.

There were no subreddits. All the users were interacting in the same place in order to create a sense of a "busy" platform. A group of 100 users on one forum makes a far better effect than a few 10-user groups, scattered across several subforums. It served as a nice gimmick.

No censorship

Nearly right from the beginning, Reddit was censorship free. This created an open, transparent community in which anyone could speak their truths – even those criticizing the platform and its founders. That created a sense of community and trust which became one of Reddit’s trademarks.

Three years after the site's launch Reddit users got the possibility to create their own subreddits.

A by-product of this censorhip free environment was porn. Not Safe For Work (NSFW) subreddit had the highest popularity among all of the subreddits. It made for about 10% of the entire traffic.

A good word from someone known

Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, mentioned Reddit in one of his essays. This could give reddit another 3,000-4,000 visitors per day in the early days.

Reddit – 1 billion page views monthly

In February 2011, Google Analytics showed that Reddit surpassed 1 billion page views. There appeared a third comma in their page views number.

How did Reddit surpass 1 billion? Through design. The design of Reddit’s smaller competition, Digg, was much more complicated, which contributed to its fall. That most probably gave Reddit a solid boost in the number of page views.

Lesson? Be better than your competition!

Tools
Website
Stickers
Bots

Psychology

Social proof

Although Reddit didn’t have any sort of comments, it had the system of Kudos which represented how users value certain posts. On top of that, the first fake accounts created fake social proof that the platform is alive and has other users.

Such proofs are valuable to humans in general and convince them to take an action.

Bandwagon Effect

People joined other people on Reddit because it seemed like a cool website with an active community. If they had known it’s actually two people posting, that could have gone completely another way.

Authenticity effects

People prefer brands that seem more human and authentic. Choosing not to moderate the vast majority of comments and posts played on that effect.

Feedback loop

As a social network, Reddit gave its users feedback loops – share a link, get a reward of Kudos or learn to try harder next time.

Picture superiority effect

One of the most popular activities on Reddit to this day is… memes. An image is worth a thousand words and is more influential on the human’s brain which is why they get so popular and Reddit rode that as a platform of their origin.