For the uninitiated, Reddit looks like a mess filled with text links, comment threads, points, upvotes and downvotes. At best, the posts seem countless, large, unruly and totally random. To explain how Reddit works, think of the platform like your Universe: a single place where all your information can be collated onto a single and easily accessible platform.
If your next question is what makes it different from Twitter, then it is the basic fact that unlike Twitter, the stream of content is curated by the Reddit community. Items of value are “upvoted” and those deemed unworthy are “downvoted.” This determines a post’s position on the site and items that hit the front page are seen by hundreds of thousands of people (consequently, sending boatloads of traffic to the linked website.) Reddit was founded back in June 2005, when co founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian decided to create something truly unique.
Huffman and Ohanian first began Reddit by creating various fake links and submitting content from those links. Before the days of social media dominance, 22 year old Ohanian wanted to accomplish a simple task: to unify people through original and quirky content. Started in a two bedroom apartment, the first version of Reddit went live on 23 June, 2005!
What attracted users to Reddit as a user interface was the simplicity of the platform. The more tools given to users, the more the platform took shape. The staple of Reddit, the up and down voting arrows that control the fate of story, were hand coded out of brute force simplicity and a dash of intuition. From being created as a very random platform, Reddit has grown to become one of the most widely used generic content platforms.
Started in the year 2005, Reddit was taken over by Conde Nast in 2006 for an estimated $ 20 million, receiving 500,000 daily unique views. With the growth being so quick and instantaneous, users spend 16 minutes on an average and is one of the most widely used sites by both men and women world over.
