Vital stats & interesting facts about Reddit paraphrased from this article on Forbes:
- Reddit was started in 2005 by two fresh University of Virginia graduates, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman (22), after they couldn’t finance a previous brainstorm: An online food-ordering site.
- Ohanian created a zany aura, doodling up a goofy red-eyed alien named Snoo that became Reddit’s logo.
- Reddit’s visitor traffic was so feeble at first that the founders spent hours posting content under a variety of fake names.
- Despite a clunky user interface that has barely been updated since 2005, Reddit attracts 3.4 billion page views a month, putting it among the 70 most visited sites in the US.
- Reddit spends just $7 million a year to support a 22-person payroll and 75 servers rented from Amazon’s cloud.
- Most of the content on offensive subreddits is posted pseudonymously and lives on the outer edges of what’s tolerable under the First Amendment.
- Exact terms haven’t ever been disclosed, but insiders say Reddit was bought by Advance Publications' Condé Nast magazine division for $5 million or less in 2006.
- Since Condé Nast stepped in, Reddit’s user base has grown about 80-fold.
- Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) crowdsourced interview series is now an important stop on the publicity tour for movie actors, directors and authors.
- Reddit jargon:
- ELI5 - Explain like I'm Five
- IRL - In Real Life
- NSFW - Not Safe For work
- TIL - Today I Learned
- TL;DR - Too Long; Didn't Read
- Karma - A tally of how many people like your posts or comments
- Rage Comics - Awkwardly drawn, four-panel comics in which characters get angry about their relatives, their computers or anything.
