Reddit is a social news promotion site with unique features. A thumbs up & down rating system records your voting habits (i.e., what articles you like and dislike) and compiles a page of recommended links for each user. I had the opportunity to interview its co-founder, Alexis Ohanian.

What inspired the creation of Reddit?

As a couple of information junkies, Steve and I found ourselves with too many rss feeds and too many tabbed windows open every morning -- we wanted a front page we could go to every morning that was made for us. Del.icio.us/popular was definitely an inspiration, because it showed the potential of aggregation (I think I'm supposed to be calling this the Wisdom of Crowds), but we were after links that were more ephemeral than the reference material one usually bookmarks on del.icio.us. When we designed our cumulative point system, we called it karma, although it functions very differently from Slashdot's - it was definitely an inspiration (although, I suppose the Hindus deserve the real credit). We've been standing on the shoulders of giants all along the way -- inspired by some fantastic sites.

Click below to see the rest of this interview.

Who is currently working on the Reddit project? What are their backgrounds?

Steve Huffman and I are the two guys working on reddit, we both graduated last May from the University of Virginia. Steve has a degree in Computer Science and I have a degree in History.

What are site stats currently?

We get tens of thousands of users a day.

Do the demographics of Reddit visitors differ from other social news promotion sites?

Hard to tell. We don't ask our users for anything other than a username and a password, but judging from our submissions and comments, all of our redditors are pretty well-informed...and incredible people in general.



What is "important news" and can the internet public be relied on to recognize and vote in favor of it?

Great question, this is something that's been debated many times around the reddit HQ (our living room). Who is to say what's "important"? This is a personal question, which is why we aren't trying to impose an answer -- it's why we're building a system that personalizes news to each user. When users are voting based on what genuinely interests them because they are training a filter, we expect a higher degree of honesty, which ultimately benefits the community with more accurate scores. Traditional news institutions have individuals deciding what's important for the masses, whereas social news sites let the masses decide for the individual -- we're hoping to strike a balance that takes advantage of both to give individuals what's important to them.



Do you think Reddit is an accurate zeitgeist for measuring what the mass public cares about?

I think it's an accurate zeitgeist for measuring what reddit users care about. :)

In what ways is Reddit different from sites like Digg and Gabbr?

As far as I can tell, neither of these sites has a mascot from the future. I think the other major difference is in my response above, in that these sites don't have any kind of personalization to give users a list of what's popular that's filtered for their individual tastes.



How does Reddit's "recommended" feature work?

You'll need to register, but as I mentioned, it's a pretty quick and painless procedure. Afterwards, you can vote links up or down based on whether you liked or disliked them. Once you've trained reddit with a sufficient number of votes, the "recommended" section will be populated with links recommended to you based on your votes. We're in the process of making this filtering much smarter and more seamless.



Does Reddit.com have a business model?

Fortunately, we're in a comfortable position where we can spend all of our time focusing on development, instead of focusing on turning a profit. Nevertheless, we've got some methods drawn up to generate revenue. But for now, enjoy a totally ad-free site -- it's an endangered species.

If you were given a large sum of venture capital, what are some things Reddit would do with the cash infusion?

We're really enjoying our bare bones lifestyle (most of the time we don't feel like we've even graduated from college) and with enough angel funding to sustain it until summer, we haven't thought about accepting VC funding, let alone what we'd do with it.

How do you see the social news promotion environment evolving over the next year?

There are plenty of new sites popping up every week, so I expect that it'll become even more competitive -- which should be a great thing for everyone and produce some really great innovations.

What new features can people look forward to in the future?

As I mentioned, we're overhauling the recommendation engine and integrating it better within the site. In the short term, there's always tomorrow's logo...

Are you working on any new projects?

Nope, reddit is a full-time commitment.



Reddit.com is my favorite news aggregator and I hope Alexis and the Reddit project continue to expand and succeed in the future. If only they could make a Digg Spy clone, then I'd be set.