Reddit began as a small experiment created by two university friends. Over time it grew into one of the world’s most influential social platforms. The site is now known for its sprawling communities, crowd-driven problem solving, viral trends, and sometimes chaotic debates.
At the centre of its origin story are Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, two University of Virginia graduates who transformed a simple submission-and-voting idea into a cultural engine that continues to shape internet discourse.
A friendship with ideas
Ohanian and Huffman met as first-year students in a dorm at the University of Virginia. Both were interested in computing and entrepreneurial projects.
Huffman focused heavily on programming and systems, while Ohanian gravitated toward design and product thinking.
Their skills complemented each other, and they frequently discussed building something together.
In 2005, the pair attended a talk by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator. They approached him afterward, pitching the idea of a mobile ordering service for food. Graham turned down the concept but encouraged them to apply again with something different. That encouragement led to the creation of Reddit. Graham described it as “the front page of the internet,” which then became the guiding concept for the platform.
Building Reddit at Y Combinator
Once accepted into Y Combinator’s early cohort, Huffman coded the framework that allowed users to submit links and vote them up or down. Ohanian focused on interface elements and community dynamics. Their simple voting system would become Reddit’s defining mechanism, later evolving into the karma score that motivated participation.
Reddit launched in June 2005. For months, the site felt empty. To fill the void, Huffman and Ohanian created fake accounts and posted links to make the platform look active. This early seeding strategy, while modest, helped attract real users who then generated their own discussions.
The Infogami merger and the influence of Aaron Swartz
Another important figure in Reddit’s early history is Aaron Swartz. He entered the project through the merger of Reddit with his own Y Combinator project, Infogami, in late 2005. The merger brought Swartz into the company as a co-founder by incorporation, and he contributed engineering work as Reddit began to scale.
Swartz held strong views on openness and user empowerment, which influenced internal discussions even when he disagreed with the direction set by the other founders.
Community-driven growth
Reddit’s structure made it different from most early social platforms. Rather than centring on individual profiles, it emphasised topic-based communities. These later became formalised as subreddits. Volunteer moderators played a significant role from the beginning, shaping culture and enforcing rules within their spaces. This decentralised model created pockets of expertise, niche interests, and in some cases intense debates that shaped public opinion far beyond the platform.
As the user base grew, Reddit became a destination for breaking news, crowdsourced advice, AMA interviews, and grassroots activism. The anonymity of accounts encouraged candid conversations, from personal struggles to political commentary.
Acquisition and evolution
In October 2006, Ohanian and Huffman sold Reddit to Condé Nast. Huffman remained involved in engineering for a period while Ohanian served as a spokesperson and product advocate before eventually stepping back to pursue other ventures. After the Condé Nast acquisition, Aaron Swartz struggled with the corporate environment and eventually left, as well.
Reddit changed ownership structure again in 2011 when it was spun out into a subsidiary under Advance Publications. This move gave the company more independence and room to expand. Huffman returned as CEO in 2015, focusing on modernising the platform’s codebase and interface.
Ohanian continued to support Reddit as a board member until 2020, when he stepped down and called for a Black board member to take his place. He has since worked on investment projects and advocacy initiatives while maintaining occasional commentary on Reddit’s trajectory.
Cultural influence and controversy
Reddit’s founders helped create one of the internet’s most expanding discussion ecosystems. That impact has brought both recognition and scrutiny.
Among the positive contributions are hosting large-scale question sessions that brought public figures closer to citizens, providing a platform for specialized communities to collaborate, and elevating niche knowledge through volunteer moderation.
However, Reddit is today known for hosting extremist or harmful communities, some of which have political influence during election cycles. The platform is also famous for its moderation disputes between users and administrators, and the tension between volunteer moderators and corporate governance.
The founders’ early design choices, especially the decentralised moderation model, continue to shape these dynamics. Both Ohanian and Huffman have acknowledged that building a massive open community carries risks as well as benefits.
The legacy of Reddit
Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman started Reddit with a straightforward goal: a space where the best content, as voted by the community, would rise to the top. They created one of the internet’s most enduring social platforms, defined not by personalities but by collective discourse.
Today Reddit remains one of the world’s most visited sites. Its combination of anonymity, topic-focused communities, and community-led governance continues to influence how online spaces evolve.