[unboxed-value]

People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it

I totally understand the difficulties reddit faced (chicken&egg) but I don't understand "pushing hard against the current" part. What current? People love wasting time online and keep looking for new ways of doing it. Yes, getting their attention (or even noticing you) may be hard, but pushing against the current?

[nostrademons]

A lot of people look at Reddit now and think "What current?", but it wasn't like that in 2005. The notion that cyberspace was some place you went to waste time was just getting started - Reddit didn't invent it, but they caught the early phases of the wave, and it wasn't at all obvious to everyone. There were no such things as FaceBook apps in 2005. FaceBook itself was limited to college students (or it had just expanded to high school students). There was no Twitter, and no Zynga, and YouTube was just getting started. Most people hadn't heard of Digg, and sites like StackOverflow or Hacker News were far off in the future. Casual games were around, but they didn't make headlines the way they do today.

Yes, there were people who wasted time online, but they were usually people in niche subcultures like fandom or gaming. Many of the early Web 2.0 successes still had a significant productivity bent to them, eg. del.icio.us was seen as a way to organize your bookmarks online, Flickr grew a large community of professional or semi-professional photographers, and blogs were often viewed as a way to increase your professional reputation.

People love wasting time online now, but that was not a mainstream view when Reddit started, and they are perhaps responsible for some of it. That's what PG means by pushing against the current.

[_delirium]

I don't think that's really true. By 2005, online time-wasting was huge, mainstream big-business. MySpace was sold for $580 million in 2005. I mean, when even Rupert Murdoch thinks social media is the next big thing, it's not exactly a secret.

[timcederman]

Fark.com was well established in 2005. Reddit added voting.

[CapitalistCartr]

When I'm in the midst of a project, the current is easy to spot. All the people who wouldn't take a stake in the project are now telling me what I should do, that they wouldn't. That's the current.

As for pushing back, every day I wake up and face the battle. Not easy, not fun at times, but the key isn't some great scheme, or brilliant pattern, or ruleset; it's just getting up and fighting, over and over, each and every day.