Randi, Can You Hear Me?

But we hear Ms. Zuckerberg may have some competition. A source mentioned that MTV is also working on a startup reality show rumored to be produced by peripatetic Foodspotter Soraya Darabi and "a Reddit cofounder." Ms. Darabi told Betabeat she was "not involved" in the project and Reddit cofounders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman did not immediately responded to our inquiry, so it's hard to say if that was just wishful thinking. However, an independent New York City-based casting director--not the lovely gentleman from last night!--confirmed that "There’s a bunch of networks" currently testing reality programming about startups, including MTV and possibly CNBC.

In fact, the casting director said he put together a reel of potential entrepreneurs--some in New York--for Bravo this summer, before "Start-Ups: Silicon Alley" had even aired. "Kind of like the 'Housewives' was successful, you look for more 'Housewives," he said, noting that the success of "Pawn Stars" on the History Channel begat "American Pickers" and "American Restoration."

"Tons of networks," he said, "are looking into the startup space."

"Right now, there’s a little trend going on where poeple are kind of into almost like the American dream," he explained. "You could turn on networks and could see people who are the best at what they do, celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay. But there hasn’t been a whole lot of documenting people with amazing ideas starting off." Networks want to "ride the journey," along with entrepreneurs. As for what kind of characters Bravo requested, "Every network has a demographic. You’re not going to send Bravo four 80-year-old people starting a company," he acknowledged. "We’re first looking for really great idea and then you just pray the people have personalities. You just need to be not be really shy."

Sounds like enough fodder to keep Pando Daily's coffers stocked for a week.

Live From New York, It's Makerbot Last night, at the launch of Wired's new holiday popup, Betabeat made the acquaintance of SNL stars Vanessa Bayer and Fred Armisen. Despite the fact that the room was decked out like an electronics store with gadgets galore, Ms. Bayer, in a grey and black Zara top, could not get enough of the Makerbot 3D printer Wired had on display.

When we asked what her favorite gadget there was, she told us it was "definitely the 3D printer." We suggested that perhaps she might want to check out Makerbot's new store in Nolita, where you can purchase little printed objects. "Did you know," she asked, her eyes wide, "that the 3D printer printed that set of headphones?" She gestured to a pair of red headphones in a glass case across the room. "That is so cool. I literally can't stop telling people about the 3D printer."

As we were leaving, Betabeat ran into her again, and mentioned that a friend of ours had joked that the party space looked a little too much like a Best Buy. "What kind of Best Buy has a 3D printer???" she asked, aghast.

GOOG Goes to Spam Betabeat receives a lot of press releases, and almost all of them route directly to our inboxes, leaving our spam folder for the detritus of the web. Except for one peculiar thing: almost every single email we’ve received from a PR person--or anyone with a @google.com email address, really--gets directed immediately to spam. It’s strange, considering Gmail is a product created and maintained by the company whose emails we are fielding. We’ve asked multiple Google PR reps what the deal is, but their best answer is that we should just continuing marking them as “not spam” to retrain Gmail. Ah, tech reporting is a rough gig.

Bromance Another day, another social media gem from Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer. This time, it’s a bit of Twitter back-and-forth:

Peer Pressure Congrats to Matt Langer, who as per his Twitter account just celebrated six months as a nonsmoker. What’s more interesting is the reason: He admitted to Anil Dash, human conscience of the tech scene, that “not even joking, one of the pros when i was trying to psych myself up to quit was ‘anil won't think i'm a fucking terrible person.’” We thought that seemed a little extreme, until we saw this riposte from Mr. Dash: “Ex-smokers have nothing but my appreciation. Smokers can go die slow, painful deaths.”

Excuse us while we dash out for a packet of Nicorette.

Mr. Martin (Photo: Reddit)

The top-scoring link of all time on the social news website Reddit is a post that users were never meant to see at all. It is titled “test post please ignore,” but almost 27,000 Redditors found it so amusing that they voted it up.

That is testament to the website’s impassioned community—and their brand of dry, often geeky humor (the site’s logo is an alien, after all). But Reddit’s user base, which a recent PBS documentary pegged as 72 percent male, has wide-ranging interests. Other top posts include a link to a news item about the elderly volunteering to clean up nuclear waste in Japan following the 2011 tsunami, and a Q&A session with the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Reddit is one of the country’s most highly trafficked websites, but its general manager, Erik Martin, keeps a remarkably low profile. Most Redditors know the 33-year-old Mr. Martin solely by his username: HueyPriest.

“Part of that’s just me, but part of it is like, we never wanted Reddit to be about the people who work there,” Mr. Martin told Betabeat on the second floor of a San Francisco café that was swiftly inching toward sweltering in the late April heat. Dressed in a plaid button-down and jeans, with dark circles forming beneath his eyes, he looked every bit the startup ingenue. “We don’t want it to be this cult of personality thing that I think some sites get turned into.”

Owned by Advance Publications, Reddit is not a publisher but a platform that allows users to share links, stories and multimedia. Often referred to as the “front page of the Internet,” it is notorious for inside jokes. While cartoon rage comics, for instance, may have originated on the ever-more-offensive 4chan message boards, they certainly reached their apex on Reddit (just read the recent New York Times article for confirmation on that). Users also can create their own “subreddits”—or sections—based on any topic of their choosing, and volunteers with no formal association to Reddit moderate them. Democratization is inherently woven into the site’s functionality: users vote posts up or down at their pleasure: The more votes a post gets, the better chance it has of making it to the “front page,” where the most readers will see it.

And an eye-popping number of users do see it: the site averages 2.5 billion pageviews a month. With user statistics like that, and an especially loyal following, detractors have derided it as a “hive mind,” but that doesn’t fully account for the complexity and generosity of the community: A few months ago, the site hosted a poignant question-and-answer session with a survivor of Norway’s Utøya massacre, for example, and there are countless threads that help collect donations for the community’s sick or needy members.

“‘Hive mind’ is often used pejoratively, and I definitely understand what people are referring to, but I think the idea of a hive mind works pretty well for bees,” offered Mr. Martin, when asked about Reddit’s “upvote now-assess later” tendencies. For bees, he explained, a hive mind means that it takes a democratic consensus to make an important decision, like where to construct a new hive.

“[The hive mind] is a very fast, sort of reactionary thing, and that has bad results sometimes, results where people are not as skeptical as maybe they should be. You need to make sure enough bees are going to double-check the new location. You need a bunch of bees going like, ‘You are right, that is a pretty great new home, it has a tire swing.’”

A little history: In 2005, the site’s young co-founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, were accepted by the startup incubator Y Combinator for its first-ever round. A year later, in a push to expand its online brand, Condé Nast acquired Reddit for between $10 million and $20 million. At the time, Reddit averaged just 70,000 unique daily visitors.

After the sale, Condé worked feverishly to fold Reddit into its stable of well-established print brands, like Vogue and Wired. “We thought of Reddit, [technology blog] Ars Technica and Wired as what Condé Nast deemed the ‘innovation group,’” said Jena Donlin, who runs business operations for Reddit and still works out of the Condé Nast office in Times Square.

Mr. Martin, who had majored in American Studies at Tulane and worked in the documentary film industry, served as the site’s community manager at the time, a role that he said entailed “answering user questions, dealing with spam and finding cool things in the community to promote.”

By all accounts, Mr. Martin also played a significant role in ushering in a successful transition from an independently run website to a division of a major publishing conglomerate. What made the job even harder was that Reddit’s approach to publishing exemplified the democratizing influence of the web, which at that very moment was violently destabilizing the whole we-speak-you-listen model that Condé Nast, with its pantheon of all-powerful editors, had long since mastered.

As Reddit’s user base continued to grow following the acquisition, the tension between the democratized user-generated site and its ancient publishing parent became more pronounced. Reddit does not offer traditional advertising, so its primary stream of revenue came in the form of Reddit Gold, a paid premium membership subscription, as well as what Mr. Martin called “self-serve ads for mom-and-pop shops” and carefully selected marketing partnerships.

The site, which boasts a barebones user interface that harkens back to the halcyon days of ’90s Usenet groups, has always shunned traditional advertising, a stance that even a cash-starved, ad-hungry Condé Nast couldn’t change. Monetizing Reddit is something Condé Nast “has still not been able to figure out,” Mr. Ohanian said in a 2010 episode of Big Think, adding, “Reddit has a fantastic audience ... How do we advertise to them in a way that isn’t screwing them as a user and at the same time providing enough value to an advertiser to want to do it?”

(Photo: Flickr.com/teuobk)

But in August 2010, an advertising controversy erupted between the stodgy parent company and its willful child. The activist group “Just Say Now” wanted to host self-serve ads on Reddit in support of the proposed California marijuana legalization law Prop 19, but Condé Nast refused. The Reddit team responded by agreeing to host Just Say Now’s ads on their site for free, a move that was still technically within the bounds of the parent company’s rules, but made a strong point.

Reddit’s traffic continued to explode, and in early 2011, the site was getting upward of two billion pageviews a month. Condé Nast wasn’t equipped to handle the technological and cultural challenges that came with that kind of traffic. And the tensions between the little-website-that-could and its old-school parent company were starting to take their toll. “In the spring of 2011, we had one programmer and two system administrators and me,” Mr. Martin explained. “It was kind of a rough time, and I was like, ‘If Reddit needs me to move out to San Francisco, I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever Reddit needs. I can’t let this fail.’”

Mr. Martin agreed to move to San Francisco at the behest of Condé, and took on the general manager role. He began to grow the team, hiring a handful of programmers to administer the site. Finally, in September 2011, the company spun Reddit out of the Condé Nast family into its own standalone subsidiary, while still retaining ownership.

“We don’t want to get in users’ way,” Ms. Donlin explained. “We want to serve what the community is already doing. Condé Nast understood that, and it’s why we’re independent. They understood that we needed to be able to do that in order to grow. And they realized in the current structure of Condé Nast, it wasn’t as easy to [grow] because there wasn’t a precedent that was set. We’re more bottom up whereas Condé is more top down.”

Mr. Martin agreed. “The process didn’t allow for [what Reddit needed], that was the main tension. [Condé’s] process is set up for sales cycles that take longer and there’s more sort of time for that kind of vetting and decision-making. But most of the Condé brands have more people on the sales side than we have total employees.”

Reddit hired its first-ever CEO in March 2012, an ex-Pay Pal and Facebook engineer named Yishan Wong. Now, Reddit is a subsidiary of Advance, separate from Condé, and reports to a board populated with executives from both Condé and Advance, along with Mr. Ohanian. “We’ve been working with Advance Publications to complete [R]eddit’s spinoff,” Mr. Wong wrote in a triumphant blog post on Reddit, “[including] a revamped capital structure that will allow [R]eddit to manage its own finances and operations.”

“The way that the site works,” said Kevin Morris, a staff writer at the Daily Dot, in a recent PBS segment about Reddit, “[is that] it tends to attract people who want to know the truth.” In January 2012, the Reddit community’s large-scale vocalization of their opposition to SOPA and PIPA, coupled with support from equally passionate communities on Tumblr and Wikipedia, eventually persuaded lawmakers to table the legislation. Reddit, an online community that had only been around for six years, had successfully helped to defeat the American government.

IN APRIL 2012, MUCH to his surprise, Mr. Martin was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people. For the event, Mr. Martin donned a tuxedo for only the second time ever—the first being a friend’s wedding—and completed the outfit with a shiny pair of Reddit cuff links.

“It was very surreal,” he confided a few weeks after the event. “I’ve never been to something like that. I got to meet Ralph Nader, who is adorable. He asked about Reddit and I explained it to him, but I don’t know if I was successful.”

Mr. Martin is unfailingly humble about his contributions to Reddit. “Any credit I would get,” he said, “would be for not fucking it up.”

“At Reddit, he doesn’t say, ‘Hey, check me out,’” explained Nils Olsen, an old friend of Mr. Martin’s. “He says, ‘Hey, check you out.”

“He can be very humble,” agreed Ms. Donlin. “That humbleness has also been what’s made him so successful.”

Mr. Martin will be moving back to New York in July to focus on the business and media aspects of the site and to run the New York office.

As for that TIME 100 award, it doesn’t appear to have gone to his head.

“Ralph Nader went to give me his business card and he said, ‘Well, I kind of ran out of my current cards, but I grabbed this stack of cards from the 1970s.’ All it had was a P.O. box. It didn’t have a phone number, so he scribbled it on the back,” he said.

“I was like aaahhhh, I am framing this! It was amazing.”

That sounded like an upvote.

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of Wednesday, June 13th.

(Wikipedia)

Twenty-four-year old digital information activist and Reddit alumnus Aaron Swartz, in the news lately due to extreme charges of cyber crime, says on his website that he "co-founded the online news site Reddit."

The problem? Reddit co-founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian don't agree--and both sides cite the same Paul Graham quote as evidence.

Mr. Huffman, Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Swartz were members of the same Y Combinator class, where Mr. Huffman and Mr. Ohanian were working on Reddit and Mr. Swartz was working on a start-up called Infogami. According to Mr. Ohanian, Mr. Swartz joined the two founders six months into Reddit, and a new entity was formed called "Not A Bug," the company that later sold to Conde Nast. Mr. Swartz is a co-founder of Not A Bug, says Mr. Ohanian, but it's not accurate to call him a founder of Reddit.

"I know the founder term is tricky, but there just doesn't seem to be any gray area from our POV," Mr. Ohanian said in an email. "Steve and I do not consider him a co-founder and have simply avoided talking to him since we asked him to resign. In our eyes, there's our mountain of facts that is somehow called into question because of one quote from PG that can be interpreted two ways and Aaron's website."

Mr. Ohanian has been correcting journalists and forum contributors and anyone who calls Mr. Swartz a co-founder, but "people keep running with it for the pageviews," he told Betabeat via email. "Reddit Co-Founder Charged With Data Theft," the original headline on a New York Times Bits post, is certainly more clickable than the revised "Internet Activist Charged in M.I.T. Data Theft" after Mr. Ohanian corrected reporter Nick Bilton. But news outlets including the Huffington Post, Time and Yahoo News continue to use the title in their headlines, not to mention the thousands of smaller outlets and forums.

It's a battle Mr. Ohanian cannot win, but Betabeat set out to settle the question.
The ambiguous Paul Graham quote in dispute is from a four-year old Reddit thread in which Mr. Graham commented: "Aaron's not wrong to call himself one of the founders. The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made Infogami, and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company."
Mr. Ohanian says this means Mr. Swartz is a co-founder of Not A Bug, but not a founder of Reddit.

Mr. Swartz's story is a little different. "I thought Paul G settled this years ago," he told Betabeat via Twitter, linking to the above quote.

"Let me first say that I'm much more interested in doing new things rather than trying to take credit for old ones," he said in an email. "But if you're just trying to get the history right, I will make one observation ... As you can see from the top of the page, Paul is responding to someone calling me 'Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz.' I don't think I've ever been referred to publicly as one of the founders of 'Not A Bug' because no one would know what that means, so it would be weird for Paul to be talking about that."

In a 2007 interview, Mr. Swartz says he helped the other two entrepreneurs come up with the idea for Reddit in the months leading up to Y Combinator.

"No one disputes that Steve and I were the only two people involved in the company that created and launched Reddit," Mr. Ohanian said.

"That's 100 percent false. Neither Steve nor I even knew who Aaron was back then."

He has not asked Mr. Swartz directly to stop using the term, preferring instead to contact those who use the term directly and publish his and Mr. Huffman's version on Google+. "I'm not sure why he's doing that. He's never discussed it with me," Mr. Swartz told Betabeat in a tweet. He's said before that he would stop using the title if Mr. Huffman and Mr. Ohanian asked him to.

Who to believe? For the time being, Betabeat will refer to Mr. Swartz as an early Reddit employee (no. 4, to be precise), as Mr. Graham refers to a start-up "that made Reddit" before Mr. Swartz joined the team, and his statement also contradicts Mr. Swartz's claim to working on the idea before the incubator's Summer Founders session started; Mr. Swartz also revised that claim on his website, where he says he joined Reddit after he failed to raise funding for Infogami.

However it seems the only way to settle this for good would be to ask Daddy Graham himself, who more than understandably did not respond to Betabeat's tweet (he was meeting with 29 start-ups in one day!) and is off traveling and away from email. We'll try to catch him when he comes to town next month, but we have a feeling the affable investor would just give a diplomatic answer anyway.

UPDATE: In response to this post, Mr. Swartz sent this comment: "Interesting. It's strange, because when we were working together, we always referred to each other as co-founders. See, for example, this press release (which, as I recall, Alexis wrote). I wonder what changed his mind."

Mr. Swartz. (Wikipedia)

. . . And was Reddit his birthday present?

FROM THE DEPT. OF KARMA. "Reddit Co-Founder Charged With Data Theft," Timesman Nick Bilton blogged Tuesday at Bits, and hearts stopped across the web: Redditors feared for the fate of Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the people they knew as Reddit's founders through the forums.

But the Times's headline was actually referring to Aaron Swartz, the 24-year old who was just arrested and federally indicted on charges of computer hacking for downloading millions of articles from MIT and could face up to $1 million in fines and 35 years in jail. The headline was changed after protests from commenters and Reddit's Alexis Ohanian, to "Internet Activist Charged in M.I.T. Data Theft" but the URL is still the same.

Once upon a time, Mr. Swartz was a contemporary of Reddit's Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman at Y Combinator, working on a start-up called Infogami, a wiki/blog platform. Reddit and Infogami "merged," a new company was formed and the trio made some agreement to call themselves "co-founders." Mr. Swartz refers to himself as a founder here and here, although he said he'd be "happy to stop if Steve and Alexis wanted." Paul Graham himself weighed in when the issue came up four years ago. "Aaron's not wrong to call himself one of the founders," he wrote on Reddit. "The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made Infogami, and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company."

But Mr. Ohanian and Mr. Huffman--undisputed Reddit founders--don't agree.

"Co-founding Reddit means so much more to me than just the work Steve and I put into creating and growing it. We went through some serious shit together and became closer because of it. Aaron had nothing to do with any of this," Mr. Ohanian said in a post on Google+ after scrambling to get the Bits headline changed.

This is Mr. Huffman's account of Mr. Swartz's role, via Reddit:

I really don't want to get involved in Aaron drama, so I won't be responding much on this thread, but raldi [a Reddit user] asked us to clarify. So, here are some facts:

Aaron isn't a founder of reddit.
Aaron was the founder of infogami.
Aaron joined us about six months in when reddit and infogami merged.
Things went well for a few months.
Things went not-so-well for a few months.
We got bought by CN, he didn't really show up, and was fired.
Everyone who worked with him is still pretty bitter and doesn't like to talk about him or that situation.

And here's Mr. Ohanian's more detailed version:

Six months after launch, we acquired Aaron Swartz's company infogami to form a new entity, which made all three of us directors -- we were all equal equity holders in this new company (without vesting, a huge mistake, take note, founders).

I was in fact once quoted saying: "Paul wanted to give Aaron Swartz, another YC founder, a birthday gift in November. More than anything else, Aaron wanted co-founder so Paul suggested the "merger." Merger is probably a bit hyperbolic for what actually happened, Aaron basically moved in with us and we made him a co-founder."

I was referring to making him an equal equity holder in the new company (Not a Bug, Inc.) which made him a co-owner of the new company, but still doesn't justify calling him a "Reddit co-founder."

Steve and I have tried to stay out of this and assumed (incorrectly) that the truth would prevail. We simply haven't wanted to engage or even really discuss it. Yet here we are thanks to a linkbait-y headline that spreads around the Internet and makes the majority of its readers assume Steve or I (but really, Steve, because I'm not smart enough to pull something like this off) is being charged with data theft.

Betabeat has seen numerous accounts of the origins of Reddit, including that the idea came from Mr. Graham, the karma system came from Mr. Swartz, that Mr. Swartz "got some cash somewhere along the line, which would explain his cavalier attitude... (since often if you quit you lose rights like options, bonus etc, but you keep them if fired)."

But ultimately, it's all semantics--titles are flexible, ownership stakes aren't. In other news, people use Google+ to write blog posts now, which is also interesting!