Growing up, “Flintstones” was one of my favourite cartoons – the classic 1960’s animated prehistoric family sitcom. The show follows the Fred and Wilma Flintstone, and their loving pet dinosaur. More than anything, I was fascinated with Fred’s car – made of stone, furs, timber – started by flurry of Fred’s legs – which rolls the family to their destination. YABBA DABBA DOO!

“Flintstoning” is a metaphor for this car, where the missing product functionality is replaced with manual human effort. In app economy, Flintstoned product launch lets the app developers to get the app out into the market and get the immediate feedback from the customers, to further improve the product. Flintstoning can also be a method to acquire new users initially. Once initial networks are formed, the Flintstoning techniques evolve toward the automation as the momentum builds. The goal is to manually fill in critical parts of the network, until it can stand on its own. 

Reddit is the perfect example of a Flintstoned product – where cofounders  employed the technique when they first launched the Reddit as a “Social News Website”. Reddit is self-described as “Front Page of Internet” and is consistently one of the world’s largest websites, with hundreds of millions of users organized into 100,000+ active subreddit communities, sharing million of links. The success story of this website is about keeping patience till you hit the jackpot. The site ranks as the seventh most visited site in the United States in November of 2021. The front page of the Internet had a community of 430 million unique users. These users access Reddit from 217 countries across the globe. This effort results in approximately 25 million post votes a day & over 8 billion page views a month.

“We are the Nerds” by Lagorio-Chafkin, is a story of controversial web startup Reddit, which began as a discussion board platform envisioned as “the front page of the Internet” – ended up as a social media platform, as the internet’s most honest bellwether of American sentiment. This platform has the army of highly engaged users who are anarchial in nature, including nerd, trolls and enthusiasts dedicated to birthing the memes that make internet culture churn – who have become a mirror of the Internet with their memes and trolls. 

Reddit Launch as a “Social News Site” 

In 2005,  Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman, Reddit con-founders, attended a talk by Paul Graham, who offered $12,000 to develop and launch the idea of social website i.e. aggregate the best of web’s endless supply of content. This concept itself wasn’t new, it was already well established e.g. Slashdot, Del-icio.us etc. The main issue with these sites was that reading news was labor intensitve and not enjoyable. 

JTBD Analysis (Social News): 

Let’s analyse this from Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) lens and see what jobs were users trying to perform here. As I mentioned in this story, the following is the statement structure for a Job-to-be-Done:

When (situation) —– I want to (motivation)—— so that (benefit)——

Following are the jobs for a person who’s searching / reading online news: 

1. When I’m searching for news online, I want to be able to find the news quickly as per my preferences, so that I can read what I want to read, in a minimal time possible. 

– Personalization 

2. When I’m searching for the news online, I want to be able to find what my friends (or my community) are reading, so that I can keep myself updated with my community.

– Like-minded community

3. When I’m reading the news online, I want to be able to like / dislike the news content (video/images/text), so that I can let the others know about how I feel. 

– Share feedback  

Alexis & Steve began by identifying the problem, rather than starting with a product. This doesn’t have to be a well-known problem – in fact people don’t always realize they even have an issue until show them a better alternative to status quo. Alexis & Steve focused on above mentioned 3 jobs and provided solutions to make social news-reading enjoyable. 

The first idea was a bulletin board – a site where users can post images, videos, texts and links to other websites. This site will focus on providing solutions to users’ above-mentioned jobs: 

Reddit MVP: The key assumption of the product was the ability to vote on content. No subreddits, no comments, just simple content submitting and voting. MVP was shipped and the engagement lead to further new features – subreddits, comments and so on. Reddit changed the way users read the news, with a very simple idea – I READ IT ON REDDIT. 

Flintstoning Reddit

Startup had a modest launch in 2005 – it was initially a simple home page with list of links submitted each day by Reddit users – only two to begin with (Steve and Alexis). To trigger the cold start, founders created dozens of dummy accounts and no let initial community dry up. The goal was to manually fill in the critical parts of the network, until it can stand on its own. 1^st hundred Reddit users were video-game characters or piece of furniture from Steve/Alex apartment. They built a software to help them scale in this activity, but it was still dependent on founders being involved and checking in on the regular basis. 

One day, Steve didn’t submit anything to Reddit. He was worried there’d be an empty homepage, but when he pulled up, there were links. He clicked on the usernames of the people who’d posted that day and saw that – they were real people. By that point, Reddit had hit a few thousand users, and it was self-sustaining. Later, as traffic grew, the home page was eventually split into three subreddits: politics, programming and NSFW. Then Sports and few other categories. Pattern repeated itself.

Reddit Gamification Mechanism: 

1) Karma Points: In beginning, there were no subreddits and no commenting. To engage the users and keep them coming back, they introduced “Karma points” – where users get points for submitting content to the site. 

2) Subreddits: At first, Reddit was a haven for politics, programming, and NSFW content. As the users started growing on the platform, other topics became popular, e.g. culture, entertainment, to the point in which there was something for everybody. Users started forming micro communities in the form of subreddits – a way to group content / people/ threads etc. The idea was to bring a variety of different people together to chat about something they have in common.

3) Upvotes / Downvote: Reddit was a UGC platform after all. Users were interested in reading tips, life-hacks, product criticisms, and other information from humans, rather than seeing branded content. If a post isn’t interesting to them, they will downvote it. If a topic is interesting to them, they’ll upvote comments related to it and join in on the discussion to learn more.

Reddit Growth Strategy – “Discussion first, Content later“

Reddit was a user generated content platform, but not like other existing social media platforms where content was the focus. Founders kept the focus on the discussions – to create differentiation in the market. Reddit’s feeds highlight active threads, discussions, or subreddits, and most of the platform’s best content exists within those threads or subreddits. One of the example below how founders were putting efforts to keep the communities vibrant: 

In 2008, European Organisation of Nuclear Research (EONR) completed work on Large Hadron Collider. New York times ran an article considering whether the research facility might open a black hole. The photo it ran alongside the story featured a scientist who bore a striking resemblance to Gordon Freeman, the hero of the video game ‘Half-life’. Ironically, Freeman’s role in the popular first-shooter is to fight off alien creatures who arrive on Earth through a portal to another dimension with a variety of weapons, including a distinctive red crowbar. This story was destined to become a meme. Ohanian recognized the publicity value of such a prank and dispatched the tool to Freeman lookalike – scientist Sandro Bonacini. Scientist replied with photographs of himself with the weapon. Along the way, it had generated a ton of clicks. 

Reddit Ads: How Brands promoted themselves on Reddit 

Since Reddit was a platform where users focused on discussion (rather than content), brands played a very different game to promote their messages on the platform, by harnessing the power of online community (and make money along the way). For example, Toyota promoted a video-based post in Formula 1 subreddit. Because this subreddit discussed everything related to Formula 1 cars, Toyota’s video of two drivers racing Supras fit well within the stream of posts.

Toyota knew that posting content as an ad on Reddit would lead to many downvotes, as users might mark them as spam. Brand focused on telling Redditors on an action-packed story about racing. Additionally, by promoting a post specifically in a Formula 1 subreddit, they are leveraging an audience that has already shown a strong interest in cars and the video’s topic. The audience on platform respond more to content that gives them value, even if it’s branded. Toyota made sure it’s giving Redditors valuable information or interesting content that they’d upvote or share.

Reddit ‘Free Speech’ Commitment 

What makes Reddit an ideal place for debate – its commitment to free speech i.e. letting anyone say anything they want. At one point, Reddit became the boiling pot for controversy, as the platform allowed hate communities to thrive. It led to the emergence of some pretty appalling communities e.g. r/Anarchism, r/Jailbait, r/Creepshots, r/Hitler etc. 

Removing these subreddits was easy enough, but it raised a bigger issue – Reddit’s hardline free speech policy that inevitably provided a free big space for bigots and fanatics of all stripes. Reddit leadership, at that point of time, pointed out that you can’t have one without the other, likening the site to an ocean – a huge, untameable realm made up of thousands of microclimates and ecosystems. 

In 2015, Reddit was under fire for hosting free hate speech on its site, that led to leadership crisis. Eventually Alex and Steve returned to rectify the situation. Steve said,

“Reddit is not a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen. It’s not our site’s goal to be a completely free speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.”

Huffman changed the site’s offensive content policy. Content glorifying violence and harm against people and animals would be forbidden. 

Reddit Now: From Social news site to Social network

Started as an promoter of “Free Speech”, it had something for everyone while others comment on the news and perspectives found nowhere else. Even after changing the content policy of the platform, Reddit is still a mystery to many marketers and users. 

Reddit is all about free speech. Or maybe it’s not about free speech. Or maybe nobody knows what Reddit is about. Or maybe nobody knows what free speech is about.

Contrary to Reddit’s motto, the site’s power has not come from being the internet’s front page but from often being overlooked and left to develop in a fascinating if disorderly way. Reddit should be a universal platform for human discourse – where anyone can pull up their soapbox and speak their mind, or have a discussion and maybe learn something new and even challenging or uncomfortable, rather than discussing the topics (of Redditors’ interest). 

Reddit is still a platform for free speech – which is not harmful to others. Discussions are still the crux of the platform – but with lots of control and community guidelines – that define the true free speech – that everyone should feel safe.

References: 
“We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory”by Lagorio-Chafkin
“The Cold Start Problem”by Andrew Chen
“theverge.com/2015/7/15/8964995/reddit-free-speech-history”