Reddit open source, we owe it to Wired
Written on June 21, 2008 – 3:31 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After one day of flying and one day of recovering from a hectic week in San Francisco, I’m once again ready for some serious blogging. Let’s start with some old news that might still interest you. Last Wednesday, Patrick, Arjen, and I crashed a Reddit party. We weren’t on the list, but thought we could “add some value” anyway. As you might have read, Reddit has just became an open source project, so we decided to ask co-founder Steve Huffman some questions about this brave business decision - which turned out we totally own to Wired’s publisher Condé Nast Publications.
Undersigned, Steve Huffman, Patrick, and Arjen
Huffman: “Quite a large number of Reddit users are programmers, so we decided to leverage that by opening up the platform”. Right after Huffman and his team did that, they immediately saw the result they were hoping for: “TechCrunch has developed it’s own social news site - based on the Reddit source. That’s exactly the kind of stuff we were hoping for.” He suspects that open source is the future for Web 2.0, though he made a remark that makes me question that a bit: “I’m not sure whether we had opened up if Wired [Condé Nast Publications] hadn’t acquired us. We can take more risk nows”.
.. and organize better parties. We were amazed by the luxurious cocktail card and the fancy food Reddit served. It was fun seeing some good ol’ Web 2.0 people like iJustine, Pete Cashmore, Silicon Calley, and Scott Beale. See you next time in San Francisco!
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