If you’ve yet to hear of Reddit, climb out from under the rock and check out the social bookmarking/news site.
In the same boat as del.icio.us, Digg and others bookmarking sites, Reddit users submit stories, pictures, videos, comment threads and nearly any other type of content to share with the world – sort of like an online water cooler gathering.
I was lucky enough to meet up with Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian at the Drankkit tour stop in Detroit. While meeting with North American advertising execs, the pair hosted user meetups and even took care of the bar tab!
Take a look at what they had to say about how Reddit fits in with new and old media (or check out the paraphrased version below):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm_TcHulkSc[/youtube]
What’s the draw of Reddit?
Huffman: For it’s community, Reddit is [users'] main source of news … That’s what new media is all about – is the users figure out what they’re into and what they want to know about.
Do more information seekers want the Reddit model?
Ohanian: We have a pretty symbiotic relationship with the mainstream media. It’s a more efficient way of doing what news has always done as a business, and that’s providing stuff that their readers want to read and their viewers want to see.
Huffman: The content is still coming from the talented people, the talented journalists. Old media companies are realizing they have a lot of good content, but so does everybody else … I think you’ll see more and more of old media companies linking to each other online and circulating each others’ content
On linking and the walled garden
Ohanian: It’s to [mainstream media's] benefit to acknowledge that it’s not the brand that matters as much as it used to. It’s the content that values more, and that’s the cool part.
On Comments
Huffman: Comments are one of the things we love best on Reddit. There’s content there that it supplements the content on the piece. It’s fact-checking, or it’s jokes or it’s just more insight.
Ohanian: It’s the same conversation that’s happening the day after the nightly news in the office or at lunch. It’s just happening online, and with the entire world.
How can web users catch the eye of Redditors?
Huffman: It’s all about finding that good content and writing a good headline
Ohanian: Headline is key.
Huffman: Right now we’ve got a new crop of users who are just like machines. Maybe they’re actually machines.
Ohanian: They’re hard-core.
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The Reddit guys were extremely personable, charming, fun and interested in the people who came to meet up with them (all 15 of us or so in Detroit). Find out more about their background from this TechCrunch interview. Hopefully I’ll get another chance to interview these guys as my rambling definitely shows through in the video (hey, they bought Dom, how was I supposed to have good questions?)!
I’d say they were both spot on with the notion that news organizations should strongly consider changing from the walled garden model. What do you think of their comments?
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I’m glad they came to Detroit, we don’t get many ’2.0′ folks out here.