The front page of Reddit is sacred ground for content producers everywhere — a link to a site that appears there translates to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of page views — enough so that just about every major publication, at some point, has tried to figure out how to clandestinely promote its work on Reddit. According to the online-traffic tracker Alexa, Reddit generates more traffic than The New York Times, Fox News and Skype, with approximately 70 million unique visitors a month and around five billion page views. These numbers, while impressive, speak to only a portion of Reddit’s influence. Because there are so many discussions taking place on Reddit, and because so many of them are of journalistic interest and involve members with real expertise, the site is not just a compilation of information but also an important venue for writers and editors looking for source material.

Despite its size and influence, Reddit employs only 28 people. The company’s offices are two glass-walled boxes found at the back of a large, long-tabled, dog-friendly communal work space in Lower Manhattan. Depending on the day, somewhere between four and six Reddit employees are at work there. Large, conceptual problems do exist at Reddit — for example, many new users find the site impossible to navigate, creating a bottleneck through which only dedicated, Web-savvy users can pass — but the day-to-day tasks at Reddit are mostly mundane. Erik Martin, who last year made Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, is Reddit’s general manager, spokesman and all-purpose problem solver. On the morning of my visit, he seemed mostly occupied with writing a blog post promoting Reddit’s worldwide meet-up day, when thousands of Redditors (as the site’s users are called) would converge in public spaces around the globe. The day before, after noting that Asa Butterfield, the star of the coming film “Ender’s Game,” contributed to a hot comment thread about a recently released trailer, Martin persuaded Butterfield to conduct one of Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” sessions, an interview series that has featured Snoop Lion, Psy, Bill Gates and Barack Obama.

According to the site’s mythology, its founders — Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian — met during their freshman year at the University of Virginia and quickly formed a bond over their shared love of video games. One of Ohanian’s professors supposedly asked him why students had chosen to take his class, and Ohanian’s response was, “I want to make the world suck less.” By their senior year, Huffman and Ohanian, like so many young entrepreneurs before them, were seeking profitable tech solutions to the nagging problems of college life. One day, while pumping gas at a Sheetz filling station, Huffman had the sort of simple, almost comical epiphany that has driven so many successful start-ups. He was hungry and wanted to order a sub from the gas station’s sandwich shop but realized that he could not pump gas and get his sandwich at the same time. But what if you could order the sub while pumping gas via your mobile device and make better use of those minutes spent standing and pumping?

Huffman and Ohanian put together a company called Red Brick Solutions, and in the spring of 2005, they spent their break in Cambridge, Mass., where the highly influential start-up guru Paul Graham was giving a talk. Ohanian persuaded Graham to get a cup of coffee with them, and a few weeks later, Huffman and Ohanian pitched their idea to Y Combinator, Graham’s new start-up fund. Y Combinator’s board ultimately rejected the food-ordering idea, but Huffman and Ohanian impressed them as entrepreneurs worth investing in. During one brainstorming session, Graham expressed his admiration for delicious.com, a site that compiles bookmarks on the Web and contained a function called Delicious Popular that aggregates links that have been bookmarked by multiple users. The problem with Delicious Popular was that the disparate bookmarking habits of the public made the list too unfocused and arbitrary to be suitable for any specific group’s needs. Huffman and Ohanian were fans of Slashdot, a site that caters to the interests of those in the tech field. Their idea for Reddit, then, was to combine Slashdot with delicious.com and create what Graham called “the front page of the Internet.” Despite the grandiose description, Huffman said, “we wanted to make it a place where techy people like me, Alexis and Paul Graham could go and find content that interested us.”

Reddit started in June 2005. At first, the only posts on the site came from fake accounts created by Huffman and Ohanian. That December, the two were joined by Aaron Swartz, the tech visionary who committed suicide in January. Swartz was working on his own Y Combinator project, a blogging platform called Infogami, when Graham suggested that Reddit and Infogami merge into one company. Swartz moved into Huffman and Ohanian’s apartment in Somerville, Mass., and began working with Huffman on building an infrastructure that would service both Infogami and Reddit. In many of the dozens of articles written about Swartz after his death, he is credited with founding Reddit, but according to Huffman, Ohanian and Graham, this is not true. Still, among a large population of people, Swartz has become a symbol of the struggle over freedom of information on the Internet. And his association with the early days of Reddit is in part why the site has a reputation as one of the last strongholds for the unfettered exchange of ideas.

The relationship between Huffman and Swartz soured almost immediately. According to Huffman, Swartz never seemed interested in Reddit, his work habits were unpredictable and he proved difficult to motivate. During a crucial time in Reddit’s early development, Swartz decided he wanted to write a book about child rearing and sequestered himself in his room and refused to come out until he had read every book he could find on the subject.

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After his death, anecdotes about Swartz’s manic mood swings have been used to paint the picture of an impulsive and troubled but ultimately beautiful mind. These same qualities made him a nightmare as a co-worker. Graham admitted to me that bringing Swartz onto the team was a mistake. When Condé Nast began looking into a possible acquisition of the site, Huffman and Swartz were no longer on speaking terms, and they agreed that after the sale of Reddit, Swartz would quit the company. On Oct. 31, 2006, Condé Nast bought Reddit. Huffman immediately moved to San Francisco to begin working in the offices of Wired, a Condé Nast magazine. Ohanian stayed on the East Coast. Swartz eventually made his way to San Francisco and hung around the Wired offices until his conflict with Huffman became untenable. One day in early February 2007, Huffman confronted him and asked why he hadn’t quit the company yet. Swartz told him that he wouldn’t quit unless he received a promise in writing from Condé Nast that he would not be sued if he quit. An agreement was produced, and Swartz left Reddit that day. Huffman never spoke to him again.