Paragraph quoting Alexis Ohanian for "An Analysis of reddit as an Online Community Platform" term paper.

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All of this evidence demonstrates that reddit the company seems like a welcoming community, but the key to their success lies in
how reddit the website is good at developing the feeling of community.  This is achieved by the subreddit system, which lets any
user create a new subreddit for users to submit links to.  Two months into the founding of reddit, the two co-founders, Alexis
Ohanian and Steve Huffman, had an argument over how to let people categorize their submissions to reddit.com.  Their two
candidates were searchable tags, which were very popular athte time, and subreddits, a system where users could make their own
subsections of the site to submit to.  The concept which Huffman said to Ohanian to explain the purpose of subreddits was:

Let’s say somebody submits a story about how the Nets aren’t doing well and we’re using the tag system.  “Nets not performing up
to pre-season expectations this year. #Nets #Brooklyn #NYC #NBA”  The problem is that each of those groups could have a
completely different discussion about that story.  We need to let that happen. (Ohanian)

The founders knew that the limiting factor on their competitors was that they were stuck with one community and couldn’t branch
past it, and the subreddit system is what they chose to address that issue.