The History of Social Networks: Flickr to Reddit

on this particular subject. In the last episode in this series, we focused exclusively on my Space and Facebook, two networks that launched a year apart from one another, and how my Space dominated the landscape for a few years, but due to lots of reasons, gave up the lead to Facebook and ultimately faded from view for a couple of years. It did eventually return as a music discovery platform and less of a social network, and that it's kind of

what it is today. And of course we all know how Facebook the company turned into meta and the various issues that this company currently faces. So let's get back to our timeline and see what's next, because now we're in the era of social networks where things got really crowded for a while. In fact, it got so crowded that an analyst named Clay Shirkey created a new acronym to describe what was going on at the time. That acronym was y A S N S yasn's it actually

stands for yet another social networking service. So you know, when folks start bandying about acronyms like that, that you're flirting with over saturation. That everyone saw social networks as being kind of the next phase of the web, and so everyone was trying to get in on it. But we're still in two thousand and four. Because even though I and I've said this in the previous episodes, even though I go through kind of the the an overview of the history of each company as we get to it,

I keep going back to the timeline. It just wouldn't make sense to strictly stick year by year because so

much is happening at so many different places. Now, my Space would rise to dominate the social networking space, and Facebook was not that far behind, but there was still some room in the environment, and some services like linked In, which had launched earlier in two thousand three, were really able to carve out a space by focusing on a niche in social networking, with LinkedIn's example being a social network for professional networking that allowed linked In to flourish

in that specific arena and continue to this day. There would be several other niche social networks that would achieve varying degrees of popularity among slices of users, such as pet owners with sites like Dogster. I'm not going to dive into those really, because they get to be so specific and so relatively small that there's not much point

in diving into them. I should also mention that even early on, there were issues with people trying to game the systems, which isn't really that big of a surprise, I suppose, because if you have a system, someone's going to figure out how to exploit it. So, for example, on Friendster, which we covered in a previous episode, the administrators decided to limit how far out from your connections

you could explore on the site. So the idea was, if there was a profile that was more than four degrees of separation from your profile, you wouldn't be able to view it. You wouldn't be able to go and look at that profile because you wouldn't be close enough connections to merit it. So some people just wanted to amass as many friends as possible to expand their network out and essentially make it impossible for anyone to have a profile they couldn't look at. It was kind of

like a game. The number of friends you accumulated would be analogous to the points you could amass in a video game. To that end, people were doing stuff like sending friend requests to distant degrees of separation, you know, folks they didn't know or had never been aware of before, just to see more potential friends being opened up. Some folks would make fake profiles, either of like a fictional character or maybe a celebrity, solely for the purposes of

gathering more friends. The abuse of the platform caused some real cultural problems for the site, and we would see similar behaviors emerge on other platforms, not exactly the same thing, necessarily, but more examples of people saying, oh, it works this way, but what if I use it this other way, which is a real hacker mentality, And I don't mean that

in a bad way. Now. Whether it was because users wanted to feel popular or they were simply finding value in the network beyond its intended purpose, the activities on Friendster often led to the platform itself losing value, and that the folks who were not game gaming the system who were just there to use it as it was intended. We're finding it harder to navigate the networks and to be sure that the people they were befriending were actually who they thought they were. All right, let's get back

to two thousand four. Uh, Katerina Fake and Stuart Butterfield, who at the time were married. They later would separate. We're working on an m m O RPG. That's massive multiplayer online role playing game. The game's name was Game Never Ending, should have been Game Never Starting because the

game would never actually launch. But but within that game, there was a feature in which users wouldn't be able to upload photos that ended up being spun off into a fully fledged service of its own, and service became known as Flicker f l I c k R. By the way, there was this also this era of web based companies where it became trendy to not include certain vowels in your name. Twitter, which we will talk about in the next episode of this series, was at one point just called t W T t R with no

eye and no E in it. But anyway, Flicker was not the first online photo sharing service. There were others like photo Bucket, and there was an early version of Picasa that kind of had elements of that. There was also smug Mug, which was really more for photographers, but

it did introduce something really useful. So it wasn't first it allowing you to upload your photos to an album, but it did allow you to do meta tagging, and so you could tag photos with any kind of metadata you liked, not just photos you uploaded, but also photos that you viewed, and that made these photos searchable by keyword. So let's say you're an avid diver and a photographer and you upload photos of some of your dives and use relevant keywords, and you use the same keywords to

search for other photos from other divers like you. Maybe you find a community of of diver photographers that you didn't know about and you would connect with them. So Flicker effectively outsourced the taxonomy of the photographs that were on its site to the community, and the community eagerly took up the task. And this just made Flicker a more valuable tool because you could find photos on just about anything. If you just started searching for certain keywords,

Flicker would become really famous pretty quickly. Fake and Butterfield founded it in February two four and just a year later in early two thousand five, Internet giant at the time, Yahoo would come a column. Now, Flicker was still in the early stages of receiving influxes of cash from angel investors, and it was very early days to consider selling to a bigger company, and this was not an easy decision.

Should you play the long game and try to build value in your company, which would in turn push up the price tag. Alternatively, you could try and just stay a solvent, standalone company on your own and not sell to anybody. Or should you cash out when the opportunity arises. This is a very tough thing to consider because keep in mind, this is two thousand five, it was not that far removed from the dot com crash, and that

crash illustrated that nothing is ever a sure thing. So sometimes when that opportunity comes around, you may not get another one. So there's a lot of pressure. Not the same time, flickers star was on the rise. I mean, even other services like Blogger were meaning on Flicker to power image uploads, so Flicker was becoming more influential in

the web in general. Ultimately, the founders made the decision to accept Yahoo's deal, which was reportedly in the neighborhood of thirty five million bucks, though some sources say that it's actually maybe as low as twenty two million. It just depends upon which one you're looking at. As we will see over and over again in this episode, these

acquisition deals, they're typically not public. Because you're talking about a private company being purchased, you don't often know how much was actually paid for it, so we hear everything

from twenty to thirty five million dollars. Now, later on, as social network sites were being bought and sold in the hundreds of millions of dollars range, it would appear in retrospect like this could have been the wrong call, right, that Flicker should have held on to itself and just waited a little bit longer, and it probably could have sold for way more money, But at the time that was impossible to say. You just couldn't be sure of it.

As for Flicker, under Yahoo, it would grow substantially. It went from a quarter million users to more than two million in less than a year, and it also increased in features, included one that I thought was super cool where you could look at a map and click on locations of the map, and it would pull up photographs of that location, so you could actually click around on a map and see photos of those sites. And I thought that was really cool. It was a great way

to contextualize photographs. Butterfield and Fake stuck around with Flicker until around two thousand eight, and they left the company at that point. At that point they had also split as a married couple as well. They would each go on to found other companies. Butterfield would actually co found one that's a really big deal today, that being Slack. So yeah, one of the founders of Flicker would then go on to co found Slack. Flicker gave users a lot of storage space to play with in ten yahoo.

I mean, this was crazy. They gave users an entire terrabyte of free storage for their photos. That was unfathomable at that time. It's still pretty crazy today, but I mean, really, at that time, that was nuts. Flicker Pro users who were paying a subscription fee for their their pro account would actually get to what amounted to be unlimited storage. But by this point, Flicker was already facing competition from services like Instagram and Facebook, and users didn't have the

same storage at those services. They couldn't put in nearly as many photos there, nor did they enjoy the same extensive meta tagging features that you had on Flicker. But the tighter social integration on those platforms one out. So while Flicker undoubtedly had incredible teachers and great benefits in the form of storage, it's just you know, people were being more active on these other social networks, and so

flickers importance began to fade a bit. Moreover, there were real serious problems going on at the parent company of Yahoo. It was kind of teetering on the edge of a free fall death spiral for a while. I've done episodes about Yahoo and what went on over there. I may have to revisit that topic at some point and give kind of a new take, or at least an update

on that, because so much has happened at Yahoo. But Verizon acquired Yahoo in and then put Yahoo under a subsidiary company called Oath, and then the following year smug Mug, you know, an old photo competitor that had launched in two thousand two but had kind of eschewed the social network approach. It was really just purely about, you know, being a place to store for potos. It acquired Flicker from Oath, so Flicker ultimately was acquired by an old competitor.

In two thousand eighteen, Flicker announced that the it was bringing an end to that terrabyte of storage. Users would then have a cap of just one thousand photos and that anything beyond that would start to see photos deleted from the service, and that led to a bit of a scramble at least among some parts of the Internet to preserve information. But in many ways, this is kind of like having a physical photo album and then misplacing it, you know, losing it, and if it's out of your mind,

you probably don't even miss it. It's just when you think about it that you're like, oh, yeah, whatever happened to that now. Flickers fate also reminds us that online storage is not necessarily for forever. It might seem like that because these are really big companies, they have a lot of redundancy built into them. You know. It's one of those things where like, if you store your pictures locally and something happens to your home, you might lose

all the pictures. But if you store them in the cloud, then something happens to a server in the cloud. Those photos are more likely than not stored on multiple other servers so you don't lose them. So we don't often think of things stored in the cloud as being temporary, but they can be, you know, if the company goes out of business, or it's acquired by another company or whatever.

It can happen. Ultimately, there's no completely safe way to store your digital information, whether it's local or on the cloud, though hopefully most cloud systems will at least give signs that you should migrate stuff elsewhere before they go belly up. Okay, that's Flicker. When we come back, we're gonna talk more about a social network that we mentioned in the first episode in this series but didn't really go into. But

first this quick break. Okay, we talked about Flicker. Now let's move on to Tagged and A and we tugged a little bit about Tagged in the first episode because Tagged ultimately acquired High five in two thousand eleven, and we mentioned High five early on in this series. But Tagged had its beginnings in two thousand four when co founders Gregg Singh and Johann Schleier Smith launched a site

intended for the under eighteen crowd. Like the team at Facebook, this project started at Harvard University, but while Facebook was aimed at college students, Tagged was very much looking at kids in middle and high school ages. Now. To that end, the creators set about making an environment that would emphasize security and privacy, which was absolutely critical considering the ages

of the users. So users who were thirteen or fourteen years old, their profiles were restricted so that the public would not be able to view them, nor would anyone on the platform who was over the age of sixteen. They wouldn't be able to see the thirteen or fourteen year old profiles either. Likewise, users who or fifteen or

sixteen their profiles were not viewable by the public. So these restrictions remained in place when in two thousand and six, Tagged opened up to users over the age of eighteen. So initially Tagged looks at people eighteen and younger. Then they say, all right, we're opening it up for people who are older than eighteen. You might wonder why, Well, one reason why you would do that is because your age, you're the age of your users is going to continue

to creep up. Right, Like if you attract someone to your site when they're fifteen. Four years later, that person's nineteen, and if your site no longer allows them to be on there and kicks them off, well that is a problem. Right, So, anytime you see a site that's aimed at younger users, there's a chance for it to evolve to also cater to older ones. Tagged made a pivot fairly early on.

As my Space and Facebook we're dominating social networking, Tagged found out from its users that the people who are using Tagged, we're doing it for social discovery. By that, I mean finding and forming new friendships as opposed to finding your existing friends from real life and connecting to them on there. So that's what Facebook and my Space

were being used for. Tagged was used to find new folks, and so Tagged evolved into becoming more of a discovery platform than your traditional social network, and it served as kind of a compliment to the growing networks rather than as a competitor, which made it a little bit more secure than some of its fellow social networks that were

coming out around this time. Now, that's not to say that Tagged didn't have its own share of downsides, at least from the perspective of a non user who wasn't interested in the service, because when you signed up for Tagged, when you made an account for Tagged, the site would encourage you to share your email address book with the site. Then the site would go on to blast out emails to all your contacts in an effort to get them

to come and join Tagged two. Now, at some points during the company's history, some of those emails would suggest that users had been tagged in posts, or rather that you had been tagged in a post by a user, or maybe that this this person had personally invited you to join Tagged, and that wasn't necessarily true. It was just part of these blast email approaches to try and

get more users onto the service. All of that kind of somewhat shady behavior led to a lawsuit in two thousand nine, and ultimately the company would settle out of court and agree to not be quite so aggressive in its marketing approach. Now, as I said earlier, Tagged acquired

High Fives i p in two thousand eleven. It was scheduled to hold its own i p O initial public offering and thus become a publicly traded company in two thousand fourteen, but Tagged scrubbed those plans because user be saviors were shifting away from desktops, so people were not accessing Tagged using their computers the way they had been,

which was affecting Tag's revenue model. This was all part of a general move as people were starting to rely more on mobile devices, particularly smartphones, to access the web. And as I've said in numerous episodes on on lots of different topics, it cannot be overstressed how big an

impact the smartphone revolution had on web content. You had entire companies that were dedicated two figuring out how best to package material for mobile because everyone was using mobile devices to access the web, and if your content was not mobile friendly, then you were losing out on tons of traffic. Well that's kind of what Tagged was going through at this point, and I also mentioned this in

the High five entry in the series. But the Meat Group, that's M E E. T. Meat Group acquired Tagged and subsequently High five in two thousand and seventeen. Tagged still exists today. You can make a profile and you can use it to meet new friends. I haven't, but that's because I am old and I am grouchy. There have been a few massively effective Internet startup killers in the short history of the web. There was the dot com

bubble bursts that killed lots of startups. It laid waste to tons of them, though to be fair, some of those companies were probably on thin ice to begin with. It was just that the dot com crash was definitely too much for them to make it through. But yeah, there there were plenty of early web startups where if you took a good look at their business plan or in some cases lack thereof, you'd say, yeah, of course,

as didn't last the test of time. But there have been also various economic downturns, like one in two thousand eight that a lot of companies were unable to push through. But there's one killer who has been consistently effective in this startup world and then terrifying, and that would be Google. Google is the company that never launched or acquired an application that it could not subsequently kill off later on.

The company's infamous for launching or acquiring and then shutting down various services and features, or sometimes incorporating parts of them into other products. So there are some Frankenstein monster style Google products out there that are the sum of a bunch of parts that came from other startups and

services over the years. And there will be other examples of social networks that were later killed by Google as we go on, But right now we're going to talk about or Cut, which was not acquired by Google, it was incubated there. The social network was named after a software engineer, so Or cult Is his name is a Turkish software engineer, and this particular project grew out of Google's then policy of allowing employees twenty percent time to

work on their own projects. So what this meant was you could spend one five of every week working on projects that are outside of your official duties. So you still had to do your job right, you had, you had things you had to do as whatever your role was, but twenty percent of your time could also be spent on other projects. And the idea was that engineers would create interesting tools and services and features or technologies that

Google could later incorporate or adopt in the future. And or Cult the social network started out as just that kind of a project. Now, Google had previously attempted to acquire Friendster, but that effort fizzled out. Friendster lined the offer and or cut would be kind of, uh, a next step in Google's attempts to kind of tap into social networks. It launched fairly quietly. It was initially an invitation only service. That's actually a tactic Google has used

a few times with its products. That used it with Gmail. They used it with Google Plus, which we'll talk about in a future episode. And let me tell you, nothing works quite so well for driving up interest in a product as making it somewhat exclusive, because everyone wants to be important enough to get into the club, particularly when you know that other people are not going to be

allowed in. But just a few months after the social network launched, it became clear that users in a couple of regions were responding to it way more enthusiastically than in others. For example, users in Brazil were particularly attracted to ork it. They outnumbered North American users two to

one just six months after orc It launched. Over time, India would become another huge market for orch it, And in both of these places you were seeing a similar trend in that more and more people were just starting to get access to the Internet, and orch it was looking like an on ramp for social networks. For these folks where they might otherwise be intimidated or not feel like other social networks were quite as friendly to them because they were already dominated by English speaking people in

North America and other places in the world. So it didn't see that much traction outside of Brazil and India. But it was popular enough in those two countries to convince folks that Orchit was the big company and Google was the subsidiary. You heard stories about that, like people in Brazil or India thought or kit owned Google, not the other way around, because that's how important the social

net work was in those countries. Interesting side note, one person who served as the product manager for orch It was Marissa Meyer. Now this is the same person who would later be hired by Yahoo. She she left Google to join Yahoo to serve as the CEO of Yahoo. Her tenure at Yahoo would become one of controversy and derision in some circles, but that's a story for another time. Anyway, for a while, orch it survived because again it was

so popular in Brazil and India. But as Facebook expanded into other countries, Google saw Orchid's popularity go into decline further. In two thousand and eleven, Google would launch another social network, which again we're going to talk about in a later episode,

called Google Plus. And since Google Plus was clearly going to be the future of social networks, and because orch It was already losing users to Facebook, Google made the decision in two thousand and fourteen to shut ork it down for good and just a spoiler alert for the future episode. Things would not go smoothly for Google Plus, as it turned out. All Right, we're now up to two thousand five, and one of the most crazy up and down stories of social networks is right around the corner.

We're gonna talk about Bibo. So this company was founded by wife and husband team show Chee and Michael Birch in two thousand five. The name Bibo came from the site's motto, which was blog early, blog often. The profile designed for Bibo gave users freedom to customize their profiles a bit. It was a modular approach, which was kind of cool. Made me think a little bit about my Space, which also was kind of modular back in the day.

And you can have a private profile where only your friends could view it, or you could allow the general public access to you your content and that would include stuff like blogs and friend comments. Later on it would support stuff like photos and videos, and Bibo became a kind of centralized location for pretty much all things you It combined elements you would find on other platforms like MySpace, Facebook,

and later on stuff like YouTube. It also allowed users to link other social platforms to Bibo, creating a kind of consolidated site of social network activity. That's something we've also seen in other social network services as well. For

three years, Bibo operated independently. It grew in importance, particularly in the UK and in Ireland, where it became quite popular, and this led up to one of the biggest acquisitions in social networking history up to that point, when in two thousand eight, A o L bought Bibo from the Birches for an astounding eight hundred fifty million bucks. Now keep in mind News Corps had purchased my Space, which was the number one social network at that time, for

five eighty million dollars. So yeah, Bibo getting bought for eight hundred fifty million that was a huge deal, and it was also a deal that other folks at A O L thought was, to put it mildly, a bone headed move. Randy Falco, the CEO at the time of the acquisition, would be removed from that position in two thousand nine. He would be replaced by a former Google executive named Tim Armstrong to take over at a o L. And it is true that the acquisition was foolhardy ao

L paid way too much for Bibo. But what made the matter worse was that two thousand eight, if you remember I mentioned it earlier in the episode, that was when we saw a massive economic downturn. A o L would only hold onto Bibo for two years. It sold it in two thousand and ten to a company called Criterion Capital Partners or CCP, for reportedly less than ten

million dollars. So let that sink in. Bibo was bought for eight hundred fifty million sold for less than ten million, although some sources say it might have been as much as twenty five million. Still, that's nothing compared to what it was bought for. And that really puts it into perspective with the MySpace story, because my Space was bought for five million and sold for thirty five million. So as bad as the MySpace deal was, it still was

better than Bibo. Now we should also remember this was the same time that Facebook was overtaking my Space and muscling out many of the other social networks out there, and Bibo, while initially grabbing onto some attention, was getting progressively lost in this bigger picture with companies like Facebook dominating the conversation. We'll talk about Bibo's fate, which takes more twists and turns, but first let's take another quick break. Oh okay, we left off with Bibo being acquired by

CCP Criteria Capital Partners at that time. Michael Birch, you know, the husband of the husband wife team that created Bibo in the first place, would invest in Bibo under Criterion Capital, so he got reinvolved in his creation. Bibo under CCP tried to reinvent itself. It did a full redesign, but ultimately the economic pressures and the influence of Facebook meant

at the site just wasn't performing well. It wasn't attracting enough users, it wasn't generating enough revenue, and ultimately CCP declared bankruptcy in two thousand thirteen, and that's when the husband wife team of the Birches swept back in. So they had sold Bibo for eight hundred fifty million dollars. In two thousand eight, they bought it back for let's see, one million dollars. That is a heck of a deal. Sell it for eight hundred fifty million, buy it back

for one million. This is not the end of Bibo. The story to continues to go bonkers bananas. So Bibo then goes dark for nearly two years because the Birches and their team they set about overhauling the platform. They're like, well, obviously we can't come back just as Bibo. That's not going to be successful. We have to figure out what is Bibo moving forward because the social network space at this point is truly dominated by Facebook. So this is

around two thirteen when Bibo goes dark. It would re emerge in two thousand fifteen, but it had gone through quite a few changes and it would continue to change. So the first incarnation was called bibo Blab, which was a messaging video app and you could send video messages to your friends, so kind of like a text message, but a video message, this little ephemeral video message that you sent to your buddies, and it quickly gained a few million users. Like it was popular early on, but

it didn't have any staying power. People quickly moved away from Bibo to use other things. Part of the problem might have been that it just didn't attract enough people to adopt it and keep the service sustainable, because if only half like like, if you adopt Bibo but none of your friends do, well, then you just have half a conversation going on as you generate these videos and

send them. But if they're not creating Bibo accounts, it's not like you're getting anything back, and that's not much fun to you know, only hold half a conversation unless

you're a podcaster. Bibo switched focus to e sports streaming, and then it actually switched to organizing and running e sports tournaments, but this too proved to be unsustainable, and in the same year this version of Biebo had launched, the site would go dark again, so it didn't even spend a full year being kind of an e sports entity. But one company that paid attention to Bibou at this time and thought there was some I P there that would be really useful was Amazon, in the form of

its subsidiary Twitch now. Twitch, of course, is known primarily as a platform for creators to stream themselves as they play video games, although there are lots of other types of channels as well. So Twitch purchased Bibo in two

thousand nineteen for maybe million dollars, maybe less than that. Again, these deals are never fully public, so it's hard to say, but as long as it was more than one million dollars, it would still be more than what the purchase spent when they were buying it back in the first place. Though obviously the subsequent investments in the platform to turn it into the new Bibo where presumably more than that. Then we get up to one. And to be honest, y'all,

I don't know how this all happened. I ran out of time and I could not dive deep enough to find out exactly the detail US behind us. I do not know if Michael Birch simply retained the rights to the name Bibo or not, or if they purchased those rights back from Amazon. But in one Michael Birch posted on Twitter the following message quote, AM launching Bibo dot com as a social network next month. Have been coding it myself during lockdown. I put a coming soon page

up yesterday and it trended on Twitter in Ireland. Hopefully the actual site does nearly as well. End quote. So it sounded like the social network that started got bought and sold and shut down and reinvented and shut down again, and reinvented again and shut down again and bought again, was now going to be an independent social network once more. However, it was not to be. So if you were to go to Bibo dot com now you will see the

following message quote. We tried our best to resurrect Bibo to create it's something new and fresh, but perhaps it wasn't new or fresh enough. This has been a fun project built during the pandemic, but sadly it must be sunsetted. We are grateful to everyone who joined us on this journey. Your support is greatly appreciated. Will Bibo rise again? Who knows? It has now lived four times, been sold twice. M

It's been emotional Michael Birch. So, yeah, big dramatic story that in two thousand and five, we got the launches of a couple of sites that kind of overlap with social networks, but neither of them quite fall neatly into traditional social networks, and so I thought we would close out with them because they are important. Even if you don't think of them as your typical social networks, and

those would be YouTube and Reddit. So let's do YouTube first, and we won't go through a thorough history of YouTube

because it's only tangentially related to social networks. But three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Joe and Karen, they founded YouTube in two thousand five, and they were already pretty well off at the time because they had been working at PayPal, and then PayPal got bought out by eBay, so they all got a handsome payout, but they wanted to go and make something of their own, and they recognize that at the time, while you could

share digital photos online fairly easily, the same could not be said for digital videos, and so they started to design YouTube. They're actually multiple conflicting stories about what gave them the real idea for YouTube and the focus of YouTube, Like there are a lot of stories that say that YouTube initially was more kind of catering to dating, like almost like computer dating, which would make it not that

different from say Facebook. But again there are a lot of inflicting stories because people have different memories, I guess, and also some stories were drawned up more for the sake of publicity than others. So it's kind of hard to say what is truly reliable information about the founding

of the company. But anyway, some of you all might actually remember a time on the internet when if you wanted to watch a video, what that really meant was that you would go to a site, you would download a video file to your local computer, and then use a desktop based app to launch the video and watch it. I mean, that's how I remember watching the first season of Red Versus Blue from Rooster Teeth. That way, I would download the videos and then watch them on my computer.

There were very few video solutions that were online at that time, though there were a couple. I mean, in fact, video was already in existence when YouTube was just taking shape. They just wasn't being used or promoted very much. Famously, the first video on YouTube published in April two five. It was called Me at the Zoo and I had one of the co founders at the San Diego Zoo. And YouTube would open a public beta a month later and invite people to join in and start uploading videos.

It would officially launch in December of two thousand five. Early on users had to work within some pretty strict limitations. Video files could be no larger than just a hundred megabytes, so they were really short. It would actually take quite some time before YouTube would really shift toward promoting longer

form content. For years there was a hard limit of ten minutes for the vast majority of users on YouTube, and then eventually those restrictions would become less and less important, with YouTube really focusing on long form content at a point, and now it's kind of shifting back to short form

as platforms like TikTok gain more more popularity. But even before YouTube had launched out of its beta, the site was attracting tens of thousands of visitors every day, and by January two thousand six, they were racking up more than twenty five million views of the videos on the site every day. The trajectory was really clear. By the summer of two thousand and six, the number of views per day topped a hundred million, And with this success

came some problems. There were technical demands to keep the site up and operational, and they were increasing dramatically, so it was an important and expensive job to add more computational assets like storage and stuff in order to keep YouTube going plus people were already showing a bit of a tendency to upload videos that you know, they didn't actually own the rights too, So various entertainment studios in the worlds of music, movies, and television really and a

crackdown on YouTube due to the proliferation of copyright infringement across the site. Fortunately, Big Daddy Google came a call in in November two thousand six and signed an acquisition deal with YouTube, purchasing YouTube in a deal that was valued at one point six five billion with a B dollars in stock, so each co founder walked away with

the equivalent of around four hundred million dollars. Yeawsa. Google got to work smoothing out issues with the various entertainment studios, and in a rare move, it would keep YouTube as its own separate company, so it did not directly incorporate YouTube into Google's empire the way it would with other purchases. Then we entered into the early age of viral videos, and YouTube would later introduce a partner program which will allow content creators to make money off of advertising that

was served against their videos. That story has its own set of dramatic turns, like I could do a full series of episodes about YouTube's partner program. But anyway, the debut of the iPhone and the evolution of the web into something the average person would access, you know, anywhere with the benefit of a mobile device would really fuel YouTube's growth quite a bit. And Google would later make some choices about profiles and log ins that would affect YouTube.

There was a time when Google, in an effort to encourage more accountability, was cracking down on user names, but that move would get a lot of resistance from multiple groups of people, and Google would ease off on those requirements. I'm not really diving into that because we're going to talk about that more when we get to Google Plus. While there are vloggers on YouTube who have their own communities around them, it's fair to say that YouTube isn't

really a social network the way other networks are. It is, however, a platform that has played an important part with social works, as people have shared YouTube videos elsewhere and as people have grown communities around their their content. All right, so let's finish up with Reddit. In two thousand five, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Hoffman were attending the University of Virginia and they were working on a new idea for the web.

Their early efforts merged fairly quickly with another project called info Gami, which was led by Aaron Schwartz, and he joined the co founders for Reddit, and together they wanted to create a website where users could build little subdomains dedicated to specific interests and hobbies, so folks could visit the site and then they could go to whichever of the subdomains or subreddits as they became known that they found interesting. So maybe you like fly fishing, well, there's

a subreddit for that. Maybe you like politics, there are multiple subreddits for that. Maybe you like Disney, there are sub credits for that. So users can contribute to conversations, they can post in threads and leave messages for each other.

They can create new threads that are based on whatever the subredit is focused on, and gradually communities would form around these and some of those communities would become incredibly influential and important, some of them would become unbelievably toxic, and some would be both. The founders referred to Reddit

as the front page of the Internet. So the idea is that users are curating interesting content relating to you know, whatever, specific interests that relate to particular subredits, and then they share that content, they publish it within those subredits, and some subredits would become wildly popular and have tens of thousands of people involved in it and get tons of

users in traffic and engagement. Some are much more niche and they have a much smaller community, but that community can still have a really strong emotional investment in the subject matter and be really engaged in the community. It's

still just a niche interest. And this idea really caught on, and one year after launching, the publisher Conde Nast would come along and scoop up Reddit for somewhere between ten and twenty million dollars and read It would remain nestled under Conde Nast until two thousand eleven, and then read It became a full subsidiary of Conde Nast's own parent company, Advanced Publications. So Reddit also is not your typical social network site. Users can create a profile, they have a

user name, they use a password to access it. They can subscribe to specific sub credits that they're interested in, they can leave messages for each other, and all that sort of stuff. In addition in the site introduced the concept of gold memberships, also known as Reddit Premium. This would bring in revenue for Reddit that would supplement the money that was already coming in from advertising. So you might say, well, what what does a Reddit premium member get? So,

Reddit Premium membership has a few benefits. For what, it lets users browse Reddit without ads, so they don't see the ads or the promoted reddits, which, by the way, it's kind of like promoted Google search results, where it can appear like it's just a normal entry in a subreddit, and if you don't notice the fact that it was promoted, you might just think, oh, some user has submitted this, but in fact it is an ad. But yeah, premium

members don't see those. They also get a monthly allowance of Reddit coins that also sometimes is known as Reddit gold. But that made things really confusing because the premium membership is called Reddit gold and the coins would also be called Reddit gold. So they get confused and you might say, well, what can you even buy with Reddit coins. Well, you can use them to buy awards to give other folks

on Reddit. Those Reddit coins are really meant to provide benefits to other users, so Let's say you've got coins and you use them to purchase an award for a Reddit user who has posted something that you think is really cool, or they made a really good point in a thread, or they're just being incredibly helpful and you

want to award them. You can give them an award, and that award might allow that redd user some certain benefits, like maybe it will give them some Reddit coins, or maybe it will let them browse Reddit without ads for a while, that kind of thing. So the reddit coin system allows users to purchase awards for other users, and as far as I can tell, those awards have limited value, which is interesting because holy cow, there can be a lot of I guess not competition, but requests to be

recognized like people. And there are a lot of accusations that you'll see on Reddit on occasion where people will accuse others of pandering in an effort to get more Reddit coins. But what do I know. I'm just a casual Reddit user. I don't pretend like I fully understand the community there. I definitely see Reddit as being incredibly useful, particularly if you want to get a good view of how a community is thinking about a specific topic. In any given amount of time, but beyond that, I find

the community dynamics to be puzzling at best. Again, I'm grouchy and I'm old. Anyway, Reddit, as I said, is tangentially related to social networks. There are communities. Users can become really well known or infamous depending upon their reputations within those communities, and beyond, entire communities can become incredibly influential, or due to the spread of toxic behavior and abuse, they can be wiped from Reddit entirely. It's a wild place,

all right. That's enough about Reddit, Like I said, and I could do a full episode and probably will do a full episode about Reddit and kind of dive into it's evolution because a lot of things have happened on that platform over the years and have changed it dramatically from one incarnation to the next. And I can also talk about Reddit versus dig That would be fun. But that's it for this episode. Next time we will tackle Twitter, which will probably take up a large part of the episode,

and a few other social networks. If you would like to suggest topics for future episodes of of Tech Stuff, including big stories in two I should cover in my end of the year wrap up let me know. You can download the iHeart Radio app for free. Navigate over to tech Stuff in the search field, there's a little microphone icon. You can leave me a voice message up to thirty seconds in length, or if you prefer, you

can use Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll Talk to You Again release and text Stuff is an i heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.