Alexis Ohanian named Reddit hoping people would say “I read it on reddit.” At the Fortune Global Forum in October 2025, the co-founder admitted he wasn’t sure that prediction had come true: “I don’t know if anyone’s actually ever said that.”
On Oct. 22, 2026, Reddit’s official account gave him a reason to revisit the wordplay. It posted, “I’d tell you a joke, but you’ve probably already Reddit.”
Ohanian, who co-founded the site with Steve Huffman in 2005, said he’d pushed the name through despite objections: “21 years ago I named ‘Reddit’ and everyone said it was a horrible name, but I insisted one day people would say ‘I read it on reddit’ and used my CEO-privilege to overrule everyone + kept the name.”
Among the skeptics, he said, were Huffman and Paul Graham, whose Y Combinator funded the company. At the 2025 forum, Ohanian recalled Graham calling the name “poison to potential investors” and proposing “Octopop” instead. Graham also dismissed the alien mascot as “that bug thing.”
When someone responding to Ohanian’s October 2026 post credited Graham with the name, Ohanian replied, “Nah, he had plenty of other ideas for it tho.”
An earlier choice had been Snoo, a play on “what’s new.” In a 2017 interview, Ohanian said snoo.com would’ve cost $4,000, which he described as “a third of our funding.”
The Reddit name came to him in the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. The price helped settle the decision: “Reddit was available and was totally free. So that and the mascot were my key contributions,” he said in 2017.