Reddit was one of the reasons Y Combinator was started. This post tells the story of how the site came to be. Despite being rejected in the first round for their food delivery app idea, Reddit’s founders were offered funding after agreeing to work on a project that would eventually become Reddit. The project was launched on a quick schedule. It had a core set of real users after just a few weeks. Reddit is now a fundamentally useful tool that seems almost unkillable.
Discovered through https://tldr.tech/, a daily technology briefing newsletter.
It’s quite possible the author has an investment in Reddit. It simply a blog post, not journalism.
But yes this is the first I’ve heard that it was someone else’s idea.