this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Interesting question. I'm a software developer, but I just wanted to point out that reddit also started out very heavily skewed toward tech workers. The non tech people came quite a bit later for the most part. Even today from what I can tell, software developers are overrepresented on Reddit.
Most of the early discussion I recall on Reddit was around programming languages. Some startup stuff. Was probably partly the Reddit team themselves posting stuff they were interested in, and partly intake from Slashdot -- I found Reddit from Slashdot -- and Slashdot had a tech bent.
Here's an early snapshot of Reddit:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051202065421/http://reddit.com/
I also think that a factor is that people who can host their own instance are particularly interested, because you can't do that at all on Reddit and the Threadiverse suddenly lets you do that. For them, it's not just "Reddit is doing something that I don't like", but "the Threadiverse has the network structure that I wish Reddit did". That'll slew towards techies. Like, is pretty active, even on non-lemmy/kbin stuff.