What does Lansing have to do with Reddit?

You’ve probably spent a few (hundred) hours scrolling the seemingly infinite pages of Reddit. But did you know that the social network has a connection to Michigan’s state capital?

Ah, Michigan. The birthplace of the auto assembly line, Detroit-style pizza, and … Reddit? Well, sort of.

While the Great Lakes State can’t entirely take credit for one the internet’s most prolific social networks, Michigan does have a unique connection to the site by way of its co-founder, Steve Huffman (perhaps more widely known by u/spez, his Reddit username).

Ah, Michigan. The birthplace of the auto assembly line, Detroit-style pizza and… Reddit? Well, sort of. While the Great Lakes State can’t entirely take credit for one the internet’s most prolific social networks, Michigan does have a unique connection to the site by way of its co-founder, Steve Huffman (perhaps more widely known by u/spez, his Reddit username).

Steve Huffman, Lansing native and tech wiz

While Huffman was raised in Virginia and ultimately attended the University of Virginia, he was born in Michigan’s spectacular state capital, Lansing, in the early 80s. We like to think that the influence of spending his first days surrounded by Spartans instilled Huffman with the stroke of genius he needed to dream up and develop Reddit in 2005.

Reddit was born after Huffman and his college roommate Alexis Ohanian pitched a series of ideas to tech entrepreneur Paul Graham, whom they’d connected with after a public lecture. Their first idea didn’t make the cut, but their second go — a broad network of individual forums and discussion boards, as well as a homepage loaded with the web’s most buzzy material — was a hit.

Reddit, billed “The Front Page of the Internet,” quickly thrived in its first years. Huffman left his CEO position in 2009, but resumed the role in 2015 and has spent the ensuing decade modifying Reddit to reflect user feedback, create a safer and more ethical online space, and improve visual design.

The next time you log in to spend a few hours indulging in the adorableness of r/aww or engaging in a heated moral debate on r/AITA (if you know, you know), whisper a word of thanks to good ol’ Lansing: home to a whole lot of state history, the rushing Red Cedar and, in a way, Reddit.

More Michigan tech connections

Of course, Steve Huffman isn’t the only tech wiz to hail from the Mitten.

Google — undoubtedly one of the most significant web innovations of our time — has a Michigan tie by way of co-founder Larry Page, who was also born in Lansing.

Unlike Huffman, Page spent a large portion of his early life in the Great Lakes State, graduating from East Lansing High School before making the move to Ann Arbor to pursue his computer engineering degree at the University of Michigan. In the late 1990s, Page and fellow computer scientist Sergey Brin laid the foundations of what would ultimately become Google … and the rest is history.

A few other notable tech figures, both modern and historic, who once called Michigan home:

• William Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard fame) was born in Ann Arbor.

• The great innovator Thomas Edison, known for his prolific work in the fields of electricity and communication, spent his early days in Port Huron (and you’ll still find plenty of nods to Edison if you visit the city today).

• Steve Ballmer, known primarily for serving as CEO of Microsoft between 2000-2014, was born in Detroit.

• Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster is a Wolverine by birth — he was born in Ann Arbor in 1962.

• The Ford family: We’d be remiss not to mention Henry Ford and his relatives, leaders in a different sort of tech industry through their work with automobiles and the assembly line. Ford himself was born in Dearborn.

Will the world’s next big tech advancement emerge from the mind of a brilliant young Michigander? We’ll be watching (and scrolling) with eager eyes.

This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.