I started using reddit when it was still written in lisp, I think because of a comp.lang.lisp post about it. I remember those days too, though I was never really part of the community there. The posts they were making were mostly stuff that were circulating in techie circles, or from sites that were popular in them, and the "core values" were those that were common among hackers before the word got appropriated to mean "startup kid". Not coincidentally, most of their early users were techies too. They didn't have to create a community, they imported one that already existed and which they were already a part of. Alexis and Steve's sockpuppeting just made it an attractive place to migrate to at a time when the old watering holes were in decline.