A lot of the jump starting on Reddit came from irc.freenode.org via word of mouth about a new aggregate voting site that needed stress testing, while it was certainly a predominately hacker crowd it wasn't overly dominated by people that read PG essays, I myself wasn't that aware of the PG connection until several months later.

petewailes made some interesting comments, in my humble opinion reddit was likely helped along more by leveraging an existing community that already communicated well than it was by PG essays - although all things helped and I'm sure the essays played their part as well.