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It was an interesting read; I also have many reservations about Reddit. I find this quote: "discussions are dominated by the most vocal and assertive Redittors, who are rarely the best informed," pretty accurate. I guess it depends on the subreddit, though, as, e.g., on r/Ethereum, the quality has been pretty good. Some discussion with points re: Reddit's IPO: Unpaid labor: If they let communities generate money, e.g., charging $1 for joining a community, they might have some budget for moderators and would also get less spam. Ofc can't do that at scale with credit cards because of the costs but with Ethereum L2s? Why not. Overpaid CEO: I don't know the details, but maybe they had some vesting/performance-based deal, like Elon had with Tesla? Huffman is Reddit's Co-Founder who left years ago, and they begged him to come back when the company was going south, so it's quite probable. AI: There's a lot of misinformation on Reddit, but there's also a lot of niche and accurate information. There's a reason why we type in "{keyword} + Reddit" in Google. Advance Magazine Publishers: they have been shareholders since Reddit sold its business for $10M to them. Then Reddit bought out itself to become an independent company once again. So they've been their shareholders for years, and from what I know, they've been pretty understanding. Advertising: A few years ago, I spoke with marketers about ads on Reddit. All of them say that because of Reddit's anti-ads culture, it's very hard to have a good ROI. But the potential is there - where else on the Internet can you target your niches so precisely? And if you let communities get a cut on ads, they might be less hostile. All in all, I think Reddit has a lot of potential, but I'd not buy their stock because I think web3 Reddit with NFT-based communities is the future :)
Actually, there's also a line in there about how Reddit relies on SEO for generating traffic, and I thought that was pretty useful to know for Kiwi News's future, too! Great submission overall; I thought it was really insightful.
It's pretty crazy how visible Reddit is on Google. A big part of their SEO tactics is using the post titles in URL slugs, e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1b2ynui/recovered_my_metmask_wallet_after_over_3_years/ IIRC, we use hashes, but maybe one day we could change it :)
It was a schock to me to knwo that reddit is not generating profit. On the other hand, its one of the most important and largest communities on the web. PRetty intriguing and sad if you ask me - dont think this will change and I'd be suprised if the IPO helped in the developement. That had a lot of time to work on a business models...