Reddit

Is the front page of the internet going to go the way of newspapers? Or is it the next Meta in the making

I’ve been a user of Reddit of some form since the great Digg migration back in 2006. I, like many others from Digg raced over to reserve our handles when Digg blew up due to over moderation and then found the content being posted to Reddit lacking. Reddit kept some of that original Digg audience, but the majority, including me, moved back to our cozy individual topic forums on various blogs and websites. With the dawn of twitter popularity during the ‘08 election, Google (followed by Facebook) starting to centralize and dominate the ad markets, and then with the net neutrality bill killed by large cap tech companies, the wordpress revolution died and the internet became more centralized as more and more individual websites didn’t have the userbase and financials necessary to maintain independence.

This centralization stalled the growth of individual websites. To the point where most websites are now landing pages for store fronts, but all the marketing is down off site. Either via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube.

That didn’t mean individual sites didn’t still exist. GiantBomb for example was a huge video game website that is probably responsible either directly or indirectly for 4 - 6% of all popular memes on the internet today. But now its a hollowed out version of itself with a completely new cast of content creators and with the original founders of the site all using YouTube, Patreon, and twitter to communicate with their audiences.

Yes, the places for varying levels of free expression and discussion of hyper specific topics became limited as forum culture died. Twitter was the place for short form text length discussions. 140 characters or less. 4chan continued to be the place to where nothing, save outright criminal topics, was out of realm of acceptable discussions. And Reddit became the news aggregator of choice, muscling out individual topic websites like N4G (gaming), 500 non-Drudge related political websites, and numerous others.

If you were looking for long form discussions you had to learn how to green post on 4chan, while you dodged the porn, /b/ posters and other oddities. If you were looking for quick breaking news or surface level discussions on popular subjects with less (open) insanity, you used twitter, but it was hard to have deep discussions via 140-character tweets. There wasn’t a solid place for people to congregate for long form discussion on tiny niche subtopics. Not one a place to discuss just classical music but a hyper specific style of classical music from Russia in the late 1800s early 1900s. Reenter Reddit.

By this point in 2009/2010, Reddit has used that influx of users from Digg to create a semblance of its own culture. One they levered in 2012 when Obama put Reddit on the map (for normies) via a massive AMA. /u/shittywatercolour was there to paint that exciting moment; people were excited to be talking to the sitting president (even though he only answered a half dozen questions) and it help jazz the youth vote up.

Obama wasn’t the first big celebrity to do an AMA but he was the largest in terms of global popularity when he did it. Taylor Swift usage on 4chan had nothing on Obama’s Reddit team up.

This helped sustain Reddit’s growth post Conde Nast split, and allowed it to continue to mature at a faster rate than the internet. Culminating in a recent IPO earlier this year.

In today’s piece I attempt to figure out near term and further out valuations on Reddit. What the primary bear and bull cases are, risks to both sides, and if it’s even worth the stress of a long or a short. Let’s dive on in.