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Water corporation dug up the pathway in front of my garage with zero notice, no idea when it will be finished. Car trapped inside. : Wellthatsucks
Main Post: Water corporation dug up the pathway in front of my garage with zero notice, no idea when it will be finished. Car trapped inside. : Wellthatsucks
Reddit - The heart of the internet
Main Post: Reddit - The heart of the internet
The Dark Truth About Reddit: From Faking Users To A Billion Dollar Company
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How did two broke college students with a failed business end up creating one of the most popular internet forum ever? The story of Reddit is filled with scandals, lies, money and even death - as Reddit has been involved in countless controversies, including turning against its own users. But let’s dive in behind Reddit's insane history to the billion dollar company that we know of today.
In 2001, Alexis Ohanian enrolled at the University of Virginia to study computer science. His destiny changed when he met his dorm neighbor Steve Huffman, another self-taught programmer majoring in computer science.
The two bonded over video games but Alexis felt behind his peers' skills. Fearing failure, he switched to pre-law despite his passion for coding. As he prepped for the grueling law entrance exam, visions of a monotonous future as a lawyer overwhelmed him. Mid-exam, he walked out and envisioned running his own impactful tech company instead.
Luckily, Steve already had a business idea - a mobile app for ordering food ahead from gas stations or any restaurant to skip the line. Excited, they named it "My Mobile Menu" and devoted their senior year to building the startup.
However, smartphones were still primitive with no app stores. Steve struggled to connect their SMS-based system to restaurants'. Meanwhile, Alexis struggled to sell the vision to restaurants. Their innovative idea was simply too ahead of its time.
As spring break arrived, Alexis and Steve embarked on a 500-mile trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their goal? Seeking help for their struggling business from entrepreneur Paul Graham, who was lecturing at Harvard on "How to Start a Startup."
Steve was a fan of Graham's books and hoped to get one autographed. But Alexis saw an even bigger opportunity. After the lecture, they approached Graham, bought him a drink, and pitched their mobile food ordering app "My Mobile Menu." Surprisingly, Graham liked the idea of eliminating waiting in line for food.
The pair exchanged contacts with Graham and returned to Virginia reinvigorated. Weeks later, Graham emailed about launching a new startup accelerator program called Y Combinator, inviting them to pitch for funding. Though confident, the investor panel couldn't envision their app working with current technology nor saw two college kids having restaurant connections.
Rejected but not dejected, Graham revealed he still believed in Alexis and Steve if they conceived a better idea. Literally getting off the train at the next stop, they brainstormed a new concept that would change everything.
Abandoning the mobile app, Graham advised building something web-based to solve "your problem every morning." By 2005, content flooded the internet from multiple sources needing better aggregation. Sites like Slashdot let users submit articles that moderators rated. Delicious bookmarked popular links.
But Alexis and Steve envisioned an open platform where anyone could share any content for users to upvote or downvote - a platform where content is rated by the people. After tossing names like Oobaloo and 360scope, they landed on "Reddit" - allowing people to simply say "I read it on Reddit."
Graduating in 2005 with a new company name and vision, the founders of Reddit were ready to disrupt how content spreads online.
Armed with $12,000 in funding from Y Combinator, Alexis and Steve moved to Massachusetts to work full-time on their new idea. They spent months operating on little sleep, barely leaving as they built Reddit day and night. However, Paul Graham soon emailed questioning why they hadn't launched yet, pushing them to release a bare-bones beta version immediately.
Unexpectedly, Graham then linked to Reddit on his blog, driving their first 1,000 visitors. Ready or not, Reddit was now live - but missing a crucial element: users.
Alexis tried everything to attract an audience - posting flyers around Boston, asking friends to contribute content, even pitching fellow Y Combinator founders. But without an existing userbase, there was little content.
Desperate for traction, Alexis and Steve resorted to creating hundreds of fake accounts to populate Reddit with posts, giving the illusion of an active community. "Reddit's no fun if the page is blank," Alexis rationalized their moves.
At first, there was no evident impact until they started noticing unfamiliar usernames joining the platform. By summer's end, Reddit had amassed over 12,000 daily users.
However, the homepage was simply a jumble of random links voted to the top with no categorization system. This sparked Alexis and Steve's first major clash - Alexis wanted tags for organization, but Steve opposed subjective labeling concerns.
Their compromise? Separate "subreddit" sections for every interest, becoming Reddit's backbone. The first was the not-safe-for-work subreddit, followed by science, programming, politics and many more niche communities united on one novel platform.
With this innovative structure, Reddit's prospects were looking very bright - especially after crossing paths with a pivotal new player, Aaron Swartz.
At just 18 years old, Aaron Swartz was a talented programmer also backed by Y Combinator for his startup Infogami, that built web development tools. However, Infogami struggled - Aaron hadn't launched yet and found himself broke, homeless and partnerless. Paul Graham saw Aaron's potential to help with developing Reddit and suggested merging companies.
Late 2005, around 6 months after Reddit's launch, Infogami merged into a new parent company Not A Bug Inc with Reddit. Steve, Alexis and Aaron each owned 24% of Reddit, with Paul at 7% and the rest reserved.
Alexis and Steve welcomed Aaron's coding skills. As users grew, Reddit added comment sections for discussions, plus a "karma" points system incentivizing quality contributions. The trio collaborated well initially.
However, underlying tensions brewed. Alexis and Steve felt it unfair Aaron publicly called himself a Reddit co-founder when he joined 6 months after their idea's inception. This founder friction intensified as Reddit caught the attention of media giant Condé Nast.
The multi-billion dollar publisher of Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair sought to acquire the rapidly growing, user-generated Reddit to expand digitally after acquiring Wired. Though not looking to sell their 1-year-old startup yet, the 23, 22 and 19-year-old founders entertained Condé Nast's millions.
After tense negotiations, one hurdle remained - Aaron voicing concerns over a massive corporation controlling the free user-driven platform. His antics like secretly tweaking contracts caused frustration until Steve warned him not to jeopardize the deal.
Relenting, Condé Nast acquired Reddit for around $10-20 million, making the founders overnight millionaires. Though required to remain for 3 more years, they operated independently with resources to grow Reddit. What seemed like a dream quickly turned into a nightmare as the Reddit founders' story took a dark twist.
Everyone worked hard to impress Condé Nast, Reddit's new corporate owners - except Aaron. He had envisioned Reddit as a voice for the people against big governments and corporations. So being owned by a massive media company felt like a bad cultural fit.
Aaron rarely showed up to the office, even blogging about hating the "grey walls, grey desks, grey noise". Finally in January 2007, Alexis, Steve and Condé Nast leadership fired the problematic Aaron.
Without him, the team continued developing Reddit, rethinking core features.
Until 2008, only employees could create new topic subreddits despite increasing user requests. Their solution? Allowing any user to make their own subreddit.
This brilliant move spawned subreddits for every niche interest imaginable, from niche bands to financial advice to bizarre meme topics like "BreadStapleToTrees" with over 300,000 members. Users could now find or create communities for any interest.
Another clever tactic was to let the most active users moderate the subreddits they created for free.
Reddit's popularity soared to over 2 million users and 10,000+ subreddits by late 2008. Yet the company struggled to monetize this traffic.
So despite explosive growth, Reddit remained unprofitable, merely introducing paid memberships and awards. Meanwhile, tensions boiled over between Alexis and Steve - the former grieving his late mother, accusing Steve of mismanagement while Steve felt Alexis schemed behind his back. Sharing an apartment worsened their explosive office fights.
By 2009 when their Condé Nast contracts expired, the fractured co-founders both abandoned Reddit just as a new Congressional bill threatened the site's very existence.
In 2011, Congress proposed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which would hold platforms like Reddit responsible for all user-generated content on their sites - even content they didn't publish themselves. For a site with millions of users freely posting, copyright owners could sue Reddit, potentially leading to massive fines, legal fees or even a shutdown.
At the time, Reddit had over 46 million users but only 20 employees, making it impossible to monitor all content for compliance. Reddit publicly declared SOPA an "all-out war against the internet" they wouldn't go down without a fight.
Many tech giants like Google and Wikipedia also lobbied against the law amid intense public backlash. On January 18, 2012, Reddit took the dramatic step of shutting down for 12 hours in protest, stating in a blog post: "We wouldn't do this if we didn't believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to Reddit and the internet as we know it."
Days later, Congress abandoned SOPA after succumbing to public pressure. One key leader emerging from this internet freedom battle was none other than Aaron Swartz. After leaving Reddit, he had become an activist fighting internet censorship and campaigning for an open internet.
But his activism landed him in serious legal trouble in 2011 when arrested for illegally downloading millions of academic journals from MIT to make them freely accessible online. He faced up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.
Aaron was offered a plea deal of just 6 months if he admitted guilty, however he rejects it to avoid being a lifelong felon. As his case lingered, the depressed Aaron became isolated, not wanting to burden others. Tragically, his girlfriend found him dead by suicide weeks before the trial.
Tributes poured in across the internet, hailing Aaron as using "his prodigious skills not to enrich himself, but to make the internet and world a fairer, better place." Though inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for co-founding Reddit and creating RSS feeds and Creative Commons licenses, Aaron's pivotal role has largely been erased from Reddit's official history.
In March 2012, Yishan Wang from PayPal became Reddit's new CEO as the site reached billions of monthly pageviews and gained cultural relevance. Even President Barack Obama did an AMA ("Ask Me Anything") Q&A on the site's popular subreddit.
However, this immense growth caused problems. Since anyone could create subreddits, many disturbing communities proliferated from watching people die to cannibalism forums. Reddit's anonymity made it ripe for abuse by extremists, hate speech, and controversies.
One tragic example followed the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings killing 3 and injuring hundreds. A "FindBostonBombers" subreddit emerged with thousands speculating and sharing unauthorized personal information against site rules. They falsely accused missing student Sunil Tripathi based on resemblance, leading to vicious harassment of his grieving family before authorities identified the true perpetrators.
When Tripathi's body was discovered on April 23, news outlets blamed Reddit's witch-hunt. As the userbase swelled into the millions, pressure mounted on executives like Yishan to crack down on offensive subreddits. Though believing "we will not ban legal content even if odious," he eventually prohibited forums like "BeatingWomen" with graphic violence.
By 2014, conflicting views on content moderation led Yishan to resign after just two years, citing stress from the internal conflicts and negative publicity scaring investors amidst sexism claims. Ellen Pao soon replaced him as CEO to address Reddit's escalating controversies.
Ellen Pao, formerly Reddit's VP known for suing a past employer over gender discrimination, succeeded Yishan as CEO in 2014. Her hiring aimed to rehabilitate Reddit's concerning reputation.
Around this time, co-founder Alexis Ohanian also returned as executive chairman, hoping to steer Reddit clear of controversies. Shortly after, Pao implemented stricter anti-harassment policies and banned some of the most offensive subreddits.
While some lauded her efforts to clean up Reddit, many core users considered it censorship - especially after Pao stated: "We are not a completely free speech platform." Matters escalated when she fired beloved employee Victoria Taylor, who coordinated high-profile AMAs. In protest, moderators shut down hundreds of subreddits, effectively blacking out the site.
With over 160,000 petitions calling for her removal, Pao resigned after just 7 months amid Reddit's tailspin and uncertain future. The company desperately needed stable leadership after cycling through 3 CEOs in under a year.
Offering a glimmer of hope, co-founder Steve Huffman returned as CEO in 2015 alongside Ohanian's renewed involvement. The original founders' comeback reignited optimism, with design upgrades, mobile apps, and clearer direction initially.
However, in 2016 Huffman himself sparked an ethics scandal. After insulting comments on the controversial "The_Donald" subreddit, he abused admin privileges to edit them, redirecting insults towards the subreddit's moderators instead. Though calling it "trolling the trolls," many felt an admin editing user posts broke trust in Reddit's freedom and openness - severely damaging Huffman's credibility.
In April 2023, Reddit announced it would start charging to access its API - the interface allowing third-party apps and websites to pull data from Reddit. One of the most popular alternative apps was Apollo, offering a different browsing experience by freely accessing Reddit's data when the API was free.
However, Reddit's new pricing of 24 cents per 1,000 API requests meant Apollo estimated yearly costs over $20 million - forcing the beloved third-party app to shut down. Many moderator tools relying on Reddit's API to provide enhanced functionality beyond Reddit's official app were also hit with massive unexpected bills.
Many in the community felt the exorbitant pricing and lack of warning suggested Reddit deliberately aimed to kill competitor apps, not giving developers time to adapt. Outraged moderators and developers grouped together, staging a blackout where over 7,000 subreddits including major communities like r/AskReddit went dark simultaneously to protest the API charges.
With huge portions of Reddit inaccessible, the company lost substantial ad revenue during one of the biggest online protests ever. Many thought this backlash would force Reddit to rescind the changes. However, since the blackout stated a hard 48-hour timeline, Reddit simply waited it out despite some subreddits staying private longer until threatened with moderator bans.
Post-blackout, animosity towards Reddit's leadership like CEO Steve Huffman has intensified. However, Reddit argued the monetization move was necessary, as the company remains unprofitable while third-parties freely integrated Reddit's entire infrastructure and content without generating any income for Reddit itself.
While Reddit's position is defensible from a business perspective, most agree better foresight like improving their official app with requested features could have avoided controversy. Nonetheless, Reddit achieved its API paywall aims - but at the cost of worsening tensions with its very own community.
Despite nearly 20 years online and around 430 million monthly users as of 2023, Reddit incredibly still operates at a loss and has never turned a profit. However, Reddit's collective community has managed to accomplish some incredible feats.
Users have raised massive amounts for charities and orphanages, organized the world's largest secret Santa gift exchange, and created millions of connections through niche interest communities. Reddit is undeniably useful too - its threads frequently appear as top Google results for inquiries.
But no event demonstrated Reddit's community power quite like the 2021 GameStop stock frenzy. Amateur traders on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit banded together against hedge funds betting on GameStop's decline. Redditors began purchasing the struggling company's shares en masse, driving its stock price from under $3 to an astonishing $483 peak.
This monumental short squeeze caused multi-billion losses for major Wall Street firms, while making numerous Redditors overnight millionaires simply by clinging together. While Reddit itself has yet to solve profitability, one thing remains clear - the website's most powerful asset and liability is its vast unified user base.
Despite the controversies and roller coaster ride detailed in Reddit's story, the site's populist underpinnings and harnessed collective continue redefining what an online community can achieve, for better or worse. Reddit's unconventional journey is far from over.
Top Comment: I still miss the original Digg.
Consider who owns Reddit and then ask yourself….
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Am I being lied to ? What’s not allowed to be said on here ? Who gives anyone the right to block or censor ? How does information being censored or blocked keep me from knowing valuable information in order to control me ?
"In 2011, Reddit was fully transferred to the ownership of Advance Publications, which is the parent company of Condé Nast.
Advance Publications is a prominent media company that has holdings in several industries, including cable television, newspapers, and magazines.
Through its holding companies, Advance Publications has significant ownership in companies such as Charter Communications, Discovery, and Condé Nast. Reddit is one of its more prominent digital media holdings.
The acquisition of Reddit by Advance Publications had a significant impact on the platform. The company has been instrumental in providing the resources necessary for the platform to expand and evolve.
Under its ownership, Reddit has continued to grow into one of the largest social media platforms on the web."
If you think your tv cable news is telling you the truth or allowing anyone on it to tell you the truth, then you might think you’re getting an accurate depiction of society and some kind of truth here on Reddit. But you are not. We live in a country ran by corporations that do not want certain narratives being shown for what they are, false and misleading, and purely disinformation. Your tv or some of us like to call it “the dumb box”, has been pedaling lies about wars and politics your entire lives. Reddit is no different. Just like Boomers who get their info from Fox or CNN, Millennials have their version of corporate owned lies as well, it’s called social media. The majority of what I see in this group is careful manipulation and the whole way Reddit interacts with the up vote down vote exists to keep you in the group.
Anyone see that video of the girl on the elevator and they did an experiment where they had a group get on and all face the opposite way to see if she would turn around even thought she was facing the correct way ? Yea, thats reddit.
Top Comment: It's hard to understand people who call msm fake or think they are always lying to you. For some reason they hear a opinion and confuse it for the news. Or they watch a news program and again confuse that with "the news" While all have somewhat a Bias. Where some stories are promoted over others. Only on the right. Will they completely misinform, ignore, or play victim to a event that should be apart of the news. The news bias toward the left. Might not tell the story every ten minutes. But they will at least tell it. Which comes back to your secondary point about reddit. I agree. Somewhat. As the manipulation of the up/down arrows, the Karma stuff, is made for the mods and the more connected to get there point shown and at the top of all opinions. Any system that can be manipulated to favor those that know how to manipulate it. Is indeed rigged.
Reddit is an American company.
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Some of you are still using Reddit. I highly suggest you to migrate to a federalized platform and open source known as Lemmy. If you couldn't migrate for some reasons, the best you can do is to have an ad blocker. If you block the ads, Reddit wouldn't receive a revenue.
Top Comment: Some of you are still using Reddit. All people who read your post use reddit.
Reddit is a corporate investment and we are the product. Should we care? A quick review and some implications.
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SUMMARY
Reddit is, above all, a corporate business investment. One where the owners (Advance Publications) and employees have a contractual incentive to create a company valuation of over $240 million...and to then sell.
Reddit users and moderators are the product - no surprise there. Unfortunately, reddit continues to lose money for investors while, at the same time, experiencing tremendous growth.
Investors and management are concerned about becoming Digg 2.0 - where the quest for profitability destroys the site itself. On the other hand, you have Facebook valuations as a guiding light.
Discuss whether users and moderators can (or should) have a significant say in how Reddit can become profitable. I personally believe it’s in our best interest if we want the site to survive and if we would like to sustain the community.
Wall of details below.
DISCLOSURE: I’m a long-term redditor and mod with zero interest in reddit outside of my desire to keep the community alive. In 2006, I worked for a tech firm and personally evaluated reddit as an acquisition candidate. (We passed on the opportunity without exchanging confidential information.) The following is solely based on publicly available information plus M&A and reddit experience.
**Reddit Business History – Follow the Money** At the end of 2006, Condé Nast bought Reddit from [Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, Y Combinator and other investors for an undisclosed amount]( http://www.inc.com/magazine/201206/christine-lagorio/alexis-ohanian-reddit-how-i-did-it.html) – ranging anywhere from less than $5 million to [$10-20 million.]( http://betabeat.com/2012/06/how-erik-martin-king-bee-of-reddits-hive-mind-harnessed-the-buzz-clocking-2-5-billion-pageviews-the-site-has-left-the-conde-mothership/) Since inception, [Reddit has never been profitable. ]( http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time_to_invest_in_gold/c6yfbuh) That’s not a problem if you are an entrepreneur whose main goal is to sell the company to a corporation. Simply cash out and either move on (Huffman) or also stick around to run the business as well (Ohanian). The issue is that Reddit has been owned by a corporation for six years. That’s a long time for an investment of $___ millions to make negative returns. Reddit has struggled with implementing traditional revenue generating approaches like advertising. Part of the issue is the reddit community – we simply do not like advertising or promotions. [Some viral campaigns do well]( http://www.urlesque.com/2010/07/15/old-spice-man-response-videos/) but these do not always bring in revenues. [The basic advertising program isn’t the best.]( http://blog.crunched.com/results-of-the-crunched-com-reddit-advertising-campaign-fail/) In mid-2010, [reddit management told the community that the site didn’t have enough money to keep up with growth. ]( http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html) Condé Nast was tired of funding Reddit and it wasnt bringing in enough money. >The bottom line is, we need more resources. >Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how reddit is owned by Conde Nast, a billion-dollar corporation like Time Warner or Cobra, and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here's the thing: corporations aren't run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And reddit's revenue isn't great. [Thus the launch of Reddit Gold – a virtual bake sale that has helped to keep the lights on.]( http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/it-was-triumph.html) From a multi-billion dollar corporation perspective that money is cute. Like a puppy. It’s not enough to make reddit profitable, but it buys time. **Make Reddit Worth $240+ Million, Attract Investors and Sell** At the end of 2011, Reddit was shifted from under Condé Nast to a [new structure under Condé Nast’s parent company, Advance Publications.]( http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html) It’s a bit of corporate ownership shuffling where the original owner pulled reddit from under a subsidiary and isolated it under a new ownership structure. Good news is that this type of structuring means reddit is valuable to the parent. For some reason, most of the media and redditors have missed the other implications. [Last month, Forbes contributor John Anders got it right...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/10/31/what-is-reddit-worth/) Simply put, the goal is to monetize the site and to then sell *part* or *all* of it: * Reddit was recapitalized (the original investors were bought out) and ownership was shifted from Condé Nast to the parent company, Advance Publications. The new deal is that if Reddit is valued (and sold) for over $240 million, employees and Advanced Publications will share proportionately in the sale. If it is less, then Reddit employees get less. * The site currently has a burn rate of over $7 million per year. The way Reddit handles advertising and Reddit Gold today does not bring in enough money to cover costs. * Mainstream advertisers see reddit as being to ‘bohemian’. Even those who are good with reddit are concerned about the darker corners of the site. “As long as we don’t participate in categories of Reddit that raise questions,” [Aaron Magness, vice president for marketing at Coastal.com] says, “we’re safe.” **Why This Matters to Redditors** [Reddit managers and board members are struggling to make the site profitable while, at the same time, to hold the site together. ]( http://mashable.com/2012/11/30/monetize-community-reddit/) They don’t have the answers, but have been trying to find non-traditional ways [like the new redditgifts.com marketplace]( http://redditgifts.com/marketplace/) and Reddit Gold. Should we care? What type of (profitable) changes to Reddit are we willing to accept? What are we not? Is it less about the addition of advertising or search revenues and more about *how* these are implemented? Personally, I’m rooting for them to keep the site rolling and I would be fine with traditional ads and the like in order for reddit to pay the bills. I also believe that the site would be more valuable to new owners if the reddit community was on-board with how these revenues are generated. If the owners and employees make millions along the way, then so be it as well. Not sure if the average redditor agrees, though. Thoughts?Top Comment: I wish I had won that last lottery. I'd buy reddit and keep it going as is. But I don't want ads, just because with ad-supported media the user becomes the product and not the customer. How many reddit golds would it take to support the site. At $7 million a year, about 234k yearly subscriptions. I wonder how many there are now? A year ago there were 2 billion pageviews a day, about 35 million unique visitors. So you only need about 1 out of a 150 visitors to subscribe to break even. http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/2-billion-beyond.html I finally caved and bought reddit gold. Guilt and all. But for the guilt to work, we need a promise. If 234k of us buy, we don't want reddit sold. We want it to stay as is. Frankly, if they sell, they'll turn into digg and become worthless to me. Give us a promise of no sale, and then we'll all try twisting the guilt for reddit gold. Cause it's not to get the site to grow. We are growing constantly. But "monetizing" reddit makes it worthless. Like digg. The ads on digg became more and more intrusive. The more intrusive the more people hate them. Worse, the people who buy the ads start wanting to have a say in the content, in blocking content that criticizes them or their industry or capitalism in general. Or turn reddit into a nonprofit, then we might be as willing to pay as the people who support wikipedia. I NEVER even click on ads, try to never leave an internet trail. But I remember an ad that almost made me buy something. It was on a yahoo site. Every time I went to post on that site there was the same ad in the same place. It was for colored contact lenses. I am very resistant to ads, but this ad, after about the 10th time I saw it, in exactly the same place on my page, I started to want those colored contact lenses. It was not intrusive, it didn't annoy me, or wave at me or yell at me. The message was simple. It was just there, and slowly I started to want the product. If I had been able to wear contacts I would have gotten them. In the same way, maybe a nice attractive ad for reddit gold. Maybe funny. Something by Randall Monroe. Always there in the same corner. But with a little change, day to day. With maybe a different punch line, so you start trying to notice it for a laugh. Till it insinuates itself into your mind. Contests...I used to be on an irc channel that had a contest every week, questions about the events of the previous week. I was always surprised how popular it was. Reddit could have a similar contest, with contestants volunteering then chosen by lot. We used to give prizes, true, mostly regifted stuff, but people still liked it. Reddit could give little prizes, reddit gold, or a picture on the front page, 1000 karma points, etc. While I hate most ads, I wouldn't be adverse to ads for art books on some of the art subreddits I subscribe to. Or political books on r/politics . Edit: Though maybe reddit can never be a nonprofit until the porn part is spunoff into its own universe. Not many people will contribute to porn. This list kinda makes me sorry I bought gold.
Reddit for Business
Main Post: Reddit for Business
What is Reddit? | Reddit for Business
Main Post: What is Reddit? | Reddit for Business
Is Reddit a private company or a Government?
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Like many of you, I read the "state of the website" blog entry by Reddit CEO Yishan Wong. What I find of particular interesting the passage:
"...we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community. The role and responsibility of a government differs from that of a private corporation, in that it exercises restraint in the usage of its powers." The blog is labeled "Government 2.0"*
This is really weird this me...almost completely out of place. Is this what Reddit's employees think of themselves? Do Reddit's employees not like their association with "business" or "private companies?" Are they "pro-government? "Most specifically do they like the idea of reduced government?" Is that what they think separates business from Government?
"a government differs from that of a private corporation, in that it exercises restraint in the usage of its powers."
How literal should we take this? What type of government is this? Should we expect direct user representation in this government? Do we have a say in the laws? Can we elect leaders?
Does Reddit literally think of themselves as a government...or is this just CEO cheerleading?
Top Comment:
or is this just CEO cheerleading?
This mostly, alienth made a post after the blog post that is much more nuanced. As far as the blog post goes, it is rather grotesque and I am not sure how I feel about being a citizen of a state rather than a member of a community.
Something else doesn't still sit right with the blog post u/yishan made. Specifically this:
We uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you - the user - has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so. When you know something is right, you should choose to do it. But as much as possible, we will not force you to do it.
As a moderator of several subreddits this feels like a slap in the face. I know it is not intended that way but I am about 90% sure it will result in a wave of people being complete and utter douchebags when we enforce our subreddit rules.
Can anyone explain what is Reddit and how it works ?
Main Post: Can anyone explain what is Reddit and how it works ?
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