Back to the Future of Reddit
Reddit needs to reinvent and do it fast! Can it?
Hey everyone 👋 — I’m Avirath. I learn a lot from analysing new products, thinking about new product strategies and my opinion on the markets/products for the future. I wanted to share this knowledge with my readers - that’s the motive behind this newsletter.
This article covers a breakdown of Reddit and the need for its re-invention as it comes close to IPO. Reddit is one of those pre IPO companies that has been around for so long but there seems to be so many avenues that it can still grow in - almost like a young startup. Let’s discover these avenues!
I am also looking for writers in colleges in the US to join me in breaking down companies - I have an exciting product coming in this space.
Read till the end for a surprise!
Join the fun on Twitter.
Actionable Insights
A Shift in Revenue Strategy: Reddit's reliance on advertising for revenue generation is palpable, with 93% of its 2022 revenue stemming from ads. However, this model is proving inefficient, evidenced by user frustrations with the platform's ad-laden interface and the shift of many to the less cluttered old.reddit.com. The looming IPO intensifies the pressure to diversify revenue streams beyond advertising to appease shareholders and sustain growth.
API Pricing and Third-Party Ecosystem: The recent hike in API pricing, charging developers 24 cents per 1,000 API requests, has led to the shutdown of several third-party applications and significant unrest within the developer community. This decision, aimed at capturing user activity and addressing profitability challenges, has sparked backlash and highlighted the delicate balance between fostering an open developer ecosystem and monetizing platform assets.
Community vs. Profit Dilemma: Reddit's core strength lies in its vibrant community and the democratic ethos it embodies. However, tensions are surfacing as the platform's commercial ambitions seem to clash with community values. The recent darkening of 7,000 subreddits in protest and the management's hardline stance against community moderators underscore the growing divide between financial objectives and community welfare.
Leveraging User Engagement for Growth: Reddit's unique community structure presents untapped opportunities for growth. Unlike other social networks where the focus is on individual connections, Reddit thrives on communal interactions. This collective framework opens avenues for innovative community-driven features, enhanced engagement tools, and monetization strategies that resonate with the platform's communal ethos.
Harnessing Data for Expansion and Innovation: Reddit sits on a goldmine of data, a vast repository of user conversations and interactions. Properly leveraged, this data can drive substantial value through improved personalization, targeted advertising, and the development of new products and services. However, recent decisions, such as the API price hike, raise concerns about the platform's approach to its data assets and its strategy for future growth and innovation.
International Expansion and Localization: As Reddit looks to grow its global footprint, the challenge lies in adapting its text-heavy platform to diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes. This requires not just translation services but also an understanding of local content preferences, community norms, and regulatory environments. Success in international markets hinges on Reddit's ability to localize content and engagement strategies while maintaining the platform's core identity and values.
Preparing for a Post-IPO Future: With the IPO on the horizon, Reddit is at a critical juncture. The platform needs to address existing challenges, from monetization and community engagement to data strategy and international expansion. The path forward involves a delicate balance of innovation, community stewardship, and financial prudence. As Reddit prepares to enter the public market, the decisions made today will shape its trajectory for years to come.
The story of Silver Thursday is an intriguing one, a tale woven with ambition, strategy, and the raw power of market dynamics.
In the late 1970s, the financial world watched with bated breath as the Hunt brothers, Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, embarked on a bold endeavor to corner the silver market. Nelson and William were born to a wealthy family with a long history in the oil business. Concerned about inflation and the stability of paper currencies at the time, the Hunt Brothers began to see silver as a valuable commodity that they could use to diversify their wealth and hedge against inflation.
The Hunts began purchasing enormous quantities of silver and silver futures contracts. This was partly through physical silver purchases and partly through leverage (borrowing money to invest). By 1980, the Hunt brothers, along with a group of Middle Eastern investors, had accumulated over 200 million ounces of silver, which was estimated to be around half of the world's deliverable supply at the time.
As the Hunts continued to buy, the price of silver began to rise sharply. It skyrocketed from around $6 per ounce in early 1979 to a record high of $49.45 per ounce in January 1980. This surge in price caused significant losses for short sellers, who had bet the price of silver would fall and were forced to purchase silver at higher prices to cover their positions.
Concerned about the market's stability, regulatory bodies and exchanges changed rules regarding leverage and placed heavy restrictions on the purchase of commodities on margin. These changes made it more expensive and difficult to hold onto large silver positions. Then came Silver Thursday, March 27, 1980, a day when the silver market crumbled like a house of cards in a tempest with retail and institutional investors offloading their large holdings of the precious metal.
Fast forward 40 years later, and the echoes of Silver Thursday resound in the digital age, as a new saga unfolded in 2020, not in the commodities market, but in the stock market, with a video game retailer at its epicenter. Here, a digital uprising was brewing, a movement that would soon draw parallels to the audacious moves of the Hunt brothers.
The GameStop saga began quietly, almost innocuously, as a discussion among individual investors who noticed that GameStop (GME), a struggling brick-and-mortar video game retailer, was one of the most heavily shorted stocks in the market. These investors, many of whom were millennials and Gen Zers, saw an opportunity not just for profit but for a statement against the traditional financial institutions that had long dominated the markets.
Just as the Hunt brothers had accumulated silver, these modern market players began to accumulate shares of GameStop. But unlike the Hunts, their tools were not just capital and commodities contracts but social media platforms and online forums. Through Reddit, they were able to mobilize rapidly, sharing analysis, rallying cries, and memes, transforming what might have been a minor market movement into a financial phenomenon. Reddit was the whirlpool where the winds and waves of Gen-Z market players and hedge funds clashed.
Short sellers, including prominent hedge funds, found themselves in a perilous position reminiscent of those betting against silver decades earlier. They were forced to buy shares at ever-increasing prices to cover their positions, further fueling the stock's ascent in a dramatic short squeeze.
What took the Hunt brothers two years to orchestrate was achieved by the Reddit community in a matter of days. Reddit stood as the centre as a silent stage of this madness, a platform that has quietly grown into a powerful conductor of social, financial and cultural currents.
It serves as a community town square for thoughts, opinions, advice on everything and anything one can think of. Rant discussion on a college professor? Reddit. Relationship advice? Reddit. Wild takes on Sam Altman leaving OpenAI? Reddit. Opinions on the new Apple Vision Pro? Reddit. Out of all the thoughts we have in a day, 90% of them are probably answered to or have been asked on Reddit.
r/Origins
This story may sound familiar.
Picture it: the year is 2005 and a young hustler fed up of studying an arbitrary subject at college wants to make a “dent in the universe”. He doesn't have a clear roadmap or a business plan, just a fervent desire to create “a dent in the universe”. This drive resonates with one of his close college friends.
A short while later, this friend brings to light a common frustration: the cumbersome process of ordering food. Back then, the concept of ordering food with a few taps on a phone was still a distant reality. Together, they envision a service that simplifies this process, allowing users to order food via text.
As they're nurturing this idea, an opportunity presents itself. A renowned entrepreneur, known for his sharp insights and forward-thinking approach, is slated to give a talk at Harvard University. Despite the daunting 10-hour train journey that lies between them and the event, the duo is undeterred. They see it as a chance not just to learn but to network and perhaps, to pitch their nascent idea.
Their determination pays off. Not only do they attend the talk, but they also seize the moment to engage the entrepreneur afterward. Their willingness to undertake such a long journey just to be part of the talk impresses him, and over a casual drink, they discuss their vision. Captivated by their determination and the potential of their idea, the entrepreneur encourages them to apply to his investment vehicle and invites them to Boston for a more formal discussion.
Though their original vision of food ordering via text seemed revolutionary, it got rejected. Mobile technology was still in its infancy, and the market wasn't ready for such an innovation. The entrepreneur still called them to Boston and spent hours brainstorming a more relevant idea. They dreamed of a place where the pulse of the internet could be felt - a vision of a community-driven news website where content could be voted upon. Lincoln, in his famous Gettysburg Address, imagined democracy to be “of the people, by the people, for the people”. The platform would emulate this in a digital world.
This is the story of Reddit with Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman as the young students and the legendary Paul Graham their mentor. Reddit's story is a compelling narrative of innovation, challenge, and transformation.
In its infancy, Reddit functioned as a simple link aggregator, its initial activity largely driven by Huffman and Ohanian themselves. The early interface was basic, but the foundational elements of community interaction through upvoting and downvoting were established. The platform's culture, characterized by a blend of technical discussions, strong opinions, and varied content, began to take shape.
The trajectory of Reddit took a significant turn with the arrival of Aaron Swartz, a fellow Y Combinator participant. Swartz merged his project, Infogami, with Reddit, and his decision to reprogram the site from Lisp to Python marked a turning point, correlating with a noticeable uptick in traffic.
Despite its growing user base, Reddit faced monetization challenges. Efforts ranged from selling merchandise like t-shirts to exploring advertising and licensing deals, but these initiatives didn't yield substantial financial results. This struggle, coupled with the platform's rapid growth, led to its acquisition by Condé Nast in 2006, a move that secured financial backing but also initiated a period of adjustment as Reddit navigated its identity under corporate ownership.
Over the years, the platform weathered leadership changes and operational shifts. The departure of its founders to pursue other ventures left a void, and the tragic loss of Aaron Swartz added a somber chapter to Reddit's history. However, the platform's influence continued to grow, becoming a focal point for major cultural and societal events such as the iconic AMA session with Barack Obama in 2012, the “Fappening”, Net Neutrality Advocacy and Pizzagate.
In 2011, recognizing the need for a different operational model, Condé Nast spun off Reddit, allowing it more independence. This change marked the beginning of a resurgence. Huffman's return as CEO in 2015, after Ellen Pao's interim tenure, signaled a renewed focus on product development, community management, and platform growth.
r/PresentDay
Since Huffman’s taken the reins, things have improved. Video was introduced to the site, the mobile experience was marginally improved, hate groups were eradicated. However, with the turn of the decade into the 2020s, things seem bleak as ever.
Dark and forced advertising patterns, veiled threats to moderators, cutting off third-party connections by making API usage rates exorbitantly high have reduced Reddit to be just an participator observer in the Great Online Game.
With Reddit marching towards an IPO in the coming months, some key issues that come to the forefront are:
With Reddit going public, the platform will need to start generating more income to appease shareholders, which could result in users seeing more advertising and modifications to the experience. 93% of Reddit’s 2022 $510M revenue came from ads and slowly evolving into an Instagram like social-media feed experience. Frequent users are so vexed by the new layout that many resort to using Reddit’s historic website from 2005(old.reddit.com) to experience less digital overload. This frustration was also doubly implied when Apollo, a third-party ad-free Reddit client for iOS, was forced to shut down with Reddit’s hike in API pricing. There is a clear over-reliance on advertising with very poor conversion rates.
In the summer of 2023, Reddit shifted to charging for its API that was once free. The Reddit API price hike charges developers 24 cents per 1,000 API requests. This pricing change led to concerns and protests from developers, as it resulted in significant costs for those with high query rates forcing several third party applications to shut down. Neatly designed and user loved apps such as Apollo(for iOS) and Relay(for Android) shut shop causing widespread backlash from several subreddits. The reasons from the management were -
Companies like OpenAI and Google were able to freely train models on data from Reddit which can be arguably regarded as one of the largest repositories of human conversations a social platform holds
While third-party apps like Apollo were profitable, Reddit has been unprofitable from the start. The Reddit team wanted to capture the user activity on these apps or corner clients into paying high rates for their API usage to solve its profitability issues.
In response to Reddit increasing API price rates, 7000 of Reddit’s 100,000 communities also went dark cutting off any access to the content in those subreddits to the outside world for 48+ hours. It caused a big saga in the aftermath of which Steve Huffman even threatened to forcibly remove and replace moderators. In some cases, they were even threatened to be replaced with bots. Moderators, in most cases, are power users/loyalists to Reddit and do a thankless unpaid job. Bullying them just accentuated the divide between value the users want versus the financial goals the management want to achieve.
Note(understanding this may help in the next part of the article): A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an entity in which all members participate in decision-making, because there is no central authority.
Reddit’s problems can be summarised as a classic principal-agent problem which refers to the conflict in interests and priorities that arises when one person or entity (the "agent") takes actions on behalf of another person or entity (the "principal"). Here, Reddit’s problem is unique because Reddit has two principles - the first being its financial backers and shareholders; the second being its power-users primarily and the community as a whole who regard Reddit to be democratic(in a way).
Let’s delve into the latter structure more. In “There’s a new Jack in Town”, I explored the idea of Twitter and it becoming a partial DAO where certain power-users(chosen by and representing the entire user-base) could assist Elon in taking hard decisions on free-speech/liberalism, maintaining the quality of discussion on Twitter and making sure the overall value provided through various features only increased. Reddit, however, is already as close to being a DAO as one may think.
Reddit’s management, especially Steve as CEO, and other board members could draw a parallel to Elon where they hold the final vote.
The moderators are representative of power-users. They work free of cost and ultimately want Reddit to succeed. Acknowledging their thoughts would act as a steady anchor to Reddit’s community growing in terms of quantity and qualitative engagement. They hold power to the extent that they can take communities dark, remove posts and even ban users. Recently, Huffman also expressed plans to update the company's moderator removal policy to allow ordinary Redditors to vote out moderators more easily making it an even more democratic process.
Finally, the several Redditors and subreddits form the larger user community.
Reddit is unique from other social media platforms in the sense that it faces extra pressure from the metaphorical “DAO” that is its group of moderators and Redditors. They are, however, very essential in differentiating Reddit to other media networks.
Throughout Reddit’s history and even more-so recently, there seems to be a disconnect in understanding the best path to appeasing both principals.
Further, Reddit currently stands at an average revenue per user(ARPU) of $0.82 with a whopping 812 million monthly active users(MAU) but only a monthly revenue of around $56 million. As the company plans to go public within the next two months, it is still unprofitable and aims at a down-valuation of about $5 billion compared to it’s August 2021 valuation of $10 billion. To compare, Snap’s ARPU for the same timeframe was $3.2 while Meta’s was around $32.
For a company with such a massive userbase and that sits on a literal data mine of user conversations in the age of data-hungry AI models, Reddit is easily one of the most under-delivering, undervalued and misunderstood companies. However, it’s only Reddit that can change its fortunes.
r/Opportunities
Community features and add ons
One of the key aspects the Reddit team misreads and loses out on as an opportunity to provide value is to build features at the community level rather than an individual level. The social graph for almost every other social network like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter is indexed at an individual level where you subscribe to the thoughts or updates of a specific user. The lowest number of users required to technically populate your feed is 1.
Reddit is different. Though you can follow a user, the default user behaviour is to follow a community and for a community to prosper/engage in meaningful conversation digitally, you realistically need >40-50 people.
While Reddit does not suffer in making traction-powered communities, monetising only through advertisements suits the number of users = 1 model heavily while there being a huge opportunity cost. Here are community features it can tap into:
Creator Communities: While there are already a bunch of subreddits dedicated to varied creators like r/LexFridman, r/JoeRogan, r/MrBeast, r/Tucker_Carlson, subreddits can become unofficial homes to these creators. Think about it - every time you want to hash out ideas when you listen to Lex, exclaim at Mr.Beast’s insanity, Reddit’s the top place to go. Reddit getting into meaningful long-form content and combining it with their active/well-moderated community would create a unique social experience for people especially if content were live streamed.
Further, this social experience opens up opportunities to provide creators various tools to interact with fans. Tokengated/ticketed one-on-one sessions or AMA sessions(for which Reddit is wildly popular), custom storefronts where creators can retail merchandise and other features can drive a lot of traffic to Reddit.
Popular podcasting platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify have created several tools to help creators but creating conversation and community around creators has proven especially hard. Increasing video limits from 15 mins to a couple of hours and by signing exclusive deals to have creators release content on Reddit can boost value driven to users. Instead of utilizing platforms like Slack, it would be beneficial to establish creator communities on Reddit. The familiar environment of Reddit would simplify the process for users to join and make payments, significantly easing the user experience. Moreover, Reddit has the potential to direct users towards selected creators, which, for communities with membership fees, could substantially enhance their revenue generation, a feat that platforms like Slack may not be able to match. At the same time, it can help restart Reddit’s virtual economy. In Keep Calm and Game, I iterated on how Roblox’s in-game currency Robux helps immerse users in their virtual world.
Roblox users purchased $2.39 billion worth of Robux in the first two quarters of 2023 for in-game avatars, tips and purchasing games. Reddit could do the same with their avatars for their own Snoo mascot and tips to creators/moderators.
Creating an Economy:
Today, Reddit is already a place people look for jobs, second-hand items and rentals/homes. Reddit, however, just acts as a lead-source for these platforms where most of the transaction occur off the platform.
With all the data they track, Reddit can easily monitor top trends and build features around it. When Facebook saw that it was becoming a trending social network for second-hand items and sublets, they built Facebook Marketplace to allows users to buy, sell, and trade items with others in their local area. They even tried their hand at Facebook Dating to help users find matches based on their interests and profiles.
Even during the crypto-boom, Reddit had an opportunity to sell NFTs through a marketplace feature they could’ve built while Redditors absolutely geeked out on token projects like NBA Topshots, Cryptopunks, remastered GIFs and memes. Reddit was perfectly positioned to capture this momentum. After all, Reddit is the place memes are made. It should have been home to its marketplace too.
This would further assist adopting an intrinsic currency for the platform as suggested in the point above.
Reddit could partner with universities and large companies to make their respective subreddits the virtual home for every discussion, rant, marketplace or job opportunity one can think of. Reddit’s specialisation has always been niche communities - with this Reddit can turn back time and become partly what Facebook was meant to be originally.
Moderators are a huge part of Reddit. They are the ultimate power-users and loyalists. Rather than threatening them, Reddit management should create an intrinsic currency or tipping option that lets moderators achieve some financial incentive too. Further, they can partner with experts in specific communities to get them to moderate and verify information too. A good example would be healthcare subreddits. When I recently had a vitamin imbalance, I checked r/vitamins to see the causes for this. I found a ton of advice and suggestions. While helpful, this can be largely misleading. Working with health professionals as moderators or verifiers, can improve quality of information on Reddit.
Greg Isenberg, one of my favourite founders in the community space, has a thought-provoking piece on "Unbundling Reddit” where several subreddit communities have a demand/need for products to be built for their subreddit community. Since Reddit has grown so big and its one size fits all doesn't fit anyone particularly well, he dotes on entrepreneurs to find growing subreddits to cater conversations and products to.
Isenberg’s playbook to Unbundling Reddit Great examples of this could include exploring avenues such as learning platforms, niche marketplaces, or paid community features based on the specific interests and needs of growing subreddits.
For instance, subreddits focused on professional development or hobbies could benefit greatly from integrated e-learning modules. These communities could host live sessions(akin to Spaces in Twitter or Rooms in Clubhouse) or live/recorded video tutorials, leveraging the expertise within the community and offering a structured way to share knowledge and skills. With the integration of live courses or video lessons, as suggested by services like MavenHQ and Podia, users could gain in-depth knowledge in fields they are passionate about, directly from trusted and knowledgeable community members.
Improving messaging services could greatly enhance the way users interact privately or in groups. This would facilitate smoother and more efficient communication, especially for coordinating events, discussing subreddit management, or simply for users to network and socialize more effectively within their communities. This would prevent exodus to apps like Slack or Discord for discussion among members of smaller groups within a community.
This doesn’t mean the company has to create new features/interfaces for each community, but it should create dedicated teams to build for its well-performing communities like r/gaming, r/stocks, r/photography, and more.
As it stands, Reddit is letting a lot of the value it creates leak into other platforms. While the ideas originate in Reddit’s data from conversations, other platforms that build vertically on top of these ideas steal away most of the monetizable value. Reddit needs to build faster to capture this value.
It definitely gets harder to build faster without bugs at scale but engineering seems to have taken a pause at Reddit ever since well Aaron left them. Even bigger companies like Meta and Apple have always found a way to change the slate and grow into more than what they initially started as. Reddit has to find a way to engineer faster and better.
Third Party Data and LLMs
In “Google is Dead? Long Live Perplexity and Metaphor?”, I wrote about how a lot of the world’s subjective search data lives on platforms like Reddit. Such data is also a direct mapping of our interests and would be super valuable to build on.
Subjective search data is Ideas. Opinions. Recommendations. Advice. Conversations. “Subjective search” encompasses everything from restaurant or recipe recommendations, to commentary on politics or new technology, to fitness tips and product reviews.
Subjective search doesn’t live in SEO-optimised websites, biased media publications or politically diplomatic articles. It lives in the comments of brutal feedback provided to product launches on HackerNews, the twenty different ways of managing context and state in React on StackOverflow, the wildest takes on Sam Altman being ousted from OpenAI on Reddit
Reddit announced a unofficial shut-off to their APIs when they brutally hiked rates in the summer of 2023 leading to several third party clients shutting shop! However, almost nine months have passed since and there’s been no communication from Reddit on plans to capture this value.
In my opinion, Reddit should completely reverse this decision. Here’s what it could do instead:
Firstly, Reddit should definitely do one of the following. Either lend this data to interested LLM development companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta or any interested organisation and let them build on top of probably the largest mine of human conversation or develop a verticalised chat agent trained on their own data(similar to Quora’s AI chat feature) and provide this as a free service on their platform.
The value of LLMs lies in their ability to summarize and organize human intelligence, rather than replace it. Their dependence on organized human intelligence is only going to grow. LLMs produce text as well as analyzing it. As they begin to feed on text that they and their siblings have produced, their informational quality will rapidly degenerate. This could make it difficult to distinguish between good and bad content at scale. It is going to be really easy to flood the zone with low quality content, but far harder to distinguish it at scale from the good stuff. The point is that in such a world, places like Reddit will become much more valuable, because they are where human based systems can plausibly help get the good stuff produced. They must use their data - again seems like a slow engineering culture and bad strategy problem.
It must be deja-vu that both Twitter and Reddit had similar responses to third party clients building on top of their APIs.
In 2010, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Bill Gross (who invented search advertising) started trying to build his own Twitter monetization product called TweetUp. This is when Twitter acquired Tweetie(best Twitter mobile client at the time) and made clear they were going to begin to monetize it via advertising, Gross started buying up multiple other third party Twitter clients with the idea of creating a competing network of clients that would monetize independently. Twitter responded in the short term by kicking several of Gross’s clients off of the platform for dubious terms-of-service violations, and in the long term by killing the 3rd party API for everyone. They did relax the API restrictions later but kept a close check on what apps used the API. However, during this time Twitter did not radically improve Twitter’s offerings, partly why Jack Dorsey stepped down to let someone better take control.
Following Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the API was made wildly inaccessible by hiking API rates, a move Reddit took inspiration from. However, rather than coughing up more money, a lot of beloved apps shut down in both cases.
However, what one, and especially Reddit management, must understand is their social graph. Instagram, for example, knows who you know and what kind of people you’d like but Reddit understands what you’re interested in. That is much more valuable. Keeping this knowledge graph leashed and not building on top of it is a very backward-looking decision.
This is what I propose Reddit should do with their knowledge graph and API(with a little bit of inspiration from Ben Thompson). Reddit should split into entities:
One entity would be the core Reddit service, heralding the social graph, user graph and other historical post data
The other entity would control all of the current Reddit web, mobile app and other feature services.
Reddit’s app entity would contract the Reddit service entity to run Reddit’s apps as it does now but this wouldn’t be exclusive. Other clients who would pay decently well and adhere to a base set of policies could get access to Reddit’s social graph too. This would solve a lot of Reddit’s current problems.
Opening up the graph and data to third party clients ensures that Reddit’s extension features whether that is an iOS client or a LLM chatbot trained on Reddit data are easily built improving value derived from Reddit’s data while improving the brand name.
One of Reddit’s biggest challenges, as Mario Gabriele states, is geographical expansion since it’s text based and not easily translatable to several languages. This bars it from being used in countries with a low rates of English literacy and diverse local languages. Clients that build on Reddit’s data could very easily solve this problem.
Statista and Generalist Reddit’s job openings suggest that they want to expand internationally and are still hiring for ground level roles in new countries which means it’s definitely something on their horizon - maybe a third party client could do a much more efficient job.
Reddit job posting for building a community in France Reddit’s Service entity can opt out of challenging moderation decisions or complex cultural dilemmas. The U.S. could be presented with a wide range of Reddit client choices, whereas Europe could enforce stricter regulations, and India might implement even more rigorous controls.
The increase in competition in clients would not only benefit the service entity from an increase in revenue but also challenge the App/Web entity to focus on bettering their own client.
For example, Reddit’s current feed is pretty generic and uses poor recommendation systems. It suggests things absolutely unrelated to me and does not invite me to new communities or channels that would increase my time spent on the platform. Singular posts take up so much space and I find 2-3 ad posts every 10 posts scrolled making it very digitally exhausting to use Reddit. Compare that to something like Imgur where I’m immediately thrust into consumption mode!
Newer clients would focus on such functionality and spur the original Reddit team to improve their platform too!
r/Conclusion
In conclusion, as Reddit stands on the brink of its initial public offering, the platform finds itself at a pivotal juncture. The challenges and opportunities laid out in this discussion aren't just hypothetical scenarios; they are real, actionable steps that could redefine Reddit's trajectory and unlock its vast potential.
Reddit's journey thus far has been marked by incredible community engagement, rich content, and a unique position in the social media landscape. However, to truly capitalize on these strengths and deliver value to its stakeholders, Reddit must address the critical issues it faces today. From revamping its revenue model and advertising strategy to fostering a more inclusive and empowered community of creators and moderators, the platform must evolve.
As it moves towards its IPO, it's crucial for Reddit to not only address the concerns of its user base but also to innovate and think ahead. By focusing on community-driven features, improving the platform's user experience, and harnessing the power of its data, Reddit can transform itself into a platform that not only survives the digital age but thrives in it.
The steps laid out in this newsletter are not just suggestions; they are a roadmap for Reddit to enhance its value proposition, appeal to a broader audience, and ensure a successful and prosperous future. As Reddit embarks on this new chapter, it's time for the platform to reflect, reform, and reinvigorate its strategy. The world is watching, and the potential is immense. Reddit has the opportunity to not just navigate the digital landscape but to shape it. The question is, will it seize the Internet?
If you have any feedback or suggestion, do loop it in the comments section. I’ll be sure to take a look at it and even reach out to discuss if possible. You can reach me at avirathtibrewala@gmail.com for any other queries or discussions.
As a part of my newsletter, I wanted to affect some moral good to the society we live in. Every time I publish a post, I’ve decided to share an artefact or cool thing on kindness and benevolence.
If you feel like you’re feeling a bit of imposter syndrome or not belong, read this brilliant post by Jeremy Cai on what it feels like to be a Dropout for a year. You may not be in the same situation but it’ll surely help you reflect on your feelings.
Lot of interesting ideas on how reddit can diversify revenue and backstory on their history. I'd love to see a comparison of Reddit's reach internationally compared to other social media. Also intriguing that it's the one social media that centers around community rather than individuals. The concept of a reddit celebrity doesn't really exist besides a couple of edge cases. And in all those cases, they are unique characters rather than someone famous. Even if a famous person is doing an AMA, the only distinction from you is their username which isn't that significant. It's a media platform where the weight of your jokes/opinion weighs a lot more than who you are. Also leads to an interesting dichotomy where users can't really turn their back on the platform because they're inherently attached to their community. There isn't another alternative platform that is remotely close to reddit and the anonymous nature means that the closing of a subreddit acts as a crisis that irrevocably splits a community. Also think the relationship between admins and moderators or employees with users (like in the API situation) is so critical to ensuring positive sentiment with the platform. Think there's a lot of room for competition in the "community focused" social media space.