Silicon Valley Daily

Reddit at $30B was not on my bingo card.

1. While traditionally their ad product was bad, they have been smart in leaning into the "[query] reddit" organic behavior. Other than Google and Amazon, one of the few at-scale websites that have consumer intent. Very good for ads.

2. LLMs are massively transformative for their business: a) data licensing to all the major players b) automatic translation for UGC advice / recommendations (see "[query] reddit").

3. No meaningful competition from feed-based social networks. Missed opportunity for Quora.

"[query] reddit" is maybe the most massive story of shifting human behavior on the internet in the past decade

backlinks were always the best way of judging real decentralized popularity across the internet (made possible by Google being really good at detecting backlink gaming)

but Reddit flipped the tables with mass social voting via upvotes (made possible by being really good at detecting fake account/upvote gaming)

real humans don't have personal blogs to backlink from any more, they have social accounts where their interactions measure their sentiment

whoever finds the best way of weighting those diverse signals properly will break Google's search monopoly and print money

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