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.

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

There’s a half conspiracy that 1 and 2 are not unrelated. Google added new rich results for “Discssions and Forums” that was basically for Reddit, and their normal results saw a huge spike. 

Then Reddit and Google agree to that licensing deal. Weird development that maybe puts a wrench in the conspiracy is that they were slightly de-ranked from a recent update