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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

Seriously though. What makes reddit worth that much? Is it strictly advertising?

At this point, it's being a massive repository of (ostensibly) human perspectives that can be used to train LLMs and perform search. Google [1] appears to think so. For all its faults as a platform that relies on volunteer (read: unpaid) moderators, the website is structured in a way that makes it very useful for continually curating human knowledge of the world. It's unclear whether Reddit can deliver long-term value like this, though, especially depending on one's perspective about to what degree generative AI is a bubble.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/22/24080165/google-reddit-ai...

The $60 million a year that Google is paying amounts to 7% of 2023 revenue. Perhaps they could get 3 or 4 more customers at that rate. There's just not enough juice there.

> used to train LLMs

Uh-oh.

If aliens come to Earth and look at Reddit posts to decide whether we're worth establishing friendly contact with, or destroying to build a hyperspace bypass, we're doomed.

> human knowledge of the world

It definitely comprises a fair share, but I think it is a stretch to say Reddit fosters continuous curation of world knowledge. It offers a space for some very particular niches and memetic content, but a lot of human world knowledge is encoded elsewhere, e.g. internal communication channels, personal correspondence, working notes, journals, wiki's, QA-sites or may not even be encoded at all.

World knowledge would also require broader demographics and more non-English language content, as well as other means of communication beyond text-based interactions.

It opened at 6-7x revenue and a ton of the yearly loss is that the C-suite is paid a stupid, double digit, percentage of that revenue. All it will take is a few right decisions and you have a profitable company trading at a low value for a tech stock. Meta, for instance, is 10x revenue.

Any indication that the board(?) will do this? Reddit seems to be a finish product so there's massive room for cost cutting in management and developers.

No I think that is the gamble here

I recently overhauled my credit card strategy, and reddit was a tremendous help. Pretty much every search result in Google is riddled with recommendations based on affiliate marketing, but /r/CreditCards had a lot of really good information. It's where I learned that Bank of America has the best cashback credit cards if you can park $100k at Merrill Lynch. I also learned a trick on how to get multiple copies of one of their category-cards.

Reddit certainly helped me get $1,000 more in cashback than I was getting.

So there's a tremendous amount of value in there, I just don't know how they unlock it.

Traffic. It's top 3 visited site in the US, that's worth a lot of money. It's easier to increase revenue of each user than it is to build a new social network. Someone will figure out how to increase revenue per user.

Reddit users are notoriously hard to monetize from ads. The most successful marketing is astroturfing and guerrilla marketing which does not you to pay Reddit itself.

> The most successful marketing is astroturfing and guerrilla marketing which does not you to pay Reddit itself.

Wait for it.

I feel like that is an old trope from many many years ago. The site has added millions of users since then. It seems like the second post on any page is an ad now. They must be filling their inventory.

User data would be my guess.

Traffic, but only if you ignore advertiser-relevant audience demographics.

Nothing. That's why we saw pg extolling the virtues of reddit and its scumbag CEO last week: gotta drum up interest to have someone else holding the bags when the dust settles.

The Enterprise: State Actor edition that provides tools for automated psyops with DLC's for old accounts (generated on the fly).

Bid system for keywords against influencing demographics.

You know, the usual narrative control and influencing.

/s /s /s

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