I thought this would play out this way:

1. create white label styleable brandable badgeable reddit 2. give it to the web team of every conde nast publication to integrate with their site & strategy 3. vogue, gq, vanity fair and the like now have better websites with their own reddit-like implementations on their own domains. reddit itself is unscarred and gets traffic feeding back from these sites by cross populating stories.

Not sure why they didn't do more of this as it was surely along the lines of what they were initially talking about. On the plus side, they haven't made a mess of reddit itself.