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If you spent $1,000 on shares of Tesla at the start of 2024, you’d be sitting on nearly $1,700 now—a 70 percent gain, about double the returns of the overall stock market. A resurgent Bitcoin is up even more, yielding a return of 120 percent for crypto true believers. And then there’s Nvidia, the A.I. chip darling, whose shares skyrocketed 172 percent in 2024—turning $1,000 from a year ago into almost $2,700 today. Yet all of these big-ticket investments were bested by the stock performance of a relatively small tech company with a long history of erratic management, restive users, and lots of losses. A company founded nearly 20 years ago that has suddenly—and, one has to worry, perhaps ruinously—become one of the hottest investments in tech.
As this is another edition of r/Farhad, where I, Farhad, explore the curiosities of the world’s largest message board, it ought to be pretty obvious that the company I’m talking about is Reddit.
Founded way back in 2005—before Twitter, before Uber, before the iPhone—Reddit’s finances were in shambles for so long that it made its debut on the stock market only this year. Expectations were muted; one analyst called it “a poor man’s Twitter.” But on their first day of trading, in March, shares rose by almost 50 percent. A lot of tech IPOs crater after an initial pop, but, fueled by surprisingly strong quarterly results (including its first-ever profits), Reddit has just gone up and up and up. As I write, a $1,000 investment at Reddit’s initial public offering would be worth more than $5,000 today—a surge of 400 percent, the sort of gain porn that the stock bros of r/wallstreetbets would take as an invitation to congratulate your wife’s new boyfriend on his windfall.
Nowhere has Reddit’s reversal of fortune been met with more surprise than on Reddit itself, where management has long been regarded with a low-grade skepticism that occasionally flares up into outright hostility.
“I’ve been a Redditor for 14 years,” wrote one user shortly before the IPO. “In that time, the only good idea I can think of that they’ve ever had was the innovative up/downvote mechanism for moderating” users’ posts. “Beyond that, everything good about reddit is because of the users and mods.” The top comment on that post concurred: “Spoiler alert, it isn’t worth a penny.”
And I doubt that Reddit’s newfound success will do much to please Redditors. There is one play for making money in social networks: grab users by the ankles and shake them vigorously for the coins to fall out. Show them more ads, monetize more of their data, figure out new ways of mining their contributions for new revenue streams. You might argue that one of the reasons Reddit has thrived all these years—one of the reasons it’s felt so different from its virality-juking, ad-infested competition—is precisely because its management had dropped the ball on making money. Now that the company has tasted stock market riches, is it on the fast track to enshittification, that perfect neologism for the way profit maximization inevitably ruins everything good online?
Unfortunately, probably. Advertising is already getting out of hand; Reddit is now placing ads among users’ comments: “Everywhere i look now it’s fucking ads. It’s been tolerable, but now as I’m in a comment section there are ads between comments. Like what the actual fuck? I’m so so tired of this,” posted one user in r/rant.
But there is more to fear than just ad overload. Reddit’s latest and perhaps greatest financial play is to become a handmaiden to our emerging A.I. overlords. Two decades of Redditors’ comments have created a repository of human experience unmatched anywhere else online. Now Reddit has begun licensing its archive to A.I. companies who are using it to train machines to think like humans. As I wrote in June, this worries me as a person—do we want robots to learn about the world from the meme-iest of sites, a place where everyone’s behavior is flattened into shallow catchall concepts, from boomer to Chad to Karen to incel? As one user wrote: “Oh perfect, an AI chatbot that sounds like your typical Redditor. This will be great.”
But Reddit’s new friendliness to A.I. worries me as a Redditor, too. First, it’s unfair: Over two decades, ordinary Redditors and especially Reddit moderators have devoted millions of unpaid hours to nurturing their corners of the site. Now Reddit is packaging up all this data for a windfall from search and A.I. companies—and offering all us suckers nothing in return for our part in feeding tomorrow’s intelligent agents.
There’s also the question of how A.I. mining might alter dynamics of what happens on Reddit. In the same way that search-engine optimization ruined the web by creating a market for low-quality, highly ranked sites, using Reddit posts for training A.I. adds extra incentives for low-quality posts and comments. Anyone who peruses Reddit regularly can’t miss the bots: As one user commented recently, “Pay attention to a lot of the new posts—they all start off the same. ‘Hi, I am x years old and live in (country).’ Not saying a lot of the new users are AI, but highly suspect.”
Where does this lead, in the long run? Dead Internet Theory—the idea that the better computers get at mining and mimicking user-generated content, the harder it becomes to distinguish bots from humans, leading inevitably to bots, not humans, writing everything online. At the moment, this may seem unlikely; Reddit is valuable as a tool for training computers mainly because most of what’s on there looks like it was posted by actual humans.
But who knows how long that can last? Wild success seems to ruin everything in tech. Reddit is likely no exception.
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