Reddit Future Plans: Users’ Commitments to User Privacy Policies, Data Transactions, and a Search for Deep Learning Adversaries
It’s not every day that a large portion of a stock’s shares are set aside for users and individual investors. But it remains to be seen what kind of influence the regular Reddit users will have on the stock’s performance.
Reddit, over the years, has been beset with leadership crises and controversies over the proliferation of racist, misogynistic and other toxic content going unchecked before laboring to clean up its act more recently.
The second largest shareholder is Chinese tech company Tencent. Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is Reddit’s third-largest shareholder, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Founded in 2005 by Alexis Ohanian and his dorm-mate at the University of Virginia, Steve Huffman, the site started as an gathering place for people to anonymously discuss politics, popular TV shows and absurd memes. The sharing of photos showing bread stapled to trees has sparked a community on the internet.
The site became known for hosting “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer sessions with well-known people such as President Barack Obama, Richard Dawkins and Harrison Ford.
Over the years, its user base has grown with now 76 million people visiting the site every day across more than 100,000 communities.
It’s rare for a social network of the size of Reddit to have as many volunteers as the site does, but it’s also unusual for the rules of each community to be determined by a group of volunteers.
Some employees fear the company’s internal culture will turn more corporate, and users worry that profit-making pursuits will drown out the lively and dependable conversations that the influential online hub is known for. Jen Wong, the COO of the company, told us in an interview that it was focused on three markets for the future of its business: advertising, transactions between users and selling its data to artificial intelligence companies. “Reddit’s corpus of information is incredibly important to the training of large language models,” Wong said, adding that the company was in possession of data that reflected 19 years of human experience, organized by topic. The Federal Trade Commission was reported to be looking into the sale of user data to artificial intelligence giants.
Each user’s share of the company share will be determined by “karma,” a kind of reputation assessment based on user contributions to the site, and about 8% of it was set aside for super users.
In 2021, Reddit became the center of a stock market firestorm when a subreddit known as WallStreetBets helped organize small investors to send the stock of videogame retailer GameStop soaring to extraordinary highs, shooting up more than 1700 percent, an event that prompted a Wall Street trading frenzy and put the spotlight on Reddit’s role in so-called meme stocks.
Ahead of the public offering, the people at WallStreetBets decided to place a wager against the site, forsaking its authenticity in the process of maximizing profits.
In recent months, Reddit has taken a number of controversial steps widely seen as preparing for a public offering, which it first unveiled plans to take the public public. Among them, charging third-party developers for access to its back-end data. The change prompted thousands of Reddit communities to stage an organized blackout.