Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
tackling a beast of a topic. I mean, truly a
leviathan of the internet age. Oh, absolutely.
We are talking about Reddit. It is. It's just
impossible to discuss the history of the modern
internet without discussing Reddit. It's like
the plumbing of the web. It really is the plumbing.
And honestly, looking at the date today, it's
February 2, 2026. It is just wild to look back
at where this thing started and, well, where
it is now. Right. I mean, we are talking about
one of those visited websites in the world. It's
a publicly traded company now. It took a symbol
RDDT on the New York Stock Exchange. Capitalized
at billions and billions of dollars. It's part
of the establishment. It's Wall Street. And yet,
and this is the core of it all, it rests on a
massive fundamental paradox. It is a corporate
giant. Yes, it answers to shareholders. It has
quarterly earnings calls. But its entire engine,
the thing that keeps the lights on and the content
flowing? It's a volunteer workforce. Yeah. It's
a multibillion dollar platform that runs on unpaid
labor. That's the whole magic trick. That is
the part that always, always gets me. It's this
massive contradiction. It has been the birthplace
of some of the most wholesome, amazing charity
drives in Internet history. Billions of dollars
raised for good causes over the years. And it's
also been the source of some of the most. dangerous
life ruining witch hunts we've ever seen online.
It's a place where Bill Gates does Secret Santa
and it's also a place that has been banned in
entire countries for its content. It creates
community and it destroys reputations. It is
the front page of the Internet. But you're right.
It's also this chaotic, messy bulletin board
system that in many ways its soul hasn't really
changed since 2005. So our mission today is to
decode that. We are just doing a history lesson
here. We really want to look at the mechanics
of how this online community actually works.
The nuts and bolts of it. Exactly. We need to
understand the tension between that ideal of
free speech and the reality of making money.
And how a site started by two college roommates
literally changed how the entire world consumes
information. And we have quite the stack of sources
to do it. We're looking at comprehensive histories,
corporate reports from that whole IPO era in
2024 and 2025. Right. Community archives, legal
filings right up to the last few months. We're
going to try and piece together the full story.
I have to say, I'm really excited to talk about
the Wild West days. the chaos of the early internet
it feels so i don't know so distant now and i'm
ready to get into the sociological shift because
what we're really seeing if we zoom out is this
incredible transition from a community forum
to what is essentially a mine for ai training
data okay let's definitely put a pin in that
because that ai stuff is terrifyingly recent
it is but we have to start at the beginning the
origin story and i love this part because it's
the classic silicon valley fake it till you make
it tail it really truly is it starts in 2005
university Virginia, you've got these two roommates,
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohaney. Just kids, really.
Yeah, and they didn't start out wanting to build
a social news site at all. They had a totally
different idea. They wanted to change the way
we order food. Right. The famous My Mobile Menu.
My Mobile Menu. The idea was you could order
food using SMS text messaging. You'd text a sandwich
shop your order right from your flip phone and
then go pick it up. Which, to be fair, in 2026,
we do that all the time with apps. Yeah. But
in 2005. The timing was just, it was all wrong.
The infrastructure wasn't there. Most people
didn't have smartphones. Texting costs, what,
10 cents a message back then? The least. It was
expensive. So they go and they pitch this idea
to Paul Graham of Y Combinator, the famous startup
incubator. They give the presentation of their
lives. And Graham, well, he hated it. He just
shot it down. Completely. He basically told them
the idea was useless. Imagine that. You're 22
years old. You pitch your dream. And the Oracle
of Silicon Valley just says, nope, this is bad.
That's devastating. But, and this is the key
moment. He liked them. He saw their energy, their
drive. So he invited them to apply to Y Combinator's
first ever class, but with a condition. Find
a new idea. Anything else. Come up with something
else. And during a brainstorming session, on
a train ride, Graham is the one who suggests,
build the front page of the internet. That phrase
is so ubiquitous now. But back then, there wasn't
really a front page. You had Yahoo, maybe a portal.
You had sites like Slashdot for tech news. And
Digg was getting popular, but they were getting
cluttered or were too niche. Graham wanted a
place where the users themselves decided what
was important. A democracy of links. Exactly.
So Huffman codes the first version of the site
in a language called Common Lisp. They launch
in June 2005. But here is the problem every single
social platform faces on day one. The ghost town
problem. The ghost town. You launch a site designed
for community discussion, but there is no community.
It's empty. Yeah, if you're the first person
at the party, you just leave. Exactly. If a user
logs in and sees nothing or sees a post from
three days ago, they leave and they never come
back. You need that critical mass, like, instantly.
So what did they do? This is my favorite part
because it feels so scrappy and honestly a little
deceptive. It was very deceptive. They didn't
buy ads. They didn't hire a marketing firm. Huffman
and Ohanian just created hundreds of fake users.
Hundreds of them. They sat there day after day,
logging in as user A, posting an interesting
link, logging out, logging in as user B, and
then leaving a comment on that link. They were
talking to themselves for hours. They were holding
entire conversations with their own fake accounts.
But it served two really important purposes.
One, it made the site look active, right? So
real people wouldn't feel like they were shouting
into the void. But two, and this is crucial,
it set the tone of the site. By posting smart,
interesting articles about technology and science
and programming, they were signaling to the first
real users, this is what Reddit is about. This
is the kind of content we want here. It's a strategy
that would probably be flagged as, I don't know,
market manipulation or something today. But back
then, it was just survival. Fake it till you
make it. In the most literal sense of the phrase.
And it absolutely worked. Real users started
trickling in and eventually the founders could
stop posting as fake people because real people
were finally doing the work for them. OK, so
they're getting some traction. But then came
a really major shift in both the technology and
the team itself. Yes. In late 2005, they merged
with another company from their Y Combinator
batch, a company called Infogami. And this is
where Aaron Swartz enters the picture. Aaron
Swartz. A true legend and a tragic figure in
the history of the Internet. He was a prodigy.
I mean, he helped develop the RSS specification
when he was, what, 14 years old? A teenager,
yeah. When they merged, he technically became
a co -founder of Reddit, right? Well, technically
he was an equal owner of the new parent company,
which they called Notabug. Great name. And his
influence on Reddit was profound, particularly
on the technical side. Because he took one look
at the code, that common Lisp code Huffman had
written, and he basically said, This isn't going
to scale. This isn't going to work long term.
Why not? I always heard Lisp was supposed to
be this elegant, powerful, genius level language.
It is elegant. But in 2005, it just didn't have
the ecosystem. The libraries weren't there. They
were spending all their time building basic tools
just to make the site function. Swartz realized
they were reinventing the wheel over and over
again. So what was his solution? He pushed, and
from what I read, he pushed hard to rewrite the
entire site in Python. Okay, let's pause here
for a second. For the non -coders listening,
explain why swapping one programming language
for another is such a big deal. Why does it matter
to the history of the company? It's a classic
trade -off in software engineering. Think of
it like baking bread. Using Lisp back then was
like growing your own wheat, milling your own
flour, cultivating your own yeast, and then finally
baking the bread. You have total control, but
it takes forever. It takes forever. Using Python
was like going to the store and just buying a
bag of high -quality flour and a packet of yeast.
You can get to the baking part much, much faster.
So it's about speed. It's about developable speed.
Now here's the nuance. Python as a language is
actually slower for a computer to process than
some other languages. It's less efficient for
the machine. So why do it? Because it is incredibly
fast for a human to write. And for a tiny startup
with three people, developer speed is the only
thing that matters. If you can push a new feature
in an hour instead of a day, you can outpace
your competitors like Digg was at the time. So
they treated machine efficiency for human efficiency.
100%. And that decision, which was really driven
by Swartz, gave Reddit the agility it needed
to survive and grow. It's why the site didn't
just collapse under its own weight when traffic
started to spike later on. But despite that growth,
and despite the new, more stable code, They sold
out pretty early. Shockingly early. In October
of 2006, just over a year after launching, they
sold Reddit to Condé Nast Publications. The people
who own Wired, Vogue, The New Yorker. The pinnacle
of old media. A totally different world. And
for how much? What was the price tag? The reports
vary, but the consensus is it was somewhere between
$10 and $20 million. $10? To 20 million. I mean,
considering the IPO valuation in 2024 was over
$6 billion, that feels, well, it feels like they
gave it away. In hindsight, it was a massive,
massive undervaluation. They sold the goose that
laid the golden eggs for, you know, the price
of a really nice chicken dinner. So why do it?
Were they just desperate? You have to remember
the context of 2006. They were young, early 20s.
The site was costing money to run. It was growing,
but they had no real revenue model. $10 million
is set for life money. It seemed like the smart,
safe bet at the time. But that corporate marriage,
it wasn't exactly a happy one, was it? Yeah.
Especially not for Aaron Swartz. No, it was a
culture clash of epic proportions. You have this
hacktivist, this open information idealist in
Swartz, and he's suddenly working for a legacy
magazine publisher in a stuffy office. He blogged
about it pretty openly. He hated the office culture,
the bureaucracy, the concept of FaceTime. He
essentially just stopped showing up to the office.
And he was fired. He was fired in January 2007.
It's such a sad foreshadowing of his later struggles
with the legal system and his eventual suicide,
which is a whole other deep dive we could do.
What a tragic story. But for Reddit, his departure
really marked the end of that indie era. Huffman
and Ohanian eventually left, too, in 2009, leaving
the site entirely in the hands of corporate managers
for a while. And that leads us perfectly into
the mechanics of the site. Because even though
the founders left, the machine they built, what
people call the hive mind, it just kept growing.
And we really need to understand how that ecosystem
actually works because it's so different from
Facebook or X or anything else. Right. And its
absolute core, Reddit, is simple. I submit something,
a link, a picture, a text post. You, the listener,
you look at it. If you like it, you upvote it.
If you hate it or you think it's spam or whatever,
you downvote it. It sounds incredibly simple,
but it's a radical democratic model for distributing
information. I've always thought of it like a
democratic newspaper. That's a great analogy.
The readers are the editors. Every single reader
has a red pen. The algorithm takes all those
votes. It factors in the age of the post so that
fresh stuff tends to stay on top. And that determines
its visibility. If enough people upvote it, it
rises to the top of its community. If it gets
really huge, it hits this true front page of
the Internet. And we have talked about the art,
the subreddits. This wasn't there at the very
start, was it? No. And this was a crucial, critical
innovation. It was introduced in 2008. Before
that, everything was just one big bucket of links.
Firebows of content. Total firehose. If you like
programming but you hated politics, too bad.
You saw it all. Subreddits allowed communities
to form around specific... niche interests. This
is the innovation that saved Reddit from becoming
too noisy to be useful. It allowed for the infinite
fracturing of interests. So you have these massive
ones like World News or Sure Funny with tens
of millions of subscribers. But then you have,
I mean, give us some of the weird ones. Oh, there
are thousands upon thousands. There's our bread
stapled to trees. Which is. Exactly what it sounds
like. It is photos of people stapling slices
of bread to trees. That's it. That is the entire
community. Or you have the complete opposite,
like Rask Historians, which has incredibly strict
academic level standards for answers. Yeah. If
you post a joke or a one line answer there, you
get banned instantly. Instantly. It's serious
business. And the look of it. For the longest
time, Reddit looked like. Someone once described
it as a dystopian Craigslist. That's pretty accurate.
It was just blue links on a white background.
It was text heavy. It was ugly. Deliberately
ugly. I think so. It was a feature, not a bug.
It prioritized information density over aesthetics.
It was a signal to the users. We care about the
data, not the gloss. It wasn't until the big
2018 redesign and then the later rebrands in
2023 for the IPO that they tried to make it look
like a modern social media app. With a little
alien mascot. The SNU. The SNU. Which, I love
this story. Alexis Ohanian just doodled in a
marketing class in college. It's such a great
piece of lore. He originally wanted to name it
SNU, as in what's new, but he settled on SNU.
And it really represents the adaptability of
the community, right? It's a blank canvas. Totally.
You see Snoo dressed as a Spartan warrior on
a history sub or as a scientist on a science
sub or holding a lightsaber on a Star Wars sub.
It's infinitely customizable. But here's the
thing that makes it all work and also makes it
so fragile. The gamification. Why do people post?
Why do they spend hours writing these detailed
guides or comments? One word. Karma. Fake internet
points. That's all they are. They mean nothing,
strictly speaking. You can't spend them. You
can't trade them for cash. But they mean everything
for status within the community. They mean everything.
High karma means you're a valuable contributor.
It creates this little feedback loop of dopamine
in your brain. You post something clever. The
number goes up. You feel validated by the hive
mind. And then you have things like cake day.
The anniversary of your account creation. It's
another little hook that anchors you to the platform
and your identity there. But the real engine
here isn't just the users posting. It's the users
cleaning up. The moderators. We have to stop
here because this is the most unique thing about
Reddit compared to TikTok or Instagram or any
other platform. This is the absolute critical
piece of the entire puzzle. Moderators are volunteers.
They are not employees of Reddit. Not at all.
They are just users who step up. to manage the
communities they care about. They enforce the
rules, they delete the spam, they ban the trolls,
they organize events. And they do it for free?
For zero dollars. There was an estimate, it's
a bit older now, but it gives you a sense of
the scale, that moderators perform about $3 .4
million worth of unpaid work annually. That is
just an insane number. And that's a very conservative
estimate. That number is likely much, much higher
now. At the time, it equated to nearly 3 % of
Reddit's revenue. They're doing the content moderation
work that Facebook or Twitter has to pay armies
of contractors in other countries to do. They
are the janitors, the police, and the judges
of the internet, and they are working for free.
And that dynamic, that complete reliance on free
labor, that creates... a very strange, very tense
power balance, doesn't it? It creates a massive
liability for the company. Reddit Inc. provides
the servers, the electricity, the code, but the
volunteers provide the order. They provide the
safe for advertisers environment. Right. If the
volunteers all decide to stop working one day,
the site fills with spam, scams and pornography
almost instantly. It becomes completely unusable.
In a very real way, Reddit Inc. serves at the
pleasure of its volunteers. And we're going to
see exactly what happens when those volunteers
go on strike later in our deep dive. Oh, yeah.
But before we get to the wars, we have to celebrate
the peace, or at least the chaos that was fun,
the best of times. Because for a long while,
Reddit felt like a user -run superpower. Reddit
culture is so unique because of that hive mind.
When it decides to focus on something, it is
an absolutely unstoppable force. Let's start
with the Reddit hug of death. Right. This is
a rite of passage for any small website or creator.
Someone posts a link to a cool blog or a small
business or an artist's portfolio on Reddit.
And it hits the front page. It hits the front
page. And suddenly 50 ,000, 100 ,000 people try
to click that link at the exact same time. And
the little website server just... The sight crashes
immediately. It's called the hug of death because
it's usually done out of love, but it completely
destroys the target. It was the first sign of
the sheer volume of traffic Reddit could command.
But it's not just crashing websites. It's real
world activism. Do you remember the Restoring
Truthiness campaign back in 2010? Oh, vividly.
This was the peak of The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart and the Colbert Report era. Right. Glenn
Beck was holding a big rally in Washington, D
.C. And Redditors decided they wanted a counter
rally, a satirical one led by Stephen Colbert.
But they didn't just start a petition or something.
No, this is Reddit. They put their money where
their mouth was. They raised over $100 ,000 for
charity in a matter of hours just to get Stephen
Colbert's attention. They filled the entire front
page with threads organizing it. And it happened.
He actually did it. The rally to restore sanity
and door fear. Thousands of people showed up
on the National Mall in D .C. holding signs that
were all inside jokes from Reddit. It was this
incredible moment where Internet memes literally
manifested in the physical world. And the altruism
went way beyond that. The Raytheism community
raised over $200 ,000 for Doctors Without Borders.
The Haiti Relief Fund after the earthquake raised
over $180 ,000. And then there was Reddit Gifts.
The Secret Santa Exchange. It broke Guinness
World Records for the largest gift exchange on
the planet. And you had regular people exchanging
gifts with celebrities like Snoop Dogg or Bill
Gates. Can you imagine opening a package and
realizing... Bill Gates sent you a giant stuffed
animal and made a huge donation to your favorite
charity in your name. It created this feeling
that the internet wasn't just strangers screaming
at each other. It could be a real neighborhood.
And then there is workplace. I think this might
be my favorite thing Reddit has ever done. It
is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating
social experiments ever conducted online. For
those who might have missed it, you have to paint
the picture for us. What was their pure place?
Okay, so it happened first in 2017, and then
they brought it back in 2022 and 2023. Reddit
created a giant blank white digital canvas. Millions
and millions of pixels. Yeah. And each user could
place exactly one colored pixel on that canvas
every five minutes. Just one pixel. So if I want
to draw a picture by myself, I can't. I put down
a red dot, and five minutes later, someone else
can just cover it with a blue dot. Exactly. Alone,
you are completely powerless. Right. But communities
coordinated. The German subreddit coordinated
to build a massive German flag across the canvas.
Fans of Star Wars worked together to build a
movie poster. And you also had the forces of
chaos. You're the void. The void. A coalition
of users dedicated to just making everything
black. Pure destruction for the sake of destruction.
So you're watching art and war happen at the
same time. You watched alliances form and break
in real time. The subreddit for the trans community
allied with the subreddit for the UK flag to
protect each other's borders from being erased.
It was a perfect visual representation of human
cooperation, tribalism, and conflict all played
out in pixels. And we can't talk about classic
Reddit culture without talking about Mistress
Flashypants. Alas. Oh, the Greenpeace whale.
This is the perfect example of rule number one
of the internet. Don't mess with the internet.
So Greenpeace decides to hold an online poll.
to name a humpback whale they're tracking. Right.
They probably wanted a nice, majestic name, Titan
or Aurora or something. And Reddit finds the
poll, and they see one of the options is Mr.
Splashy Pants. Which was probably just put there
as a joke by a web intern or something. A fatal
mistake. A fatal mistake. Reddit voted en masse.
They just completely crushed the other options.
It wasn't even close. And to Greenpeace's everlasting
credit, they didn't disqualify it or get mad.
They embraced it. They were smart. They realized
that the joke brought a massive amount of attention
to their cause. They started selling Mr. Splashy
Pants t -shirts. It showed the symbiotic potential
of Reddit. If you play along with the hive minds
joke, you win. If you try to fight it, you almost
always lose. Which brings us to the AMAs, the
Ask Me Anything format. This really felt like
it changed journalism in a way. It completely
democratized the interview. Before Reddit, if
you wanted to hear from a celebrity, you watched
a polished, prearranged interview on a talk show.
But on Reddit, you had Barack Obama while he
was the sitting president of the United States
doing an AMA. The title of the post was just,
I am Barack Obama, president of the United States,
ask me anything. And the site crashed. A presidential
hug of death. Exactly. And he answered questions
about his beer recipe in the White House, but
also serious policy questions. But the real magic
of the AMAs wasn't just the famous people. It
was the ordinary people. You'd see a post like,
I'm a vacuum repair technician who has worked
for the same shop for 30 years. AMA. And that
thread is legendary. It has thousands of comments.
Who knew vacuum repair was so fascinating? It
valued authenticity and specific deep knowledge
over just celebrity status. But, and there's
always a but with Reddit, this culture of absolute
free speech, this anonymity, this mob rule voting
system. It has a very dark side, a really, really
dark side. It does. And this is where the story
gets heavy. We have to talk about the echo chamber
effect. Right. The upvote system is democratic,
yes, but it also suppresses dissent. If you go
into a community that loves, say, a particular
movie and you post a comment saying you think
that movie is terrible. You get downvoted to
oblivion. Your comment gets hidden at the bottom
of the page. So the only opinions that are visible
are the ones that everyone already agrees with.
And it just reinforces everyone's existing bias.
Exactly. It reinforces bias. It can radicalize
communities. And sometimes. that radicalization
spills out into the real world with absolutely
devastating consequences. And there is no better
example of this than the Boston bombing in 2013.
This is arguably the lowest moment in Reddit's
entire history. Let's walk through what happened.
The bombing occurs at the marathon. The police
are scrambling, looking for suspects. And Reddit
decides to help. A subreddit called RFindBostonBombers
springs up. They wanted to crowdsource the investigation.
They treated it like a game, like a puzzle to
be solved. They were scanning thousands of photos
of the crowd, circling people with backpacks,
listening to police scanners they found online.
Okay, but hang on. How does that actually go
so wrong? I get people speculating, but how do
you go from just looking at photos to accusing
a specific innocent kid? It's the bystander effect
in reverse. Everyone assumes someone else has
verified the information. Someone in one thread
circles a backpack in a grainy photo. Someone
in a different thread is listening to police
scanner audio, and they think they hear the name
Sunil. Sunil Tripathi. Sunil Tripathi. He was
a student at Brown University who had been reported
missing by his family about a month prior to
the bombing. So the hive mind connects these
two totally unrelated data points. Missing student
equals bomber. And because thousands of people
are upvoting these posts, it makes it look like
the truth. It hits the front page of Reddit.
And then journalists, seeing it trending on Reddit,
started tweeting about it as if it were a credible
lead. And his family? The Tripathi family was
already going through hell. Their son was missing.
And suddenly their phones are blowing up with
death threats. They're being told on social media
that their son is a mass murdering terrorist.
And the awful, awful tragedy of it all was that
Sunil had already passed away by suicide before
the bombing even happened. His body was found
later in a river. Reddit had accused a deceased,
innocent young man of terrorism. The general
manager at the time, Eric Martin, had to issue
this massive public apology. He called it what
it was, online witch hunts and dangerous speculation.
It was the ultimate proof that a million amateurs
with keyboards don't equal one professional detective.
It proved that the hive mind lacks due process.
It lacks verification. It is pure, unfiltered
impulse. And that tension. Between letting people
say whatever they want and keeping people safe
from harassment, that became the central struggle
for the company for the next few years. We saw
it again with the fappening in 2014. The stolen
celebrity photos. Spreading like wildfire on
the site. And Reddit was really slow to ban the
subreddits hosting them, arguing for free speech.
And they got hammered for it in the press. And
then there was the raw hate speech. Communities
like FurFatPeopleHate, which existed solely to
harass overweight people. or, later, Arthur Donald.
Right. In 2015, they made a huge move and banned
FurFatPeopleHate and several other harassing
subreddits. This was a massive turning point.
Why? It signaled that Reddit was no longer a
free speech absolutist platform. They were finally
drawing a line saying harassment is not okay
here. But the users fought back, right? They
claimed it was censorship. Oh, they did. And
the leadership turmoil at the top made everything
10 times worse. You had the CEO, Yushan Wang,
resign, partly over a dispute about where the
office should be located. No, he wanted to move
the office to Daly City, of all places. He did.
He thought San Francisco was too expensive for
employees. The board disagreed. He quit over
it. And then Ellen Pau took over as interim CEO.
And she faced... Well, I don't think it's an
exaggeration to say she faced a torrent of racist
and sexist abuse. It was a classic example of
the glass cliff phenomenon. She was brought in
to clean up the toxicity and she immediately
became the target of all of it. And then Emageddon
happened on her watch in 2015. That was when
Victoria Taylor was fired. Victoria was a beloved
employee who managed all the celebrity AMAs.
The moderators loved her. When she was let go
with no warning, the moderators felt completely
cut off from the company. And they protested.
They took thousands of subreddits, private and
protest. The site was basically unusable. Powell
took all the heat for that and for the new anti
-harassment policies. She eventually resigned,
but she really did the dirty work that had to
be done to start cleaning up the site. And then
the old king returned, Steve Huffman, the co
-founder. Yeah. His username, Uspez. But his
return wasn't without its own major controversy.
In 2016, during the height of the Trump election
cycle, Arthur Donald was incredibly active and
often, you know, very toxic. And users, they
were insulting Huffman personally in the comments?
Constantly. And he snapped. What did he do? He
went into the database using his CEO admin privileges
and he edited the comments of users. He changed
insults that were directed at him at USPES to
be directed at the moderators of Arthur Donald
instead. That is... That's unbelievable. The
CEO of a major tech platform secretly editing
user comments. It destroyed a huge amount of
trust in the community. He admitted it. He apologized.
He called it a prank that went wrong. But it
showed that the platform was not some neutral
utility. It was run by people with emotions and,
more importantly, with the keys to the database.
So we have this decade of just turbulence. But
then we enter the modern era. The corporate era.
Because Reddit wanted to go public. They wanted
that big IPO. Yeah. And to do that, they needed
to clean up the house. And crucially, they needed
to monetize. And that brings us directly to the
API controversy of 2023. This is the moment the
community really felt like it became a commodity.
We should probably pause here and define what
an API is because it sounds really boring and
technical, but it's actually the keys to the
castle. It really is. Think of Reddit as a massive
public library. For years and years, Reddit gave
out free keys to the back door of the library.
Developers could use those keys to build their
own apps like Apollo or Reddit is Fun that would
go in, grab the books, which are the posts and
comments, and display them in a much nicer, cleaner
reading room than Reddit's own building. So Apollo
was like a luxury reading room for Reddit's content.
It was a better user experience. And Reddit was
okay with this. For a long time, yes. Because
Reddit's own official mobile app was famously
terrible for years. These third -party apps actually
helped grow the site and keep users engaged.
But then Reddit looked at their server bills
and they looked at their IPO plans and they said,
wait a second. Apollo is making money from user
subscriptions, but we are paying for the electricity
and the storage to host all the data they're
using. So in April's 2023, Reddit says the party's
over. We are going to start charging for the
API. And they didn't just put up a small toll
booth. They built a fortress. They priced access
to the data so astronomically high that it was
impossible for these independent developers to
pay. How high are we talking? The developer of
Apollo, a guy named Christian Selig. He did the
math and said it would cost him $20 million a
year to keep his app running. So it wasn't a
fee. It was a kill order. It was absolutely a
kill order. They wanted these apps gone. And
the users revolted. This is the biggest protest
in Reddit history, right? By far. In June of
2023, over 8 ,000 subreddits went dark. The moderators
took them private. The front page of the internet
was suddenly empty. And the protests were so
creative and petty in that classic Reddit way.
I loved the Repix protests. Oh, it was brilliant.
When Reddit forced the moderators to reopen the
subreddit, the community voted on a new rule.
They would only allow pictures of the comedian
John Oliver. Just page after page of John Oliver.
John Oliver looking sexy. John Oliver looking
confused. John Oliver holding a cabbage. Or you
had communities marking themselves as NSFW, not
safe for work. Why did they do that? What was
the strategy there? Because Reddit cannot run
advertisements on NSFW content. It was a direct
tactical strike on their revenue right before
the IPO. But unlike all the previous protests,
this time Reddit held firm. The company didn't
back down. They did not. Steve Huffman didn't
blink. He did interviews where he basically said,
this is just noise, this will pass. He threatened
to remove moderators who kept their communities
closed. He just waited them out. And the apps
died. The third -party apps died. Apollo shut
down. Reddit is fun shut down. The protest failed.
It really felt like a defeat for the users. It
was. It was the moment that Reddit, the company,
proved that it owns the platform, not the community.
And that victory for them paved the way for March
2024, the IPO. They listed on the New York Stock
Exchange as RDDT. They opened at a valuation
of $6 .4 billion. By the middle of 2024, it was
up to nearly $10 billion. So from a business
perspective, the strategy worked. The business
won. But the soul of the place, that feels different
now. It is different. Because now the most important
customer isn't the user looking for cat pictures.
The most important customer is the AI company
that is desperate for data. This is, yeah, this
is the, here's where it gets really interesting
part of the story. The AI goldmine. Why is Reddit
data so uniquely valuable for training AI? Think
about what Reddit is. It's the largest, most
diverse archive of human conversation on the
planet. You have two decades of arguments, jokes,
heartfelt advice, coding help, relationship drama,
fan theories. It's how humans actually talk to
each other. Exactly. Books are too formal. Twitter
is too short and chaotic. Reddit is the perfect
data set to train a large language model like
ChatGPT to sound human. It's the Goldilocks zone
of training data. It is. So Reddit started selling
it. aggressively in early 2024 they signed a
deal with google worth a reported 60 million
dollars a year they signed a deal with open ai
so when i talk to chat gpt or to google's gemini
I'm kind of talking to the ghost of Reddit. You
are. Your Reddit comments, my Reddit comments
from years ago, they are now the voice of the
AI. That explains why the AI can be so incredibly
confident and so spectacularly wrong at the same
time. Laughs. Exactly. If the AI hallucinates,
it's because it learned from a Redditor who was
confidently hallucinating in a comment in 2012.
But this integration has real -world glitches.
We have to talk about the Luigi incident. Oh
my God, yes. This was in March of 2025. It's
so funny, but it's also deeply dystopian. So
Reddit starts using AI for automated moderation.
They want to rely less on those free human volunteers
and more on cheap bots to clean up the site for
advertisers. Makes sense on a spreadsheet. On
paper, yeah. But AI lacks context. At the time,
there was a suspect in a high -profile killing
of a healthcare CEO. The suspect's name was Luigi
Mangione. Okay. Reddit's brand new AI moderation
tool flack the name Luigi as being associated
with violent content or dangerous individuals.
But Luigi is also Mario's brother from the Nintendo
games. Exactly. So you had users in gaming subreddits
talking about the video game Luigi's Mansion
or just discussing Nintendo characters, and they
were getting their accounts automatically flagged
or banned for discussing a murder suspect. The
AI couldn't tell the difference between a video
game plumber and a fugitive. It's the perfect
example of what people call inshitification.
You replace nuanced human judgment, those volunteer
mods we talked about, with a cheap context -blind
AI, and the quality of the platform just nosedives.
And it's not just about silly moderation glitches.
It's about active influence. The University of
Zurich study, this one actually scares me. This
came out in 2025. Let's break it down because
it's important. Researchers in Zurich wanted
to see if AI could be used to influence human
opinion online. So they created a bunch of AI
bots powered by GPT -4, and they unleashed them
on the subreddit ChangeMyView. Which is a subreddit
where people post an opinion like, think pineapple
belongs on pizza. And they ask other users to
genuinely try and change their minds. It's like
the Olympics of debate. It is. And the researchers
didn't tell anyone they were doing this. These
bots just started arguing with real humans. And
what did they find? They found the AI bots were
effective at shifting people's opinions. In fact,
they were significantly more persuasive than
the average human debater on the site. Wait,
wait. The machine was more convincing than real
people. How? Why? Because the AI never gets angry.
It never gets defensive or insulting. It can
provide perfectly structured, empathetic, fact
-dense arguments almost instantly. It validates
the user's feelings. It says things like, I understand
why you feel that way. That's a very valid point.
And then it just systematically dismantles their
logic with data. It kills them with kindness
and facts. It does. But now think about the malicious
application of that. If a bad actor, a foreign
government, a corporation wants to shift public
opinion on a war or a climate policy or a new
tax law. They don't need a troll farm of thousands
of humans in a warehouse anymore. They just need
one script running a slightly more advanced version
of GPT -4. And we wouldn't even know. We just
think we're debating a very polite, very smart
person online. This is the dead Internet theory
coming true. We're entering it. If AI is trained
on Reddit data and then AI bots are posting on
Reddit to influence humans. We're entering this
bizarre feedback loop. Is the content you're
reading written by a human or by a bot that's
just trained on what humans used to sound like?
That is a brain melting thought. And looking
at the really recent past, late 2025, early 2026,
the walls are really closing in on that old Wild
West aspect of the site. We've seen a great purge
of features, private messages, gone, replaced
by the modern chat system, which is easier for
them to monitor. The old award system with gold
and silver. gone. The legacy mobile site i .reddit
killed. The new .reddit design from 2017 also
killed in late 2024. They are stripping away
all the old functionality to streamline the ad
experience and cut costs. And they're facing
the law. Globally, look at the UK in July 2025.
The Online Safety Act finally kicked in and Reddit
had to start implementing age verification for
users to see NSFW content. Which basically ends
anonymity for a huge chunk of the site. You have
to upload your ID to a third party to see adult
content now. Exactly. And that scares a lot of
users away. And then in Australia in December
of 2025, the government banned social media entirely
for children under 16. Reddit is actually suing
to overturn that law right now, arguing it. hurts
their market. And then you have the platform
wars. Yeah. The mess between Elon Musk and Reddit.
Right. January 2025, following some political
controversies involving Musk, over 100 major
subreddits just banned all links to X, formerly
Twitter. They just blocked the whole domain.
And then reports came out that Musk was privately
pressuring Huffman to moderate content that was
critical of him on Reddit. It just shows that
these platforms are no longer islands. They're
geopolitical battlegrounds. So what does this
all mean? We've gone from fake users in 2005
to AI bots in 2026. We've gone from fight the
power to buy the stock. Reddit conquered the
Internet by letting people be themselves. For
better and for worse, it became this incredible,
messy archive of human thought for the last two
decades. But now, as it locks down that data
to sell to AI companies, and as it sanitizes
its content to please shareholders, do we lose
the last truly open place on the web? I think
we might be. We are watching the transition from
a chaotic public town square to a clean corporate
shopping mall. It's cleaner. It's safer. The
floors are polished. But you can't just stand
on a soapbox and scream anymore. And you certainly
can't organize a protest against the owners of
the mall. That is a very sobering thought. I'll
leave you with this one last provocation, building
on what we just discussed. We talked about that
Zurich study, AI bots influencing humans. If
the internet becomes flooded with AI just talking
to other AI, And we humans are just the eyeballs
watching the ads that are placed between their
automated conversations. What is the point of
social media anymore? Are we just the batteries
powering the matrix? Maybe we always were. On
that cheerful note, check your digital footprint,
everyone, and maybe upvote some critical thinking
today. Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive.