When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit. Is the web’s most reliably human forum a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
I believe they call that out in the article… the parentheses look like a late addition though?
On Halloween 2006, just 16 months after they founded the company, Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast in a deal worth $10 million and agreed to stay on as leaders for at least three years. (Condé Nast, which is owned by Advance Magazine Publishers, is the publisher of WIRED). Condé viewed Reddit as a place to experiment and where the magazine company could build out new ideas online.
But by 2009, according to users, Reddit’s website was as bare-bones as before the sale. Ohanian and another person familiar with the corporate politics say the site’s growth was stymied by Condé Nast’s uncertain desires for the property and Ohanian’s self-acknowledged mismanagement. Reddit was awash in half-baked pursuits—including a short-lived iPhone app, iReddit—and a path to sustainable revenue wasn’t yet evident. After the cofounders’ three-year contracts expired on Halloween 2009, Huffman and Ohanian left for new pursuits.
Slowe and the handful of other staffers left behind at Reddit—now contending with the fallout from a global recession—stumbled through experiments with selling ads and subscriptions. Neither Condé execs nor users were pleased. But they managed to keep the website alive. Anyone could now open a subreddit, and by January 2011, Reddit had 57,000 of them. That year the company began operating as a subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent, Advance, which let it function more like a startup. (Advance still owns a roughly 30 percent stake.) Amid the changes, Ohanian came back via a seat on Reddit’s board.
Not only a late addition, but purposefully not clarified or explicitly stated at the beginning, or even at the end, of the article. This is like fine print, tucked into the content of the article so that you have to read the entire piece to get that information. Even then, if you are in the midst of the article you might not even consider how it impacts the framing. They also use distancing language there to avoid as much as possible connecting themselves to ownership.
Like, could you imagine this article ending on a ‘dont touch this dumpster fire of a stock’ line? Conde nast would not allow that.
The article was so glowing at the end it almost swayed me until that realization
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I believe they call that out in the article… the parentheses look like a late addition though?
Not only a late addition, but purposefully not clarified or explicitly stated at the beginning, or even at the end, of the article. This is like fine print, tucked into the content of the article so that you have to read the entire piece to get that information. Even then, if you are in the midst of the article you might not even consider how it impacts the framing. They also use distancing language there to avoid as much as possible connecting themselves to ownership.
Like, could you imagine this article ending on a ‘dont touch this dumpster fire of a stock’ line? Conde nast would not allow that.
The article was so glowing at the end it almost swayed me until that realization
Quick, how do we short it?