The Deadly TRUTH About Reddit

Alexis Ohanian needed a plan and he needed it fast his senior year of college was approaching and he had no clue what he wanted to do with his life luckily his best friend Steve Huffman came to him with what sounded like a million-dollar business idea and then that business totally crashed and burned so how did two groke college kids with a failed business end up creating one of the most popular websites ever and what really happened to reddit's forgotten founder who nobody talks about reddit's history is filled with scandals lies money and death as Reddit

has been involved in countless controversies including its own users turning against the site but it's time for the truth welcome to the insane story of [Music] red Alexis oan was bullied relentlessly as a child constantly teased about his weight and being told he had a girl's name but he found an escape with the dialup internet of the late '90s he taught himself how to program and even began building websites for nonprofit organizations all while he was still a teenager sitting in front of the computer in his parents' basement and so in 2001 Alexis enrolled at

the University of Virginia with the intention of pursuing computer science but his Destiny would change forever when he met the guy living across the hall from him that guy was Steve Huffman another self-taught programmer who was majoring in computer science the two young men quickly bonded over their shared love of video games they spend hours in their rooms playing PlayStation together and forming a close friendship but after meeting Steve and the other students on his computer science course Alexis felt his programming skills were way too far behind their level he feared disappointing his family and

wasting the money they generously loaned him for college and so Alexis convinced himself that he should choose a different path and thus he changed his major and decided his new new goal after University was to become a lawyer Alexis knew that he could have a safe career as a lawyer if he could just pass the law school entrance exam and so he spent hours in the library studying for the grueling test but when the time finally came and Alexis sat down to take the LW exam he spent months preparing for his mind began racing with

visions of his future Life as a lawyer a plain suit a boring desk a demanding boss and mind-numbing contracts Alexis began to realize he might regret going down this path as clearly law wasn't something he actually cared about so in that moment he did something no one expected he literally walked out in the middle of the exam and kept walking until he reached the local Waffle House and it was there over his plate of breakfast that Alexis envisioned a different future for himself one where he was the boss building his own company with a product

he truly cared about and making a real impact on the world this idea excited him so much more than being a lawyer however Alexis had no actual plan on how to achieve that and he needed to figure out his next move quickly or else the last few years of his life would have been a complete [Music] waste Alexis told Steve I don't want to have a job I hate we needs an idea but luckily Steve was already way ahead of him while Alexis had been working towards law school Steve had already come up with a

business idea one day while refueling his car Steve stood at the pump thinking about what food he wanted to order inside the store that was attached to the gas station but then he thought to himself what if he could use his cell phone to place the order while he was stood at the pump I used to sit there while I pump gas thinking this is a total waste of time cuz I'm just standing here the sub guy inside he's just standing there if only there's a way for me to communicate to him like he could

be making my sub right now the idea could work for any restaurant rather than waiting in a queue when you got there just order from your phone when you're nearby so the food is ready by the time you arrive when Steve explained this idea to Alexis he loved it and Alexis even came up with the name and I was like we can call it my mobile menu or M and so in 2004 the pair partnered up and spent their senior year of University working tirelessly on their new startup however back then this was the most

advanced phone on the market and so Steve struggled to figure out a way to build the technology they needed for their mobile food ordering tool this was before we had smartphones that were connected to the internet and before the App Store and th they had to real on SMS as a result connecting to the existing ordering systems that stores and restaurants used was a very hard technical problem to solve meanwhile Alexis tried to pitch my mobile menu to local restaurants but many restaurants at the time didn't even have websites and the owners couldn't understand the

vision in many ways their food ordering idea was simply ahead of its time but either way Alexis and Steve were struggling and that's when spring break of their senior year rolled around and most students headed to the sunny Florida beaches for a week of partying but not Alexis and Steve they instead embarked on a 500m trip to Cambridge Massachusetts in search for some much needed help with their business you see an entrepreneur named Paul Graham was giving a lecture at Harvard called how to start a startup Paul was well known among startup Founders and especially

programmers in fact Steve had literally been reading one of Paul's books and wanted to get it autographed at the event but Alexis thought this could be an even bigger opportunity after Paul had given his lecture Alexis and Steve went out to talk to him and Alexis asked if they could buy Paul a drink and get his opinion on their startup Paul was impressed these two college kids had traveled from Virginia just to see his talk and so he agreed to meet them for coffee and hear their pitch from my mobile menu and amazingly Paul liked

their idea he said it could be the end of waiting in line for food Alexis and Steve thanked him exchanged contact details and then returned to Virginia feeling full of confidence to continue working on their idea and just a few weeks later they got some even better news Paul emailed to say he was launching a new initiative called White combinator an accelerator program designed to provide funding and mentorship to startups Alexis and Steve were thrilled to be invited to join the first class of white combinator in 2005 they'd still have to pitch their idea to

a panel before they got officially accepted into the program but since Paul had personally invited them they felt confident they would get accepted we went up to Boston gave the interview of Our Lives for YC I mean we were we were feeling amazing and that night they called us up and they said sorry you're rejected oh ultimately the panel of investors just couldn't see how Alexis and Steve could build a mobile food ordering tool with the technology available at the time they were also worried that Alexis and Steve two college kids wouldn't have enough Connections

in the restaurant industry to make my mobile menu work and to be fair it's true Alexis and Steve had precisely zero connections to the restaurant industry so their why combinator pitch was rejected and the next morning Alexis and Steve got the train back home feeling completely deflated to make matters worse while they were traveling back Paul actually called them and explained just how little the investors believed in their idea however Paul then said he had some good news although the investors didn't think my mobile menu would work they really liked Alexis and Steve Paul told

them they could be part of white combinator under one condition they had to come up with a better idea Alexis and Steve literally got off the train at the very next stop went right back to Boston to see Paul and began brainstorming a new idea instead and whil they didn't know it at the time that next idea was going to change everything [Music] thing Alexis and Steve had officially abandoned their mobile food ordering idea Paul Graham told them it was too early for mobile and they should instead focus on something they could build for web

browsers which many more people had access to his advice was build something that solves your problem every morning Now by this point in 2005 content was being created on the internet from a wide variety of different sources and Alexis and Steve realized there needed to be a better way to aggregate it all in one place there was some sites that kind of did this for example there was Slash dot where users could submit news articles on topics like science and technology and moderators would rate the submission but Stash's moderators were randomly selected users so it

was sort of like virtual jury duty to pick out good content then there was a site called delicious where users could bookmark links they wanted to visit later and there was a leaderboard page that showed the links users bookmark the most but whilst Alexis and Steve agreed these sites had good Concepts they sensed an opportunity to build something different something better what if there was a site where everyone could publicly post whatever content they wanted from different Publications and everyone would have the power to moderate content using a simple voting system up vote if they

liked it and down vote if they hated it the result would be a website where anyone could see the best content on the internet as determined by the people of the internet in other words it would be the front page of the internet they tossed around several different names for the site like ubu SN and 360 scope but they eventually settled on Reddit so people could say I Reddit on Reddit Alexis and Steve graduated from college in the spring of 2005 and it with a name and idea now in place along with $12,000 of funding

from WC combinator they moved to Massachusetts to work full-time on this idea they worked on building Reddit every day and night barely going outside at tour for months and operating on very little sleep however as leis and Steve soon got a pretty scaving email from Paul asking why they hadn't launched yet he said they needed to get a beta version public right away and so they put live a very basic barebones version of Reddit unexpectedly Paul then linked to Reddit on one of his blog posts which brought them their first thousand visitors whether they were

ready or not Reddit was now launched but whil they did have a functional site it was missing something pretty crucial users Alexis tried everything to bring new people to the sites he posted advertising Flyers around Boston he asked his friends to post content he pitched Reddit to his fellow y combinated classmates but the problem was because they didn't yet have many users they didn't have much content so desperate to generate some traction for Reddit Alexis and Steve resorted to making hundreds of fake accounts and different usernames and posting content themselves to give the impression that

lots of people were using the sites un like this and I started submitting all the content just to keep the thing full right cuz Reddit not fun after Pages blank at first they weren't sure if this was working at all until one day they started to notice usernames they didn't recognize finally other people had found Reddit and were submitting their own content and by the end of the summer Reddit had amassed over 12,000 daily users however if you visited reddit's homepage back then you'd be greeted with just one page full of random links the voting

system Steve programmed ensured that the most popular links Rose to the top of the page but there was still no system for categorizing the content and this led to the first major disagreement between Alexis and Steve Alexis wanted to use tags to organize information but Steve St disagreed he argued that tags were too subjective and worried that users might never find common ground on how to tag content they came to the conclusion that every type of content should have its own dedicated corner of Reddit separate many communities which came to be known as subreddits and

this quickly became the backbone of the site the very first subreddit was actually the not safe for work subreddit but they then began introducing many more subreddits like science programming and politics and this proved to be hugely popular up until this point internet forums had been used for Niche communities but now redddit allowed all these communities to be on one single site and thus things were looking bright for Reddit and it's fair to say things got even more interesting when Alexis and Steve got introduced to a guy called Aaron [Music] Schwartz at 18 years old

Aaron Schwartz was a very talented programmer who had also been backed by white combinator Aaron was building a company called infogami which made web development tools but things weren't going well for infogami while Aaron had impressed by combinator with the product he was building he hadn't got it online yet and he soon found himself with no money no place to live and no Partners to help him Aaron was ready to give up on his startup until on his 19th birthday Paul Graham came to him and said I thought of a solution to your problem merge

with red a Paul could see Aaron's potential and believed he could help a lot with developing red air so Paul suggested to Alexis and Steve that they should merge with Aaron's company thus in late 2005 about 6 months after Reddit had begun Reddit and infog gam emerged under a new umbrella company they created called not a bug Incorporated with the merger complete Steve Alexis and Aaron each owned an equal 24% share of Reddit Paul owned 7% and the rest was left for future options now Aaron was a unique character for example he'd only eat Cheerios

and at one point slept in the kitchen cupboard however Alexis and Steve were happy to overlook his quirks because Aaron had the programming skills they needed to code the site and make a lot of improvements as the number of Reddit users started to pick up Reddit experimented with new features including adding a comment section this helped transform the site from just having people sharing links to now having Lively conversations and debates they also added the karma system a public score for each user as an incentive for people to make high quality contributions to the site

and thus for the first few months a Lexis Steve and Aaron worked really well together made a lot of progress and important additions for redit but there was an underlying tension between them according to the deal that had been agreed Aaron was now a co-founder of redm but Alexis and Steve felt this wasn't fair since they'd started Reddit 6 months before he joined Aaron wasn't there when they came up with the idea or put in long hours to build the site and yet Aaron was publicly referring to himself as a co-founder of redder and the

tension between the founders would soon grow much more intense but first Reddit began to catch the attention of some pretty huge [Music] corporations Reddit caught the attention of K Nast a multi-billion dollar media Empire who's behind magazines like Vogue GQ and Vanity Fair during this time they were looking to break into the digital space and they had already acquired wi.com and now they wanted to buy Reddit it was clearly growing quickly and had huge potential and since users generated all the content con Nast wouldn't even have to pay writers and editors like they did for

its magazines so they approached Reddit with an offer now the founders hadn't been looking to sell the sit Reddit was only Oney old and really just getting started but at the time Lexus was 23 Steve was 22 and Aram was 19 and so when a giant media company offers you millions of dollars to acquire your business it's hard not to seriously consider that and after months of of tense negotiations Cony Nast and Reddit were almost ready to sign the deal but they ran into a bit of a roadblock Aaron Aaron openly voiced his concerns about

the potential consequences of a giant media conglomerate taking control of a small website where users were supposed to have freedom and control and while Aaron was making legitimate points his Antics such as secretly tweaking contracts to see if lawyers would notice were beginning to cause frustration finally Steve pulled Aaron aside for a serious talk and told him this isn't a joke millions of dollars were on the line and Aaron was putting everything at risk so despite his concerns Aaron backed down and on Halloween night of 2006 the deal went through cond Nast acquired Reddit for

a fee of around $10 million with some reports claiming it went as high as 20 million the acquisition made Alexis Steven Aaron millionaires overnight Alexis couldn't believe it he was getting millions of dollars for about 60 months of work it was only later he would perhaps regret selling out just as things were starting to click but selling Reddit didn't mean the found Founders were leaving the company in fact the deal specifically required them to stay at Reddit for at least another 3 years and con said they were happy to give them a lot of freedom

to operate independently and still continue the work they'd been doing except now they were owned by a huge Media company which should mean they'd be able to hire a bigger team and grow Reddit a lot faster they'd be able to move out of the cramped apartment they'd been operating from and into bigger corporate headquarters so in many ways the whole thing seemed like a dream come true but unfortunately the story of the Reddit Founders was about to take a dark twist with deadly consequences before we get to the next chapter I want to tell you

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magnates or click the link in the description [Music] below everyone was working hard to make credit a success and impress their new bosses except for Aaron Aaron had a Envision Reddit as the voice of the people and a way to stand up against governments and huge corporations and so Aaron always felt Reddit being owned by a big Corporation was a bad culture fet Aaron rarely showed up to the office and he even blogged about how much he hated the new office environment writing gray walls gray desks gray noise the first day I showed up here

I simply couldn't take it by lunchtime I literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying finally Alexis Steve and conas Leadership had had enough of our own so they fired him in January of 2007 with Aaron out the Reddit team continued to develop the platform and rethink key features for example up until 2008 users could submit ideas for different subreddits but only employees of Reddit could actually create them but more and more users on the site meant more and more requests for subreddits and the team just couldn't keep up so they decided to

give all users the ability to make subreddits themselves this turned out to be a brilliant move suddenly there was a subreddit for nearly every topic you could think of from specific bands to TV shows to financial advice to memes there's literally even a subreddit called bread staple to trees with over 300,000 members you could Truly find whatever you wanted on Reddit now and if you couldn't find it you could create it and so this really helped to diversify reddit's user base another clever move Reddit made was allowing users to be the moderators of the subreddits

they created at this point Reddit had a very small team and managing all those communities themselves would have been almost impossible but instead they got all of this unpaid labor as reddit's most active users would moderate the communities for free contrast that with social media sites like Facebook who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on content moderation of course this did mean giving moderators a lot of control and influence over what gets posted or deleted and many would argue that concentrating that much power amongst a small group of individuals isn't good in fact there are

reportedly six power mods who control 118 of the top 500 subreddits and Reddit would suum witness firsthand just how much influence reddits moderators can have but for now Reddit was becoming increasingly popular and by the end of 2008 Reddit had over 2 million users and over 10,000 subreddits but while the website was experiencing rapid growth reddit's bank account was not despite having millions of users Reddit struggled to find a way to monetize the platform it certainly didn't help that users were repulsed by reddit's attempts to put advertisements on the sites they accused the company of

selling out and turning what should be an authentic Community into just another money hungry Corporation reddit's biggest competitor at the time a site called dig had PRI prioritized Ado for user experience which actually caused many users to come to Reddit instead so basically Reddit had huge amounts of traffic and was growing rapidly but were struggling to monetize without alienating users they would soon introduce paid memberships and awards to try and make more money but Reddit simply was not profitable meanwhile Alexis was dealing with his own personal crisis his mother had died from cancer and he

began having explosive fights in the office with Steve Steve accused Alexis of doing things behind his back and Alexis thought Steve was wasn't doing a very good job at managing the company's resources on top of that they were sharing an apartment again so this made for some awkward car rides home ultimately Alexis and Steve both left Reddit in 2009 when their contract with con Nast was up and by then their friendship had mostly Fallen apart so for the first time since it launched neither original co-founder was involved with Reddit and just as Reddit was figuring

out its future a bill was introduced in Congress that threatened reddit's entire existence before we get to the next chapter I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you for those who don't know my name's John and I started this channel a few years back making crappy videos talking to a camera with no idea what I was doing but I'd always found business interesting the rags to richest Stories the way fortunes are built and destroyed the battles between companies business can be fascinating the problem was whenever I tried to watch a business documentary

I'd find it boring so I started learning how I could make my own videos that felt more like like mini movies and fast forward a couple of years and this channel has well over a million subscribers which is wild but if you're subscribed to magnates Media then you're a part of this Channel and so I just wanted to say how much I appreciate all your support I'm going to keep trying to level up further to make some even better videos for you but for now though thank you for being a legend and let's get back

to the story [Music] in 2011 Congress proposed a bill called the stop online piracy Act and the basic idea was to hold platforms like Reddit responsible for all the content on their website even if the content was user generated and not published by the website itself this would mean for a site with millions of users posting whatever they wanted like Reddit the copyright owner could sue the company which could lead to massive fines and legal fees or even the site getting shut down by this time Reddit had over for 46 million users but only 20

employees thus it would be impossible for them to monitor all of the content on the site to make sure it complied with the law Reddit publicly declared that the stop online piracy Act was an allout war against the internet and that they weren't going to go down without a fight many other companies including Google and Wikipedia lobbied against the law and there was intense public backlash to the bill as well on January 18th 2012 Reddit took its most dramatic step yet by shutting down its site for 12 hours to protest the Bell Reddit Executives wrote

in a Blog post we wouldn't do this if we didn't believe this legislation and the forces behind it were a serious threat to Reddit and the internet as We Know It This felt like a pivotal moment for the internet and thankfully a few days later Congress finally Cav to the public pressure and abandoned the bill and there was one person in particular who emerged as a leader in the battle for the internet Aaron Swartz after leaving Reddit Aaron had become an activist for the cause of Internet Freedom helping to fight internet censorship and campaigning for

a free and open internet unfortunately this got him into some serious trouble in 2011 Aaron was arrested for breaking into MIT and illegally Mass downloading millions of academic journals he intended to upload them for free as he believed this academic information should be accessible to everyone and not behind a pay wall however before he could do that he was caught and faced up to 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million Aaron was offered a plea bargain which would have him serve just 6 months in jail if he pleaded guilty but

he rejected this offer as he didn't want to be legally regarded as a felon for the rest of his life and so he sent a counter offer to the prosecution which was rejected Aaron had struggled with depression for a while but whilst waiting for this trial he became extremely isolated since he didn't want to burden anyone else with what he was going through he was just 26 years old though and everything that was going on took a huge mental toll on him tragically just a few weeks later Aaron's girlfriend found him dead in his apartment

a co-founder of the social news and entertainment website Reddit has been found dead the body of 26-year-old Aaron Schwarz was found in his Brooklyn apartment yesterday the medical examiner says he hanged himself within hours of the news about his death tributes all across the internet poured out for Aaron the hacker group Anonymous even hacked mit's website as a tribute to him Aaron's family created a Memorial Website that said he used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the internet and the world a fairer better place many Reddit

users considered him a hero for the cause of Internet freedom and Aaron was inducted into the internet Hall of Fame because as well as being a co-owner of Reddit he'd helped create RSS and was an early architect of Creative Commons however following his death Aaron has been removed from reddit's co-founder page mostly erased from reddit's [Music] history in March of 2012 yishan Wong a member of the so-call PayPal Mafia took over a CEO of Reddit the site was now getting billions of page views a month and ging more cultural relevance US President Barack Obama even

did a Q&A in the ask me anything subred but all of this growth also began to cause some problems for red the fact anyone could create a subreddit meant there were plenty of disturbing communities on the sides from watch people die to cannibalism the fact that Reddit is more Anonymous than some other social media sites always meant it was open to abuse and sure enough Reddit has seen extreme groups hate speech and all kinds of controversial posts one particularly sad example came after the Boston Marathon bombings after two bombs were detonated killing three people and

wounding hundreds more one of the largest man hunts in history began in search of the attackers and thus a subreddit called find Boston bombers was created on Reddit where thousands of users analyzed photos and footage from the attack looking for anyone they believed was suspicious but unfortunately these efforts were based on speculation and misinformation one user claimed that a suspect in the case resembled a man called Sunil trapathy a college student who was listed as a missing person despite no evidence that he committed the crime sunil's name spread across Reddit like wildfire people blatantly ignored

the rules against sharing personal information and users began harassing sunil's family jumping to the conclusion he was responsible his already grieving loved ones received malicious phone calls and messages Around the Clock accusing Sunil of being responsible for the attack on April 19th authorities found the real perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing and on April 23rd authorities found the body of the innocent Sunil many news outlets blamed Reddit for fueling a Witch Hunt for someone innocent and as the user base continued to grow by the millions pressure began mounting against Reddit Executives to enforce more moderation

and oversight of offensive subreddits but the CEO yishan believed that it was not their place to make such decisions he said we will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it although as things got more extreme yishan eventually found himself in a position where he did feel the need for moderation Banning the subreddit beating women which featured graphic images of videos of violence against women then in 2014 Yan resigned just two years after taking the role citing a disagreement with the board of directors and a huge amount

of personal stress that the job had caused him you see internally at Reddit there was a lot of conflict over what they should or shouldn't allow on the site and where to draw the line on Free Speech the negative publicity some of reddit's more controversial subreddits were causing was beginning to scare stockholders and investors and the situation was made worse by claims of sexism within Reddit as a result Ellen Powell was appointed as the new CEO she'd been serving as vice president of Reddit and was well known in the industry after filing a gender discrimination

lawsuit against her past employer it was felt she could help save reddits concerning reputation in the media it was also around this time that Alexis Ohanian returned to the company as executive chairman so it was hoped Reddit would now be able to get away from any controversy shortly after taking the Reigns Ellen began implementing stricter rules and anti-harassment policy and banning some of the more controversial subreddits but while some people liked her efforts to try and clean up Reddit some of her actions were very unpopular with many redditors who considered it censorship especially after Ellen

publicly announced we are not a completely free speech platform things got worse for Ellen or CEO after she fired Victoria Taylor a much beloved Reddit employee who coordinated many of the high-profile asme anything sessions in protest moderators of hundreds of subreddits shut down their communities effectively causing a sitewide blackout pressures against Ellen began mounting and petitions for her resignation reached over 160,000 signatures before she finally stepped down as CEO after just 7 months in the job but the damage had been done Reddit was now in full meltdown mode and the future of the company was

in Jeopardy Reddit seemed to be on the verge of tearing itself apart in less than a year Reddit now needed its third new CEO and was crying out for some stability but then a glimmer of hope appeared Steve Huffman couldn't bear to see the company he built go up in Flames so Steve came back to Reddit in 2015 as their CEO and since Alexis had returned to the company not long before this it meant that both the original founders of Reddit were now back almost a decade after they'd sold the site with the original Duo

back at the helm a lot of people felt much more optimistic about reddit's future and sure enough things got off to a good start with improvements to reddit's design the launch of both Android and iPhone apps for Reddit and a clearer direction for the site but once again it wouldn't last in 2016 Steve was involved in a scandal of of his own when people posted comments criticizing him on the controversial subreddit the Donald Steve abused his authority by editing these comments to direct the insult at the moderators of the subreddit instead of himself he called

it trolling the Trolls but many redditors felt an admin editing posts of its users broke the Trust In Reddit being a truly free and open platform and Steve's reputation with the Reddit Community would soon get much much worse [Music] in April 2023 Reddit announced that it would begin charging for access to its API which is what allows other thirdparty apps and websites to get data from redab for example one of the most popular third party apps was Apollo which provided a different interface to browse Reddit which many people preferred and when reddit's API was free

that worked great as it could pull data from Reddit at no cost but then Reddit suddenly announced they'd start charging 24 cents per 1,000 API requests which Apollo calculated would cost them over $20 million per year they definitely could not afford that and so the Beloved third party app was forced to shut down not just that but there were many third party tools that moderators on Reddit used to better moderate their subreddits as they provide extra features that reddit's own app doesn't have but again all these Services were suddenly hit with huge bills to continue

using reddit's API needless to say the way this was all handled by Reddit created a lot of anger in the community many felt that not only did the pricing seem extremely high but that the sudden way Reddit sprung this on developers with very little warning suggested Reddit was deliberately trying to kill off third party apps as the developers didn't have enough time to accommodate this change this led to outrage from many Reddit moderators and developers and thus they grouped together to Stage a black out where countless subreddit moderators closed down their communities at the same

time in protest of the new API ch Chargers it's estimated that over 7,000 subreddits were shut down at the peak of the blackout including many of the biggest subreddits on the site like arm music this meant huge portions of Reddit were inaccessible to all users ands surprisingly this generated a lot of media headlines it was one of the biggest ever online protests and whil the subreddits were down Reddit wasn't earning any AD revenue from them and many thought all the backlash from reddit's users would force the company to back down but it didn't since it

was quite clearly stated the blackout would only last 48 hours it made it pretty easy for Reddit to wait it out now some subreddits stayed private a lot longer than this but it's reported Reddit threaten those subreddits to reopen and ban the moderators if they didn't comply and thus ultimately the API changes went into effect like Reddit wanted since then there has definitely been a lot of hostility towards reddit's owners Steve Huffman or SP as he's known on Reddit is regularly called out on the site however there are always two sides to a story and

Reddit argued that this API change was necessary because the company is not actually profitable and so when you have third party apps like Apollo that basically imported the entirety of Reddit into their app for free it meant Reddit was paying huge bills for the backend infrastructure to host all this content yet people were accessing it from apps Reddit didn't own so Reddit wasn't making any AD money from It ultimately it's reddit's platform and from a business perspective you can see why they wouldn't want anyone to just import all of their content for free now does

that mean Reddit handled all of this well no and I ionically most of the problems could have been avoided if they just added some of the features users wanted within their own app so people didn't need the third party tools like adding better accessibility features still Reddit got what they wanted but there's now more tension than ever between reddit's owners and its users but before we get to the next chapter if you sell anything online you're going to want to know about today's sponsor ship station ship station software makes e-commerce so much easier and saves

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however Reddit users have been able to come together to do some pretty incredible things they've raised huge amounts of money for Charities and orphanages organized the world's largest secret Santa gift exchange and Reddit has allowed millions of people to connect around shared interests plus there's no denying Reddit is extremely useful when ask asking a question on Google often the top answers are from Red a however there's perhaps no clearer example of the power of reddit's community than what happened in 2021 gamestock have been soaring fueled by amateur day Traders communicating on Reddit are creating Chaos

on Wall Street the Wall Street betet subreddit banded together against big hedge funds who are betting that GameStop would fall Reddit users began buying the stock in huge quantities driving the stock price up from under $3 to $483 this caused several large hedge funds to lose billions of dollars and made many redditors extremely rich in the process as for Reddit itself it still remains to be seen whether it will actually become profitable but one thing is clear Reddit users are continuing to prove that they are the company's biggest asset and its biggest liability now there's

no denying Reddit has an interesting story but it's not as crazy as the story of Instagram which you can watch right now by clicking this thumbnail on screen thank you for watching magnates media you are a legend and I'll see you in this next video in a second cheers